There are far too many human rights about
While going through the list of the Tory Party Conference fringe meetings in Manchester this week – nearly all obsequies to false idols like ‘Climate Change’ – I perked up no end when I saw a debate, in partnership with Channel 4, entitled: Freedom from Torture and Human Rights.’ Never mind torture, but freedom from human rights? This was more like it.
There are far too many human rights about. We have been doling them out for years without even thinking how we would pay for them. The American Founding Fathers defined our rights as ’life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. The trouble with my generation, is that they have dispensed with the proviso.
We have abjured all personal responsibility expect the politicians to extract us from the state we’re in, regardless of the fact that many of us have been human personifications of Greece. We are the Macavity Generation: we always have an alibi, we always find someone else to blame.
Yet we have been working less hard than our parents did, expecting greater reward. I suspect, of course, that there should have been a comma after ‘Freedom from Torture.’ But there is one vital right we have ignored for decades – that of the English language to a grammatical sentence.