What's this Bill of Rights and Duties for?

After reading all the articles about Gordon Brown's new Bill of Rights and Duties (or is it Responsibilities?), I decided I had better go and read both his speech and the more detailed follow up from Jack Straw.

I'm still none the wiser. Matthew d'Ancona might have been impressed but I wasn't. Sure, Gordon name-checked enough political philosophers to make up an undergraduate reading list but he didn't give a clear description of what he actually plans to do.

He said that he would "safeguard and extend the liberties of our citizens" in the following areas:

* respecting and extending freedom of assembly, new rights for the public expression of dissent;

* respecting freedom to organise and petition, new freedoms that guarantee the independence of non-governmental organisations;

* respecting freedoms for our press, the removal of barriers to investigative journalism;

* respecting the public right to know, new rights to access public information where previously it has been withheld;

* respecting privacy in the home, new rights against arbitrary intrusion;

* in a world of new technology, new rights to protect your private information and respecting the need for freedom from arbitrary treatment, new provision for independent judicial scrutiny and open parliamentary oversight.

Rrrright....so what does all that actually mean?

Take the last two. Rights against arbitrary intrusion and rights to protect your private information. Does that mean he's going to abandon his plans for ID cards? Will he call a halt to the project which will put the details of all children, apart from those of the rich and famous, onto a national database by the end of 2008?

Notice, too, that there is nothing specifically about free speech. How will the "new rights for the public expression of dissent", and "respecting freedoms for our press" work? Would that freedom apply to someone who published cartoons of Mohammed or described Islam as a wicked and vicious faith? Or would that still potentially fall foul of the Religious Hatred Act? What about a Christian or Muslim newspaper that described homosexuality as a sin? Would its authors be protected by the new rights or prosecuted by the government's next round of hate crime laws?

There's something almost childish about all this. "You can't use the Bill of Rights to escape ID cards and the Religious Hatred Act because we'd already bagsied them before the Bill came in."

But if I'm confused about the Rights bit, the Duties (or is it Responsibilities?) are even less clear.

Gordon is right to say that responsibilities flow from British citizenship but don't most of those take the form of laws that we are obliged to obey? For example, we all have a duty to pay tax and we will be punished if we don't. Unless you are Mohammed Fayed, of course, in which case you do a secret deal with the Inland Revenue.

Surely, the way to make Fayed and his ilk fulfil their responsibility to pay taxes is to enforce the existing law properly, rather than to set up  a constitutional duty obliging them to do so.

We also have an obligation to respect each other's property and privacy. If that duty had been enshrined in a Bill of Rights would it have stopped people from persecuting Peter Woodhams in his own home? I doubt it. Police action under current laws might have done so though.

Jack Straw referred to Rights and Responsibilities in his speech but, again, he didn't give any examples of what one of these responsibilities might be. If they are to be legally enforceable, which would be the whole point of putting them into a bill, they must either be re-iterations of laws we already have, which would therefore be superfluous, or yet more new restrictions on the citizen.

That's the bit that worries me most. A new duty might, for example, be the responsibility to show restraint when criticising someone's deeply held faith, or the obligation not to cause offence to religious minorities. Just the sort of thing that would go down well in Jack Straw's constituency.

Do we really need this Bill of Rights and Duties at all? Wouldn't a better way of enhancing the rights on Gordon's shopping list be just to remove a lot of the legislation brought in by his party?

I don't think that's the real aim of this bill though. Instead, it will add yet another layer of legislation to an already complex set of restrictions. Things that we can still just about get away with today will probably be banned by tomorrow.

Comments

[Prodicus]

And these 'rights' are to be conferred by the government? By what right do they have power to confer or deny such 'rights'? Many or most should be taken as read in a country in which, once, Speaker's Corner was possible, one could live one's life without coming to the notice of the state authorites and one could depend on the civility of one's neighbours. Ah, those were the days. If this thought-control government got out of my life, I would probably have most of this stuff, which they now deem theirs to dispense, by natural accident, and not require anyone to confer such spurious ' rights' on me. In short, there is too much government and there too many bloody laws and this is what threatens my liberty. The existing Bill of Rights will do fine, thank you, so you can bugger off, Prime Minister.

[Bert Rustle]

“Pub Philosopher wrote “...Gordon name-checked enough political philosophers to make up an undergraduate reading list but he didn't give a clear description of what he actually plans to do. He said that he would "safeguard and extend the liberties of our citizens" in the ...”

I would suggest that a better description of what he intends to do and what he and his ilk have done can be found in http://www.amazon.co.uk/Triumph-Political-Class-Peter-Oborne/dp/0743295277/ “The Triumph of the Political Class”. . An honest journalist? Quite possibly.

[Les Bean]

"Do we really need this Bill of Rights and Duties at all?"

No. We will have the right to receive orders and the duty to obey. Sean Gabb wrote a very good piece on NuLabour and "freedom":

He [T. Bliar] has created in the past nine years a thousand new criminal offences. He has made true for us our old sneer at the Germans—that whatever is not compulsory is illegal.

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc147.htm