Image: Ponderosa Templeton, Wikimedia/Creative Commons.
The Labour party’s 2017 manifesto remains an impressive document with its insistence on equality and human rights. Labour has become the party of commitments to human rights of all kinds, civil and political, workers’ rights, women’s rights, the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the rights of people with disabilities, and LGBTI rights.
But there is a gaping hole, as a new pamphlet by Paul Hunt, the outstanding human rights lawyer and activist, points out. In Social Rights Are Human Rights – But the UK System is Rigged, published by the Centre for Welfare Reform, Hunt writes that the manifesto’s social policies on education, social security, housing, health and social care are “among its strongest features”, but there is no explicit mention of social rights [my emphasis], except for a single reference to the right to education.
