Individual rights vs collective rights

The subject of human rights has been in the news recently. Some right wing commentators and politicians are arguing that Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). They claim that by doing so we will be better able to control illegal immigration, particularly those who are crossing the English Channel in increasing numbers. Thus it is worth examining the issue of human rights in more detail.

The British Conservative government signed up to the ECHR in the early 1950s. The intention was an honourable one, at a time of heightened awareness that European totalitarian regimes of both right and left were murdering and incarcerating their own citizens in pursuit of their ideological objectives. So for several decades British acceptance of the ECHR was uncontroversial as the perceived intentions and objectives enjoyed widespread support across the political spectrum. It helped to address the fear that ordinary citizens could become helpless victims of arbitrary injustice with the loss of their individual freedoms, by regimes pursuing collectivised politicised objectives regardless of the impact on their citizens’ rights as individuals.

The government of the time believed that signing up to the ECHR would have no impact in this country since, as a parliamentary democracy, we possessed an inbuilt mechanism to safeguard individual human rights that would render the imposition of a totalitarian regime impossible. Nevertheless, in accepting membership for ourselves we could demonstrate our commitment to this European ideal and provide a lead to other countries which in the past had failed to uphold human and democratic rights for their citizens.

So given the uncontroversial nature of ECHR membership when Britain joined there was very little consideration or analysis of what we had signed up for. In reality, the ECHR provides very little protection of human rights since nearly all of the listed ECHR rights include exemptions which governments could use as justification for their actions. For example, there was a right to a private life, but Britain continued to criminalize private homosexual relations between adult men. They could do so because there was an exemption for maintaining public morality, a stance supported by the majority of the public at the time. More recently the British people were locked down in their homes for months at a time at the stroke of the Health Secretary’s pen. The ECHR provided no protection as there is a public health exemption. Still more recently ‘far right louts’ were imprisoned for social media comments, which would be permitted under the public order exemption.

The whole argument for signing up to the ECHR is based on the fiction that the ECHR judges are independent of politicians. But the reality is that their views increasingly converge, and the determining legal body, the European Court of Human Rights, merely rubber stamps decisions which reflect the dominant political narrative of the time. Moreover, human rights have now metamorphosed from the protection of citizens against their government into a vehicle for achieving minority rights at the expense of the collective rights of the majority.

The human rights that receive the most attention are those that relate to favoured minorities. That which has the greatest impact on the nation’s social cohesion concerns ethnic racial and cultural identity, particularly involving Afro-Caribbeans and Muslims. The problem broader society faces is that there appears to be an army of lawyers enjoying considerable but largely opaque sources of funding, who are willing and able to exploit the legal system pursuing individual rights cases of these favoured minority ethnic groups. In so doing the collective rights of the majority remain unrepresented and their concerns are thus overlooked or ignored when these one sided cases are being considered.

The outcome is that the collective rights of the majority white society are gradually being eroded by the cumulative impact of favourable individual human rights decisions brought on behalf of ethnic minorities. The effect of this trend is the increasing anger felt by the indigenous population, particularly the white working class. Their resentment is particularly focussed on the Labour party, which traditionally supported working people, but now despises them for their ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, anti-feminism and opposition to immigration and Islam. This was graphically illustrated during the riots in the summer in response to the Southport atrocity.

The time will come when a future ‘far right’ government will need to take drastic remedial action, involving the withdrawal of individual rights where there has been overreach, if societal breakdown is to be avoided. In short a conflict is coming between the ‘far right’ majority of ordinary citizens and the activist vocal elite minority proponents of cultural Marxism. Thus it is likely that if we, the overwhelming majority, don’t start coming for these delusional virtue signalling subversives, they will continue to keep coming for us. It is hoped to explore this matter further in a future post.