Bill of Rights to Right all Human Wrongs?

As someone who has been involved off and on in Charter88 campaigns for a Bill of Rights, who has marvelled at how enlightened a party the Lib Dems must be for having called for one for as long as I can remember being involved, I must say I am pleased. I am pleased that after so long denying it, the Conservative Party has signalled such a big u-turn on something that in my opinion has been fundamental to the rule of law and the place of the citizen in a democracy since...oh Tom Payne and before.

You see, it has been one of the huge blockages to my ability to see the Conservatories as a party I could deal with. The evidence, up till now, has been that they are a party for whom rights were divisible, that fundamentally believed that some people had fewer rights than others. This to me was the outrage of Section 28 for example. It just galled me that a party could go out seeking to claim to be able to represent all of us, yet still want to put some of us in pigeon holes and say we had fewer rights.

So far so good.

But...and you knew there had to be one...the "noises" are all wrong. They're apparently reacting (because in reality they are a bunch of old reactionaries of course) to some whipped up furore about the Human Rights Act, and, by extension, whatever they say, about the European Convention on Human Rights. Have they actually read this document? What rights enshrined in that would we not have? It's not a big document. It doesn't take long to enumerate them.

And the Human Rights Act basically does two things - bring the first responsibility for enforcing the Convention on the British courts instead of the famously slow European Court of Human Rights, and make all public bodies, including the legislature, consider their citizens' rights. For all the harumphing about the Afghan hijackers or Abu Hamza or whoever, 99.99999% of the times (at least) that the Human Rights Act is cited in anything, it is where little jobsworths and council officers all over the country have to consider the impact of their decisions and recommendations on us, the people, whom they exist to serve.

Every report of a planning officer has to consider the impact on the rights enshrined by the ECHR of the proposal and their recommendation. Every decision to award a grant to ensure public money is being used fairly and being given to causes that will not discriminate. Every time, in fact, the least of the lowest civil servant so much as takes a dump...

Indeed, when last they were in power, the Conservatories also conspired to let the ECHR do their dirty work for them (and for all his apparent new age all are equal cuddliness in 1997 this is something Mr Blair perpetuated, despite being bunked up every night with a woman making her legal reputation and fortune fighting the UK government on Human Rights). Equalization of the age of consent for gay men - won through the ECHR. The right of gay men and lesbians to fight for their country - won through the ECHR. To be treated the same by employers - yup, ECHR. Presumably now that the problem is foreigners, not poofters, these are not examples of the sort of thing the Conservatories would want to roll back?

So then I hear Dominic Grieve, and he should know cos he's something to do with the law, saying it's not meant to diminish our rights but increase them. And of course that is allowed, and it's welcome. If it were true. If that were the case, certainly in the ethos of Charter88, it would mean a real shift of power towards the individual citizen and away from government - finally redressing the truism, two centuries and more old, that we live in a dictatorship on all but one day out of four or five years. Long something the Conservatories have said they want to do, but yet again have proven they can't when in power. It means to me a need for fewer MPs and flunkies. I don't see many Conservatories saying they stood for parliament in order one day to sack themselves - something I absolutely take as a given for the Lib Dem MPs I know. To curtail and control the power of the executive. In short, a constitution.

Hard cases make good headlines, and bad law. If there is to be a UK Bill of Rights it is not something in the gift of one political party or a couple of reactionary newspapers. In a majority parliamentary system one could easily imagine what human wrongs a Bill of Rights passed by, say, the Reichstag in 1936 might have enshrined. It has to be a broad based effort - perhaps requiring a referendum, or at least an extraordinarily high proportion of the legislature, to get passed, and subsequently amended. What ought to amount to a written constitution and set of guarantees of the citizen's position vis-a-vis the state must be the work of us all.

I welcome the Conservative U-turn on this, bringing them alongside decades of Liberal and Liberal Democrat campaigning on this, but I'll bet they didn't think too carefully about what they were letting themselves, and us all, in for. One of the people I think myself lucky to inhabit the same city as is Vernon Bogdanor, onetime tutor to brave Dave. I'm with him when he said last night that if Dave were still a student of his, he might suggest rewriting this particular essay.

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