On Human Rights (3)

As I’ve said, the plethora of new rights and the demand for such rights is exponentially increasing.  But then it is pushing at an open door—or rather at the aperture of a door that has been lifted off its hinges and left standing against the wall.

I remember back in the 1960s there was something on BBC called The Simon Dee Show, one episode of which included a sketch of a prosperous upper-class toff learning to speak cockney.  And it has stuck in my mind ever since, because it was illustrative of the collapse in self-belief and self-confidence that was affecting authority at the time.

And it is really no different now.  We have an authority without confidence or bottle, terrified of taking decisions and risking unpopularity, and forever unwilling to go against the crowd.  Rather all the time courting the crowd, in pursuit of a sort of unctuous mateyness, a version of the Clintonian ‘we feel your pain’.

But then this is a common feature of societies and civilisations in the process of going to the dogs, an inability to govern in a serious manner and an unwillingness to confront the various forces, who, under the guise of democratic reforms and general do-goodery, are really involved, whether they realise it or not, in pulling society down in the interests of some variant on the classless version.

Over the past decades, campaigning and activist forces have increasingly sought to change the political and social nature of the world we live in, aided by governments and elites seemingly ever more desperate to divest themselves of responsibility.

Everything from the matter of victim impact statements—introduced in the early 1990s, in response to, as the Irish Times described it, ‘the victim’s rights movement which gained momentum in the 1980s’—up to the complete and abject surrender of responsibility involved in the so-called ‘citizen’s assemblies’.

The most pernicious weapon of all has been the drive for an abstract, absolute and radical equality, which no matter what way you look at it represents a ruthless race to the bottom.  It is this that has progressively hollowed out the traditional institutions of the state, in such a way as to make the damage generally invisible until it comes near the moment of collapse.

I can remember at the time of the ‘London Spring’, in 2011, watching helicopter footage of a mob confronting two lines of police, who could be seen wavering every time the crowd threatened to attack, so that there was little doubt as to who was likely to break first, should push come to shove.

The police involved were no doubt a representative sample of the ‘Uncle Tom Cobley and all’ diversity that was being imposed on forces at the time—save that they quite obviously lacked the grit and physical presence for the role they were being asked to play.

One could go on and on . . .