I have a problem with the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which will begin to eat away at our liberty and democracy from December 1st. But what’s my beef?…

The Charter is possibly the most wide-ranging human rights treaty in the world today. There are civil rights, political rights, social rights, ecological entitlements, rights for the arts, consumer rights. The list is really extensive.

Ok, to start with the basics. Liberties can be defined as providing ‘protection from’ someone or something, while rights can be defined as providing an ‘entitlement to’ something.

‘Protection from’ places an obligation on others to help protect their fellow citizen’s freedom. “Entitlement to’ places an obligation on others to provide the entitlement.

Hence the only “Bill of Rights”  worth having is one which enshrines protection from other people and from the state, and not one which enshrines entitlements.

The main problem i have with “positive rights” is that by their nature they often come in to conflict with each other, and there are situations where such entitlements need to be suspended!

When this occurs, it is the judiciary who end up as de facto legislators, and not the democratically elected legislators. The complex web of contradiction and conflict provides a vichyssoise of possible arguments from which to pick, and places lawmaking in the hands of unelected and unaccountable individuals.

What is worse is these judgments can often lead to perverse – or seemingly perverse – judgments, which simply serves to obfuscate justice from the people. And if justice is opaque, and crucially if justice is not seen to be done, then people feel and become further alienated from the process.

This is a wider malaise which I have often spoken about – the fact that people no longer feel they have ownership of their society; their government; their community. They do not feel the police are answerable to them, or are serving them, but instead they are serving higher authorities in Whitehall and are perversely directed to act against the people. Equally they do not feel they can affect change with their vote.

When people feel fed up and angry about what they see as “the country being ruined” this is what they mean. They are saying they feel powerless and what should be a simple system is throwing up bizarre and unjust outcomes.

We absolutely MUST get the principles and morality of liberty back into politics.