'Instead of examining the idea of a "human right" Grayling gives us a series
of appendices, containing the various declarations of rights that have
influenced modern government. But what are these declarations really about?
Grayling does not say. The UN Declaration of Human Rights tells us in the
same breath that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of
person (as Aquinas and Locke acknowledged) and also that everyone has a
right to medical care, social services, unemployment benefit, and whatever
else is "indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his
personality". To Grayling, the UN declaration is "the greatest achievement
in the sphere of rights and liberties that the world had hitherto seen". To
me, it is the beginning of the "rights inflation" that is ruining the
delicate and hitherto durable equilibrium maintained by the common law.
Grayling is similarly indulgent towards the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen, which launched the French revolution on its path of
unrestrained murder, and is unable to see what Burke was getting at when he
argued that abstract rights without concrete institutions will lead of their
own accord to anarchy.
Grayling concludes his book with an extended warning against the way in
which the hard-won liberties of the subject are being eroded in Britain and
America. He makes a strong point with good-natured grace. But here are two
examples that he does not mention. Habeas corpus, which is at the heart of
Anglo-American liberty, is a common-law right, dating from the Middle Ages,
and deeply embedded in our legal and political traditions. It is about to
disappear, cancelled by the corpus juris of the EU. The right to hunt - on
which the way of life of my neighbourhood depends - was recently taken away
by a dictatorial House of Commons. It is indeed odd, given his historical
emphasis, that Grayling overlooks this last example, the right to hunt being
the first granted at the French revolution as a symbol that the land was
being returned to the people, and being enshrined also in the constitution
of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Such uneducated invasions of inherited
rights are, it seems to me, far more indicative of the fragility of liberal
political order than the identity cards of which Grayling complains at such
length. I agree with him that liberal order is under threat. But one of its
greatest enemies remains the one identified by Burke - the airy declaration
of abstract political goals, combined with a contempt for real people.'
The rest here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/book...istory/
ROBBIE
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