FIVE YEARS AGO, I wrote an article in Spearhead magazine headed ‘Time to terminate the "rights" racket’. The article was prefaced by a quote from the words of William Granham Sumner, which went as follows:-

‘We are born into no right whatever, but what has an equivalent and corresponding duty right alongside of it. There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing. Whatever we inherit of wealth, knowledge or institutions from the past has been paid for by the labour and sacrifice of preceding generations.’

The choice of title for that article in no way meant that human beings should not have rights; it was merely intended to draw attention to the fact that, for a long time, the concept of "human rights" has been unscrupulously exploited by politicians intent on ingratiating themselves with the mob - to whom talk of "rights" always serves as a much more potent vote-winner than emphasis on duties, responsibilities and obligations.

I was reminded of this article and its title when it was announced that, as from October 2nd, the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into English law, had come into force. In a leader in the Sunday Telegraph of the 1st October it was stated:-

‘The Act settles, for the first time in our history, the long-running dispute between judges and parliament as to who is the supreme authority. From now on, the judges will be in charge. It is they who will rule whether any legislation passed by Parliament conforms to the European Convention on Human Rights.

‘Judges will have the power to strike down legislation. Their new power is not, of course, expressed in the Act in those terms but that is what it will be. Their new power will turn judges into political figures. This will produce increased scrutiny of their opinions, and of potential appointees to senior judicial positions. The politicisation of the judiciary is not a welcome development. But is now inevitable.

‘Legal opinion is divided on what the effect of the Human Rights Act on existing laws will be. Some say it will create a flood of new "rights" whose result will be to make it ever more difficult to operate law itself; others that it will simply provide protection for those able to afford the most expensive lawyers. Very few predict it will produce the new utopia of justice envisaged by the Lord Chancellor. The constitutional effects are undeniable, however. From tomorrow, Britain has a new sovereign: the men in wigs, gowns and tights.’

Of course. the realist will immediately recognise that Britain's judiciary is already highly politicised. as the verdict against David Irving in his libel action against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt made clear. The idea that the judiciary, in any state, is, or can be, completely independent of the power of the state - attractive though it is to idealists - has always been something of a chimera; judges have to be appointed by someone, and it is usually the government of the day that exercises this prerogative. Correspondingly, judicial decisions never are, in the real world, wholly uninfluenced by the prevailing political culture and climate.

Political correctness to rule

The Human Rights Act simply brings much more out into the open, and most certainly will intensify, a tendency that already exists, and it will do so in a wholly one-sided way: it will ensure that liberalism and political correctness, even more than in the past, will provide the criteria by which cases in our courts are judged; and it will greatly impede the powers residing in what non-PC judges we have to make rulings in accordance with their own standards of right and wrong rather than the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. In other words, we will be much nearer to a judicial system akin to that of the late and unlamented Soviet Union - and just at a time when Russia is moving very much in the opposite direction.

For, let there be no mistake about it, the European Convention on Human Rights is an institution utterly dominated by people and values of a one-world globalist, liberal, politically correct pedigree. True to this pedigree is not only the concept of a supra-national body imposing on British law, and thence on British national sovereignty, but the whole spirit in which the "human rights" giving rise to the policy have been conceived. Such "rights" will of course be the "rights" that the globalist elite deem good for us; they are not intended to include, for instance, the right to violate the sacred cow of multi-racialism by participating in frank discussion of innate racial differences; nor - if their architects have their way - will they include the right to question the authenticity of certain legends belonging to World War II, in particular those relating to the so-called "holocaust."

In most countries of Continental Europe, such discussion is today banned by law, and we know some people currently in prison for daring to engage in it. With Britain conforming more and more to "Euro" legislative standards, it seems only a matter of time before we follow suit.

Intelligent philosophers on jurisprudence have have often said that the extension of a right to one individual must always involve the denial of some right to another. We will see, when we look at some of the rights that are now going to be enshrined in the British legal system, how much this rule will hold force.

In some areas, Britain has already adopted "Human Rights" legislation in accordance with ECHR specifications and has committed itself to adopt yet more. It has been accepted, for instance, that "gays" must be admitted into the armed forces, and that our traditional system of military courts martial is illegal. The ECHR has also ruled that the killers of James Bulger did not have a fair trial in the British courts. The ECHR has forced our government to pay compensation to a convicted heroin dealer in consequence of the manner of his arrest. It has also decreed that British parents do not have the right to smack their children.

In all these areas, rights for some have meant the erosion of the rights of others. Both men and women in the armed services have - or at least should have - the right to share the company, both on and off duty, of people of the same sexual orientation and be protected from the predatory designs of perverts. By intruding into the case of the murderers of Jamie Bulger, the ECHR is jeopardising the rights of children of similar age to be protected from monsters of that kind, however young. Protection of the "rights" of heroin dealers means a denial of the right of society to be protected from those loathsome characters. Making it illegal for parents to smack children removes a basic right that societies over centuries have acknowledged as necessary for the preservation of order and discipline in the home and as a deterrent to unacceptable juvenile behaviour. Of course, where this right of physical chastisement of offspring is abused and children are subjected to excessive violence by parents, there have long been laws quite adequate to deal with such cases.

As for military courts martial, those seeking to criminalise these institutions simply betray their total incomprehension of how armed forces must operate. Armed forces cannot possibly be subject to the same rules as apply in civilian societies and organisations; they are, by their very nature, undemocratic. But even here, procedures are in place to prevent, and where necessary punish, gross abuses of disciplinary power.

But there is much more. Michael Clarke, writing in the Daily Mail of the 2nd October, said of the new legislation:-

‘A Euro-Charter of human rights becomes part of English law today, triggering warnings of a lawyers' bonanza and a massive boost for the burgeoning "compensation culture."

‘Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine admitted the move would mean lawyers getting rich on spurious claims.

‘The Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Booth, QC, is likely to be one of the major beneficiaries as she spearheads a new set of barristers' chambers specialising in human rights law.

‘The Act, dubbed a "complainants'" charter, will cost taxpayers £60 million a year in court costs alone - £40 million in legal aid bills. It will create full-time work for 12 to 15 judges. Ministers are braced for a deluge of unfounded cases, and are pinning their hopes on judges throwing the claims out. But even if they do, every case will cost thousands of pounds.

‘In Scotland, where the Convention has been part of the law since last year, 98 per cent of cases have been thrown out - leading to criticism that lawyers are willing to take on any case, however spurious.’

Damage to business

This, of course, is all grist to the mill of the compensation culture - already far out of hand. Ruth Lea of the Institute of Directors said recently:-

‘The compensation culture is already damaging business competitiveness and tying up businesses in red tape. We fear the Human Rights Act, an unnecessary piece of legislation if ever there was one, will give another major stimulus to the compensation culture.’

Everyone who has any dealings with the law in Britain - and that means most of us - knows that police, courts, lawyers and judiciary already have far more work on their hands than they are able to cope with. In fact, there is a real danger that, with mounting crime and civil litigation, our legal system will grind to a halt.

The Human Rights Act is simply going to aggravate this process several degrees further - what with the vast numbers of new cases that are going to come before the courts and the huge additional resources that are going to be required to cope with them.

And what kind of cases? Here's one: Moors murderess Myra Hindley is likely to bring an early challenge under the Act. She is expected to claim that giving the Home Secretary the right to decide if, and when, she is released is illegal. Her plea may be thrown out, but we can be sure that many hours, and huge lawyers' fees, will accumulate in the process of her making it.

It has been reported that the civil rights group Liberty is searching for a black youth club or community group in order to mount a challenge to police powers to stop and search suspects. Campaigners are claiming that stop-and-search is used disproportionately against young black men and therefore breaches the Act's bans on "discrimination" and "inhuman and degrading" treatments.

Inner city police forces, already groaning under the weight of street crime, committed - let's be honest about it - at a disproportionate rate by certain ethnic minority groups, might in the future just as well give up: every time they employ stop-and-search, however legitimately and justifiably, they are liable to find themselves facing legal action under the new laws which will consume additional time and resources right now stretched to the limit.

Oh, and yes - Moslem groups are reported to be planning to use the Human Rights Act to try to legalise polygamy, citing the rights to family life and freedom from discrimination!

A further piece of craziness resulting from the new "Human Rights" legislation occurred at a Sheffield court last month when a judge scrapped a trial involving two Asian defendants after a juror tipped him off that he had heard a "racist" remark by another juror. This same judge had attended, earlier this year, a training course on the introduction of the Human Rights Act, and was obviously very zealous to put what he had learned into practice. Of course, he only had the word of the one juror concerning the alleged "racism" of the other. The mind boggles at the possibilities such a precedent creates for anyone who feels that a trial is not going the way he would like: all he has to do is make a similar allegation of "racism" and that is the end of it. The "end" in this particular case resulted in a wastage of £45,000 to the British taxpayer - and this was only the start!

Destablilisation

David Heathcoat Amory, also writing in the Daily Mail of October 2nd, gave a few more examples of the potential for massive destabilisation of society inherent in the new legislation:-

‘It is more a question of which will escape unscathed. Soldiers could refuse to obey orders that might contravene their right to life, it could become a human right not to wear a suit to work under the right to privacy, the police would find their ability to use surveillance against suspects severely curtailed... the right to freedom of expression could mean the end of school uniforms... the head of the Government's family planning quango said homosexual marriage was quot;inevitable" under the Act, prisoners announced plans to set up a trade union to demand better conditions behind bars, and disabled people argued for their right to join the armed forces.’

It is in the sphere of national defence that the Human Rights Act has the most alarming implications of all. This was highlighted earlier this year when the Government made moves to bring in legislation that would permit soldiers to sue their commanding officers if they were given orders which prove to be "wrong". Exactly who would decide what was "wrong" and what was not seems to remain a fuzzy area; but if, as seems likely, our judges are to be bound by rules even more ridiculously politically correct than in the past. They will almost certainly have a field day finding against any officer they care who has issued orders unpleasing to left-liberal consciences. It means, in effect, that the centuries-old traditions of the British armed forces (and others in Europe for that matter) will go out of the window.

And the latter, doubtless, is the objective. Today's Eurocrats are the commissars of the New World Order - the modern equivalents of yesterday's rulers of the Soviet Union. Their aims are virtually identical even if their methods are different: the aims are wholly to remake society according to their own revolutionary prescription - just as those of their Soviet predecessors were. Armed forces, and their ancient and time-tested fighting traditions, are one of the most vital bastions of a nation's defence against this kind of upheaval, and of course they must therefore be destroyed. Every modern development - racial and sexual "equality," "gay rights," military trade unions and the consequent undermining of officers' authority, the use of soldiers as social workers and "peace-keepers" and their deployment in places and in roles that have nothing whatever to do with national security - all these things are calculated to destroy armed forces as we know them, and thus to destroy an essential pillar of nationhood.

No "rights" in nature

In my article of five years ago on what I termed the "rights racket" I put out a reminder that "rights" are entirely absent from the rules inherent in the natural order:-

‘Of course, the believers in "basic human rights" can go on proclaiming for the next several centuries that the right of a woman not to have children if she wishes otherwise is fundamental to individual liberties and all the other sacred cows of "democracy." The argument, however, will not be resolved by ideological debates; nature will resolve it by depriving Britain of the children necessary to its survival. Nature's verdict, in other words, will be the final and overruling one. For nature, you see, recognises no such things as "rights." The latter are a human invention.

‘At root, the "rights" mentality is a childish mentality. The small child does not know, and cannot be expected to know, that nothing is for free. If the child wants something, he bawls for it, and then bawls even louder if he is not allowed to have it. The liberal who believes in "basic human rights" is a person who has never really grown up. He is like the child who insists on his "right" to take possession of an attractive toy or the contents of a bag of sweets. If the desired object is denied, that is a violation of "basic human rights" and must justify loud protest. The thought that desired things must be earned, or that anyway there could be people in authority with good reasons for withholding them, is totally alien to the liberal outlook. "What I want now I must have" might be adopted as the liberal motto.’

I was here, of course, speaking of a genuine believer in the "rights" idea. It difficult to imagine that the framers of the present Euro legislation, who include at least some mature and erudite men, all come into this childlike category. One suspects, therefore, that they have a much more complex agenda - in fact a hidden agenda vastly diferent to the apparent one. I touched upon this in the concluding words to the article from which I have quoted, thus:-

‘This writer's advice to everyone... is that when a man comes running up to you waving a placard which talks of "rights" - be immediately on your guard! It is quite possible, of course, that he sincerely believes in what his placard says, in which case be nice to him for he intends no harm. But it is most probable that behind the placard and its slogan he has an axe to grind. He wants something that someone else has. He represents an interest which depends for its advancement on persuading people that it stands for some "right" or other. It is the interest that he is really agitating for, not the "right."

‘So beware of that man and his demand for "rights," just as we have been taught to beware of the Greek who comes bearing gifts. The "rights" racket has become a formidable weapon of power politics in the 20th century. We fail to identify it at our peril.’