A Nazi writes in the Daily Telegraph

A Nazi writes in the Daily Telegraph

Why the Left is winning the fight over the wrongs of the Human Rights Act

Conservatives never seem to understand the importance of language as much as their Labour opponents do.

By Graeme Archer

7:34PM BST 26 Aug 2011

Are you in favour of human rights? Of course you are. Who could be against them? In as much as I thought at all about Labour’s Human Rights Act, which incorporated our treaty commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, I imagined that it was a money-making scheme for barristers, who would test the patience of the rest of us with an irritating but mostly harmless sequence of cases involving school uniforms and religious jewellery. Then came the demand that prisoners should be allowed to vote, and my patience snapped.

It’s easy to mock the Leftist fetish for the adjectival phrase “human rights”, as though a worldly noun is imbued with goodness simply because it has a certain prefix. Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya once chaired the UN Human Rights Council: the council wasn’t particularly good as a result. To mock is not sufficient, however. The phrase itself has political power.

Someone who understands this is Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham, who published the following on the internet on Tuesday: “Just popped into [the] Nuremberg rally memorial site, to recall what happens when [the] Right gets carried away. Wonder if Germans trash human rights?” We should listen to Mr MacShane, not least because the IT systems he uses to transmit his thoughts cost us all so dearly (he famously claimed for eight laptops in three years; the police are currently investigating his expenses).

I don’t judge Mr MacShane’s probity (we’ll leave that to the police, shall we?). But let’s not forgive his frankly disgusting equation of Nazi Germany with the Government’s response to the riots in Britain a fortnight ago – and rather than react to them in his own terms, let’s consider why he would want to make such an unpleasant remark, and, more importantly, why he knows he can get away with it.

Labour MPs like Mr MacShane can set themselves up as ethical judges of anyone who questions the Human Rights Act, and its cultural consequences, because language lets them. Conservatives never seem to understand the importance of language as much as their opponents do; because of this they consistently lose every cultural battle of consequence.

The words used to describe a law ultimately control the parameters of the debate which polite society will permit about it, even if the words so used have almost no connection with the object they attempt to describe. The Human Rights Act should really be entitled The “Incorporation into UK law of the right for citizens to sue the government in a British court, in the kinds of cases that used to be heard in a faintly quaint institution which doesn’t resemble a British court in constitution or practice, and which we could safely ignore” Act. To support the repeal of that would be applauded. To speak out against the same thing, once it is named “the Human Rights Act”, is not: Denis MacShane is not a fool. He knows exactly the mood he wants to create, and how to use language to create it.

Which government ministers are the most successful? Surely Iain Duncan Smith at welfare, and Michael Gove at education. Not only are their policies effective and in tune with majority opinion, but they have also found a language which is hard to attack from the Left. IDS talks of the immorality of abandoning a person on benefits, turning a debate about workfare into a Good Samaritan duty. Gove speaks angrily about the scandal of under-performing schools, and the young lives they blight, which leaves his teaching union opponents looking selfish. Other Conservatives should learn from them: mimicking the Left’s language (about “diversity” and so on) is not a game a Tory can ever win. But if you choose the language of the fight yourself, you’re more than half way there.

Now answer the question we opened with. The only acceptable public answer is “Of course I am in favour of human rights”. But honestly? “Usually, I am. Sometimes, I am not. Not when such 'rights’ are used to demand votes for prisoners, or to prevent foreign killers from being expelled from the country. Furthermore, I refuse to accept the Left’s insistence that the laws which govern all of human interaction can be codified into a text which will never contradict itself, and which should be immune to criticism, just because they gave it a nice-sounding name.”

It’s not (only) knowledge that is power, in the old phrase; it’s language, too. There may one day be a government, free of the baleful influence of the Liberal Democrats, which deletes the Human Rights Act from the statute book and reappraises our relationship with bodies such as the Council of Europe. But what if it turns out that the Act was a symptom, and not a cause?

A culture or a party which uses language to end political debate is far more chilling than any single legislative act. Denis MacShane understands this. That’s why he will call you a Nazi if you dare to disagree with him: because he knows that he can.

Comment: The Nazi author fails to explain why human beings, which prisoners are, should be denied their human rights.