I’m holding fire on the oath swearing nonsense. I mean, if you think that’s bad how about a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, a Green Paper on which is apparently due in the next few months.
This Bill will set out the rights we enjoy and the responsibilities we owe as members of society.
A Bill of Rights is a constitutional document. Constitutions can be more or less permissive in the rights they afford the citizen. Most have a mechanism by which more rights can be added, or which override previously accepted rights. Offhand, I can’t think of a constitution which sets out obligations to the state as a basic condition of citizenship, on which the enjoyment of rights is conditional.
Or as Jack Straw explains it here:
In a democracy, rights tend to be ‘vertical’ - guaranteed to the individual by the state to constrain the otherwise overweening power of the state. Responsibilities, on the other hand, are more ‘horizontal’ - they are the duties we owe to each other, to our ‘neighbour’ in the New Testament sense. But they have a degree of verticality about them too, because we owe duties to the community as a whole.
…with the state being the means of enforcing responsibilities to the “community as a whole”, after deciding what those responsibilities are.
There’s a traditional way of doing this. Parliament decides what we shouldn’t do and passes a law prohibiting it, or it legalizes some previously illicit form of behaviour or activity. We obey the law and mobilize politically to change it if we don’t like what it says. But the government seems to have more on its mind than that. From back in 2006:
“Should we be aiming for a more explicit statement of the contract that covers both the service offered by the public sector (what is in and what is not) and what is expected from citizens (beyond paying taxes and obeying the law)”
Apparently the answer is yes. The traditional debate along the communitarian/libertarian axis has concerned what actually constitutes a right and how many of them there should be. A right itself is inalienable. You possess it by virtue of being human. Once you conflate rights with responsibilities, then you abandon the idea that there is any such thing as an inalienable right at all. Welcome to the Bill of Obligations and Privileges.
“A right itself is inalienable. You possess it by virtue of being human.”
This is highly debatable. Many of us take the legal positivist line that a right is something the law guarantees, no more than that. What is right is a different matter from what your rights are.
As usual with this increasingly rotten Government, this is arse-about-face.
What they fail to recognise is that a Bill of Rights is there to protect the citizen from an over-zealous Government - not the other way around.
Somehow when this was first mooted, I knew we’d get a shittier end of the stick.
It’s nonsense and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
“This is highly debatable. Many of us take the legal positivist line that a right is something the law guarantees, no more than that.”
Instrumentally, it does. But what, then, is a law gyaranteeing rights based on?
Much like the whole oath thing, this tries to demand what is normally earned. A Bill of Rights can help codify exactly what it is (or should be) to be a free member of a western democracy which then motivates you to be a ‘good citizen’ or whatever. But offering those rights in exchange is like… Swearing an oath to queen and country, instead of just being patriotic (whatever that means) *because* you are proud of your country.
But what, then, is a law gyaranteeing rights based on?
What is any other law based on?
Laws are based upon our freedom to act and our ability to enforce constraints upon our freedom, rights are the product of this interplay.
On the subject of where laws guaranteeing rights come from, I take a fairly Hobbesian line - laws come from entities with the power to enforce them. So you have a right because some entity (i.e. the state) says you have that right (i.e. has passed a law to that effect), and is capable of enforcing that. Eighteenth century white men in Jamaica had the right to own slaves, nineteenth century married women did not have the right to own property. I don’t think either of those things was morally right, of course.
This has implications for what Straw and Wills are proposing. Obligations and rights are basically the same thing, so the imposition of an obligation may be the removal of a right, or the creation of a new right which removes an old one (e.g. the obligation to treat black Jamaicans as free men removed the right to own slaves). We shouldn’t pretend that a set of legally-enforceable obligations is not going to have implications for existing rights (and if these obligations are not enforceable, what is the point of them?).
I have no beef with the concept of responsibilities per se, provided the responsibilities laid out are
1) Obey the law, and
2) Pay your taxes
Any more than that and we’re in fantasyland. Rights and responsibilities? I think Jamie K once said it would make just as much sense to say we have rights and cheesecake.
A Declaration of Rights is, or should be, about setting limits on what the state can do, not what the citizens are allowed to do, or what responsibilities they owe to the state. Yes, the Labour Government have got this totally arse about face. That’s because they are gang of socialist control freaks.
Jack Straw recently spoke at George Washington University and completely perverted Thomas Paine’s idea of rights and responsibilities, which is simply that
rights become duties by reciprocity. The right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee it to another, and he to me; and those who violate the duty justly incur a forfeiture of the right.
What more do we need?
Jamie K has hit the nail on the head, this will be a Bill of Obligations and Privileges. Very well put indeed.
[...] A Bill of Obligations and Privileges March 14, 2008 Jamie K has it right. [...]
In a free society, the rights and laws protect the individual from the government.
In a dictatorship, the rights and laws protect the government from the people.
Need we say anything else?
How can you say with a straight face that these traitors are socialist? They are fascist to the core! By the corporation, of the corporation, and for the the corporation. I can’t see any common ownership of the means of production with these cunts. Whatever they are, they aren’t socialists.
I don’t want to get into a battle of definitions. Facists are equally as bad.
I’ll add something I was struck by when reading it today. I don’t know if it’s exactly true but it seems about right:
Ninety-seven per cent of all tax in this country is collected by central government and then doled out. The life of ministers is a stream of people like me coming from their towns and counties, saying, “Can we have more money for this, more money for that?” At some point the Government has to let go. When I told that figure of 97% to the Mayor in Moscow he said, “That is worse than Russia under Stalin”, and that is absolutely true. There was once a promise to return the business rate. That would help. - Ken Livingstone
Then of course you have tax revenue as a percentage of GDP being about 40%. These are pretty substantial portions of our money going into “common ownership”.
- direct link -
Andrew