Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The Guardian’s editorial this morning on civil liberties ends with a resounding call to arms, “No quarter should be given to the politics of fear”. But this reader had the feeling that after pussy-footing around the issues (if that is not unfair to pussies), and giving away more quarters than make a square, the poor leader-writer came up with this final sentence to quell that inner-trembling which besets the Guardian when things might get serious. In this case it probably comes of making an effort to appear wise while at the same time hearing in one’s inner ear the scornful snorts of philistine colleagues on Farringdon Road who regard anything constitutional as more old-fashioned than Neil Kinnock. The leader backs into a proposal for reform. But it would be hard not to describe as fearful a suggestion which goes, “Achieving a better outcome… might best be achieved” (Nervous prose? I’d say so), and continues by calling for “a convention like the one that built consensus for Scottish devolution” in order to… improve the Human Rights Act. Is this not a cowardly compromise? A convention, like the Scottish one, is a process designed to engage with things as a whole not one bit of legislation (in the Scots’ case the call for a national parliament.)
There is a need for our human rights legislation to gain public support. But as Lord Scarman used to say, ‘rights’ are not for the public as a whole, which has no need of them, they are needed to protect minorities from the potential tyranny of the majority. Thus a new Bill of Rights cannot ‘articulate what it means to be British’, as the leader writer suggests, even if Gordon Brown thinks it can. You do not need courage, just clarity, to see that one role of any Bill of Rights is to extend protection to those who live here and feel they are not British. This is why if we are to have a democratic process that addresses issues of Britishness its weight cannot be carried by a Bill of Rights alone.
Any attempt to do this runs the risk of ‘nationalising’ what are universal principles, rolling back the Human Rights Act and providing a weak and fearful definition both of liberty and country.
