"rights and responsibilities"
October 11, 2014 7:13 AM   Subscribe

At the heart of the reform will be a new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities that will restore common sense to the application of human rights in the UK. A draft of the Bill will be published for consultation before Christmas. Among other things the Bill will stop terrorists and other serious foreign criminals who pose a threat to our society from using human rights to prevent deportation. It will make it clear that people have clear responsibilities to society, and that there is a proper balance between rights and responsibilities in British law.
If you follow UK politics you know the Tories (as well as a large chunk of Labour) have an obsession with the European Court of Human Rights and its "interfering" with British domestic matters. The party has now proposal to scrap the 1998 Human Rights Act and break the UK's ties to the court.

For the successive Labour and ConDem governments, the European Court of Human Rights (not an EU institution, though often confused with it) has been a thorn in the side as it's been used as the court of last appeal in a fair few controversial cases, though nowhere near as many as the tabloids make out. The Human Rights Act, ironically enacted to limit the direct interference of the ECHR, often constrains the power of UK government to do things like sending people back to countries that may torture them, something Home Secretaries find unacceptable.

The Tories have been grumbling about withdrawing from the court for a long time and this became acute last year, as discussed in this article looking at the impact of withdrawal last year. Repealing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a British "Bill of Rights" though is new. For background information of this, liberal law blogger Jack of Kent has provided a list of resources to read up about it.

The best of which is perhaps conservative commentator Peter Oborne and now Tory MP Jesse Norman's Churchill's Legacy - the Conservative case for the Human Rights Act (PDF).

For a look at what withdrawal from the ECHR would have abroad, Oliver Bullough looked last year to the impact of UK criticism had on Russia's attitudes to the ECHR:
Although the bill has not got anywhere since it was mooted in July, his article was a clear sign that criticism of the court in western countries where it does little work is amplified in Russia where its work is crucial.

“One worries about contagion,” Court President Nicholas Bratza told the authors of a report on the court for Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission. “There is a risk of this attitude in the UK to judgements of the court negatively impacting on other states and complaints being made of double standards. This could result in a wider refusal to implement ECtHR judgements across the Council of Europe.”
posted by MartinWisse (39 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Was it fucking worth it Nick? They gave you your referendum which they proceeded to then fuck you with and it only cost you your party, your integrity, your soul, and your political life come 2015.

Rot in hell you traitorous bastard for setting the UK back for a generation.
posted by Talez at 7:22 AM on October 11, 2014 [28 favorites]


By all accounts, it's unclear whether this "British" Bill of Rights will apply to Scotland, N Ireland and Wales. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/11139902/Scotland-will-refuse-to-accept-British-Bill-of-Rights.html.

So it's not so much British as "Small Minded Little South East In-Bred Englander" Bill of Rights.

In terms of responsibilities, I'm sure they'll be along the lines of:
- Look down upon poor people, unemployed, disabled, and anyone who is either a refugee or immigrant.
- Anyone with untidy hair should be taken immediately to a respectable upright white-owned hairdressers to be given a short-back and sides.
- Anyone working in a public sector organisation should strive to have it privatised, and accept worse working conditions and less pay.
- Play your part in a conscripted army.
- Tug your for-lock when anyone of the Upper Classes passes nearby.
- And so on .....

It's really embarrassing that we've got to this point of moronic thinking, it really is. Why aren't we putting in time and effort to nail problems that really affect us all? Like huge corporate tax avoidance for one thing.
posted by rolandroland at 7:30 AM on October 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


Because those benefit the asshats pulling this bullshit, rolandroland.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:43 AM on October 11, 2014


This is just dog whistle stuff to draw back the loonier fringe of Tory voters who have been gravitating to the UKIP side. Sane Tories (there are a few left) like Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve have been clear that the proposals are essentially unworkable - and, in any case, come next year there's unlikely to be a Tory government to implement them.

It is horribly, profoundly depressing that such dross is even a part of our political discourse though.
posted by sobarel at 8:03 AM on October 11, 2014


Balance rights and responsibilities. People who do not fulfil their responsibilities in society should not be able to claim so-called “qualified rights” in their defence in a court of law.


Wow. So rights are now conditional on having (what the government perceives as) good behaviour. That's a pretty big step away from the principles of a liberal democracy.
posted by Banknote of the year at 8:17 AM on October 11, 2014 [9 favorites]


Yeah, well, that's what you get when your constitution is based on an accumulation of restrictions placed on a monarchy instead of any explicit democratic principles.
posted by Small Dollar at 8:46 AM on October 11, 2014


I don't think that's either a valid description of the UK Constitution, or anything to do with this bit of ludicrous political grandstanding.
posted by sobarel at 8:55 AM on October 11, 2014 [8 favorites]


Talez, I don't want to derail this with a discussion of Clegg and the Lib Dems' behaviour since the last general election, but I'm always curious when I see reactions like yours: what do you think Clegg should have done, given the outcome of that election?
posted by Decani at 9:10 AM on October 11, 2014


Decani: can't speak for Talez, but "confidence and supply" plus tactical support of the Tories when their plans fit with those in the LD manifesto would have been a damn sight better than the set of blank cheques they issued, drawn on their own future.
posted by bonaldi at 9:54 AM on October 11, 2014 [7 favorites]


what do you think Clegg should have done, given the outcome of that election?

Negotiated better.

You go into government to get things done; the LibDems went in for the sake of governing and have accomplished nothing as a result.

Their minimum demand should've been to get the Chancellor of the Exchequer and proportional representation, rather than just a referendum on the issue made hideously complicated.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:44 AM on October 11, 2014 [3 favorites]


Decani: Kept his promise to rein in the worst excesses of the Tory party and their policies.

The problem was, Labour had been in power for so long, when it came to make a deal with the LDs they fucked it up, so the LDs went with the Tories.
posted by marienbad at 10:46 AM on October 11, 2014


"I don't think that's either a valid description of the UK Constitution,"

We don't have a constitution, Small Dollar's summary is essentially accurate.
posted by marienbad at 10:48 AM on October 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


The Tories are running scared right now. UKIP just won a by election with a huge swing away from the Conservative party and is polling well enough to pick up seats in the general. So look for more attempts to pander to the euro-skeptic nationalist right wing vote ahead of the next general election.
posted by Grimgrin at 10:56 AM on October 11, 2014


Limit the reach of human rights cases to the UK, so that British Armed forces overseas are not subject to persistent human rights claims that undermine their ability to do their job and keep us safe.

How does committing war crimes keep Britain safe?

When Canadian troops were found to have committed torture (the 1993 Somalia Affair) the response was national outrage and turning the army upside down. The ultimate outcome was that Canada now has a highly effective army that can be trusted to fight wars in a manner that's compatible with the country's values. How would it have been to our country's advantage to shelter the perpetrators and cover it up?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:27 AM on October 11, 2014 [5 favorites]


We don't have a constitution, Small Dollar's summary is essentially accurate.

We don't have a single written constitution, but we certainly have a constitution. You can't have a functioning state without one, even if it exists as a patchwork of laws, treaties and conventions.
posted by sobarel at 11:34 AM on October 11, 2014


sobarel in modern statecraft that's what a constitution is. Your patchwork of regular acts of Parliament, court cases, and traditions doesn't qualify under any reasonable definition that I'm aware of except your own. Israel is an example of another state without a constitution, but they at least don't pretend that if you take all of their basic laws and throw it into a basket that it somehow equals a constitution.

The problem seems to be the whole "can Jesus make a burrito so hot that even he cannot eat it?" conundrum. Parliament is incapable of passing acts that restrain subsequent parliamentary action. Of course there are other ways of doing a constitution - the Netherlands has no constitutional court for example, so the legislature is responsible for policing itself to ensure that its acts are in accord with the Constitution - but I don't think what the UK has qualifies as anything more than some basic laws and general principles.
posted by 1adam12 at 12:20 PM on October 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well, I disagree. Here's a summary from the Constitution Unit at University College London that I think is pretty good, and here's a more in-depth description from The Constitution Society, which is a foundation that promotes public understanding of the British Constitution.
posted by sobarel at 12:45 PM on October 11, 2014 [6 favorites]


Can we please boot the U.K. out of the E.U. if they renege on their obligations to the European Court of Human Rights?
posted by jeffburdges at 1:13 PM on October 11, 2014


Talez, I don't want to derail this with a discussion of Clegg and the Lib Dems' behaviour since the last general election, but I'm always curious when I see reactions like yours: what do you think Clegg should have done, given the outcome of that election?

First of all, I would have caucused with Labor. Then I would have held their feed to their fire to make sure all the people that Cameron fucked wouldn't have been fucked. But since they're in too far deep they can't say "fuck you Cameron you've gone too far" because the second they do that Cameron just says "election" and the LibDem party is over.

So not only do they fuck the people who have been fucked, fuck themselves and fuck the UK, they end up continuing to fuck all of the above simply because the second they show some backbone their small scrap of power is gone.
posted by Talez at 1:27 PM on October 11, 2014 [4 favorites]


I'm pretty sure that most of the people who voted LibDem would be pretty happy to see their party dissolved right now.
posted by schmod at 1:38 PM on October 11, 2014 [4 favorites]


First of all, I would have caucused with Labor.

Clegg was obligated to negotiate with the largest single party first (the Tories), and his brand of Orange Book Liberalism is closer to the Tory left than to the Labour right. The fact that the LibDems often locally portrayed themselves as a left-wing alternative to Labour is the problem there as far as voter expectations go.

In any case they didn't have enough MPs for a Lib/Lab parliamentary majority (326), and Labour weren't keen on a "rainbow coalition". Supposedly Brown was very rude in negotiations with Clegg. After a long time in power I don't think Labour were really up for struggling onwards in a fragile minority government.

because the second they do that Cameron just says "election" and the LibDem party is over

We have fixed-term parliaments now, so Cameron can't just call an election whenever he chooses. We'll have to wait until next year to see what the fall-out is for the LibDems. It's entirely possible whatever is left of them will end up in a coalition with Labour this time around.
posted by sobarel at 2:03 PM on October 11, 2014


Clegg's fundamental mistake was to agree to the new arrangements for fixed-term parliaments. This may have seemed a good idea at the time, as it meant that Cameron couldn't just dump the Lib Dems and call a snap election (as Wilson did in 1974). But it also meant that the Lib Dems were locked into the coalition and couldn't threaten to trigger a general election if their demands weren't met. As a result, Cameron was free to ignore them.
posted by verstegan at 2:06 PM on October 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


We have fixed-term parliaments now, so Cameron can't just call an election whenever he chooses. We'll have to wait until next year to see what the fall-out is for the LibDems. It's entirely possible whatever is left of them will end up in a coalition with Labour this time around.

Motion of no confidence passes, election called. There are ways to backdoor a snap election even with the promise of fixed parliamentary terms.
posted by Talez at 2:08 PM on October 11, 2014


It's a sleight of hand PR trick.

They got orgasmic Mail and Sun front pages, and that's probably as far as their thinking goes on all this.
posted by sobarel at 2:28 PM on October 11, 2014


Motion of no confidence passes, election called. There are ways to backdoor a snap election even with the promise of fixed parliamentary terms.

Precisely. Parliament being bound in any way is essentially impossible, given the nature of the British constitution as it currently exists.

But yes. The Lib Dems should have agreed confidence and supply with the Tories, and never entered a coalition. However, I will admit that it's easy to say that with hindsight. The Lib Dems were terrified of being seen as the party that destroyed the chance of recovery by leaving the country with a weak government. But that's not much of an excuse for Clegg, given his evident ideological sympathy with relative Tory moderates like Cameron. He should have had more of a grasp on the realities of the Tory party's internal politics, and the power that its lunatic right-wing was going to exert over the course of this parliament.

Fuck Clegg, certainly, at the very least for being a failure, a dupe and a fool, whose failings have hurt us all.
posted by howfar at 2:40 PM on October 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


The thing is though that the tories can move to the right all they want, they may well struggle to pick up votes for it anyway.

This fairly cringeworthy snippet of a phone in radio show suggests that many voters are not voting UKIP because they believe in them, but that they don't like the main parties. They actually have no idea what their policies are, they just think they are somehow different.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:00 PM on October 11, 2014


Yes, vote for Farage - the public schoolboy ex-stockbroker who stood for parliament five times - because you want an outsider non-establishment figure in politics!

And even he thought the last UKIP manifesto was "drivel".
posted by sobarel at 4:30 PM on October 11, 2014


We have fixed-term parliaments now

And the fact that this happened without people really realising* is one big argument that we should have a written constitution. I think it was a referendum-worthy change.

*including a colleague who I informed about it just after he mentioned he was on the shortlisting committee for the local Lib Dem party, to replace the incumbent, who's stepping down at the next election.
posted by ambrosen at 4:40 PM on October 11, 2014


Yes, vote for Farage - the public schoolboy ex-stockbroker who stood for parliament five times - because you want an outsider non-establishment figure in politics!

My fave vox pop from the streets of Clacton was a bloke who voted UKIP because he thought the Tory MP had been useless. (Closely followed by the woman who said 'I don't like Asians' and 'I'm not a racist' in the same sentence.)

That said, I have had some success persuading folk not to vote UKIP by giving them a potted history of Farage's career. My new tactic will be informing them of the fact that his campaign manager in Thanet is an unrepentant former branch manager for the National Front - see this piece in the LRB for the horrifying details.

(I really hope the press run with this - I think it's a safe bet that UKIP is riddled with ex NF and BNP. Or, given the great age of their membership, former members of the League of Empire Loyalists and the British Union of Fascists. That sound like a joke, but I'm honestly this close to thinking future histories of the British far right will have Farage at the end of a list of names like Mosely, Chesterton, Tyndall and Griffin.)
posted by jack_mo at 1:58 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Motion of no confidence passes, election called.

That's the old system. Under the new one someone would just have to try to form a viable government without an election, through new coalitions or whatever. To call an election would require a fresh Act, which might not be available for the asking. I think the idea was that incumbents could not manipulate the date of an election to their advantage, but in the case of a government falling it doesn't seem a better system to me.

It's worth noting how much British political thinking has shifted recently under the influence of the prevailing international consensus in favour of entrenched charters of rights. The concept of entrenched charters goes back, I think, to the French revolutionary model enthusiastically taken up by the nascent US - and gradually by everyone else, it seems. Not so long ago it would have been common ground among Brits of all shades of opinion that such charters of rights simply moved ultimate power from the people to the judges, which was not a good idea. Now it's accepted that the only possible alternative to European chartery is a Bill of Rights of our own.

Jeremy Bentham would probably be turning in his grave if he were in it, instead of sitting in a glass case in UCL.
posted by Segundus at 2:21 AM on October 12, 2014


That sound like a joke, but I'm honestly this close to thinking future histories of the British far right will have Farage at the end of a list of names like Mosely, Chesterton, Tyndall and Griffin.)

It doesn't sound like a joke to me. The modern European far-right has become very good at cloaking itself in locally appropriate imagery and even policy. The True Finns and the Progress Party are the two examples that come to my mind first. UKIP seems to me like a manifestation of this 'soft' far-right.

I think the key aspect of English (not British) society that UKIP has adapted to is our snobbery. Its major strength, compared to the BNP (which attempted to address this issue, but largely failed) and the NF is that it isn't seen, by many people, as 'common' to vote UKIP. The fact that Farage is a public school buffoon is a feature, not a bug. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and people don't like it when they think about it in great detail, but as a general impression and atmosphere, it works. For this reason alone, Farage is the most effective party leader the far right has had for a long time. The idea of a Tory/UKIP + Johnson/Farage UK leadership after the next election is frankly terrifying, but it's possible.

If we want to undermine UKIP, exposing the links to the BNP and NF is vital, but not for the reasons that matter to us left-liberals. We need to expose everything about UKIP that smacks of the council estate and the football terrace, rather than the suburban semi and the cricket club.

I know this is a cheap, reductive and grubby thing to think and say. I recognise it reveals how little respect I have for the political decision making abilities of my fellow citizens. I don't like myself for holding this view. But from a practical perspective, I think it is both essentially true and of significant importance.
posted by howfar at 2:47 AM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


That's the old system. Under the new one someone would just have to try to form a viable government without an election, through new coalitions or whatever. To call an election would require a fresh Act, which might not be available for the asking.

Why do you believe that to be the case? From s2 of the Act:
(3)An early parliamentary general election is also to take place if—

(a)the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (4), and

(b)the period of 14 days after the day on which that motion is passed ends without the House passing a motion in the form set out in subsection (5).

(4)The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (3)(a) is—

“That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.”

(5)The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (3)(b) is—

“That this House has confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.”
posted by howfar at 2:55 AM on October 12, 2014


If we want to undermine UKIP, exposing the links to the BNP and NF is vital, but not for the reasons that matter to us left-liberals. We need to expose everything about UKIP that smacks of the council estate and the football terrace

As a working class man from a council estate who likes football, I really I don't know what to say. It makes me sad and angry though.
posted by marienbad at 3:33 AM on October 12, 2014


As a working class man from a council estate who likes football, I really I don't know what to say. It makes me sad and angry though.

It makes me sad too, although I have no right to be angry. I'm aware of the snobbery even in the observation. It's a shitty thing for me to think, and I apologise. But I still think it's true.
posted by howfar at 3:48 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


I should make clear that I do not believe that there is anything about social housing or working class people that links them to the BNP or the NF, rather that the far-right in Britain has been hamstrung by its perceived association with the working class in the minds of many who might otherwise vote for it.
posted by howfar at 3:52 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Over here in the States, I'm used to the lazy notion held by many of our liberals that the Brits are the adults of the English speaking world, especially compared to the bull in the China shop that is the U.S. I don't know: maybe it's the wonderful accents and John Oliver. But then I read things like this and wonder if all the Anglosphere is going completely off its collective rocker.
posted by JKevinKing at 9:06 AM on October 12, 2014


What do you mean going? The Anglosphere has been off its collective rocker for centuries.
posted by Talez at 9:27 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Get off your one duff and get on your other, in fifteen minutes this starts on C-Span: "Deputy PM & Party Ldr. Nick Clegg Address at Liberal Democrats Party Conference"
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 5:47 PM on October 12, 2014


Why do you believe that to be the case?

Because I though I knew what I was talking about, whereas in fact I have failed most egregiously. :(
posted by Segundus at 7:17 AM on October 13, 2014


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