Rights Talk

"Rights Talk is a seminal book. In a sense it is about the other side of the hyper-individualistic society that we’ve arrived at. Now let’s be clear. I wouldn’t be talking to you, as a black MP who’s grown up in Britain, were it not for the huge advances of the sixties and for the socially liberal environment. But that kind of freedom alone is not the answer to the problems that we saw during the riots. The answer is responsibility and a society which is more relational. Mary Ann Glendon challenges how rights can morph from a signal of individual dignity and respect for each other to create a society in which people become intransigent and uncompromising. She is clever in her analysis of everyday language – “it’s within my rights” and so on – and how we have backed away from moral judgments that go beyond discussions of law. Rights cannot be something that you just leave to the lawyers. It’s got to be owned by the people, and therefore in Britain by parliament. Rights was running through the riots. Both the “right” to help yourself to someone else’s goods, and also questions like: Should you show the faces of rioters on posters? Should you deny rioters their homes? It was those sorts of issues writ large. I got involved in a row because I said that the company which runs Blackberry should turn off Blackberry messenger for a night, just so that we could get some order. People said that would be against their right to free speech. This kind of question is very important to discuss."