Churchill’s Legacy

"I’m picking something with the new coalition government in mind. It’s called Churchill’s Legacy: the Conservative Case for the Human Rights Act, written by Peter Oborne and Jesse Norman, and it’s downloadable for free. They do something really important, which is to write – from a conservative point of view – about the Human Rights Act, which of course has been so denigrated and attacked from the centre right and the right of politics in Britain, who saw it as this horrible New Labour political correctness kind of thing. As two very proud conservative thinkers, they explain some of the history and philosophy of the Act. It was actually the post-war Labour government which had far more doubts about enshrining rights and freedoms in law. But it was Winston Churchill who said: we must have these rights and freedoms enshrined in post-war Europe, and there’s an obvious reason for that: we’ve seen the Holocaust and the Blitz, and what totalitarianism can do. So there’s an attempt in the European Convention on Human Rights to encapsulate the non-negotiables of any democracy: no torture, free speech, fair trials, personal privacy, equal treatment under the law, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, peaceful enjoyment of property, and so on, and all that is now enshrined in the Human Rights Act. So this book is particularly important now, when you’ve got a government of two coalition partners, one partner of which – the Lib Dems – has been very solid in supporting the Act to date, with the other party, the Conservatives, being much more ambivalent and mixed. There are hawks and doves everywhere, and we can dispute particular policies and the application of rights and principles, but no one wants to scrap human rights culture altogether, so I think at this moment this is an important little book."