Constitution

On the Proposed Replacement of the Human Rights Act 1998 with a Modern Bill of Rights

This open letter to the UK Government was first published on the author's Substack blog in March 2022 and is republished by permission.

 

This is the story of a duel. It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable, and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown private individual. The duel does not take place in what is commonly known as the sphere of politics; the individual is by no means a politician, still less a conspirator or an enemy of the state. Throughout, he finds himself very much on the defensive. He only wishes to preserve what he considers his integrity, his private life, and his personal honor. These are under constant attack by the government of the country he lives in, and by the most brutal, but often also clumsy, means.
—Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler

I am writing to express grave concerns regarding the Human Rights Act Reform: A Modern Bill of Rights — Consultation, which recommends extensive revisions to the Human Rights Act 1998.

I often contemplate how people who consider themselves virtuous can blithely commit acts, make decisions, and enact policies that infringe the rights; curtail the liberties; and inflict anguish and even death on incalculable individuals.

I’m not talking about the tyrants—who are nearly all psychopaths—but about the ordinary colluders, without whose cooperation the tyrants could not execute their tyranny.

Is it bribery? Blackmail? Threats? Hypnosis? Ideological capture? Social and political pressures? Lust for power? Envy? Fear? Pride? Likely miscellaneous mashups of the above depending on the participant—served with a philanthropic side of self-delusion.

Since you’ve made the effort to read this far, I’ll be charitable and assume it’s just self-delusion in your case. You probably believe these policy reforms are for the best. Unless you’re a blackguard, that’s the only way you could cope with the moral ramifications of green-lighting legal transubstantiations that unfurl the crimson carpet for totalitarianism.

So, before you read further, I have a simple request. Try to actively resist the temptation to rationalize, to justify, to abstract away the concrete consequences of your decisions. Resolve to cease lying to yourself, as Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima admonishes:

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
―The Brothers Karamazov

Take a deep, belly-filling breath. Stand up and wiggle your whole body, from your toes to your knees to your elbows to your nose. Feel the physicality of your body and notice your sensations. Don’t be afraid to feel silly. Laugh at yourself. Shake out all the lies. Blow raspberries if you like.

Then let all the truths you’ve been hiding from your conscience rise to your consciousness. At this point, you may need a cathartic cry. That’s okay. It means you’re human and thus better-equipped to make decisions about human rights policies than a sociopathic bureaucrat.

Doesn’t that feel better? Don’t you feel lighter, more open, more welcoming of ideas that stretch your thinking?

With that frame of mind, let’s examine some of those proposed reforms, starting with:

[O]ur system must strike the proper balance of rights and responsibilities, individual liberty and the public interest, rigorous judicial interpretation, and respect for the authority of elected law-makers.

These sound like the gilded words all authoritarian regimes deploy to persuade people to accept degradations of their individual liberties and rights in the name of the notorious “greater good.”

Reading that statement as beneficent requires a cultivated amnesia about the totalitarianism that bloodied the bleakest decades of the last century.

In his May 1983 essay Totalitarianism and the Lie, Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski writes:

In both forms of totalitarian socialism—nationalist and internationalist—social control of production for the common good was stressed as essential.

He continues:

The destructive action of totalitarian machinery is usually supported by a special kind of primitive social philosophy. It proclaims not only that the common good of ‘society’ has priority over the interest of individuals, but that the very existence of individuals, as persons, is reducible to the existence of the social ‘whole’; in other words, personal existence is, in a strange sense, unreal. This is a convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery.

See if you recognize that foundation for the ideology of slavery in these items from the Executive Summary (emphasis mine):

  • [#3] “We will overhaul the Human Rights Act passed by the then Labour government in 1998 and restore common sense to the application of human rights in the UK.… we will reverse the mission creep that has meant human rights law being used for more and more purposes, and often with little regard for the rights of wider society.”

  • [#4] “Our reforms will be a check on the expansion and inflation of rights without democratic oversight and consent, and will provide greater legal certainty.”

  • [#6] “The Bill of Rights will make sure a proper balance is struck between individuals’ rights, personal responsibility, and the wider public interest.”

  • [#9] “provide greater clarity regarding the interpretation of certain rights, such as the right to respect for private and family life, by guiding the UK courts in interpreting the rights and balancing them with the interests of our society as a whole”

  • [#9] “recognise that responsibilities exist alongside rights, and that these should be reflected in the approach to balancing qualified rights and the remedies available for human rights claims”

These statements unapologetically articulate the authors’ intention to roll back individual human rights for the sake of “wider society,” a sentiment repeatedly echoed throughout the document. (Here are examples of similarly disturbing passages from Human Rights Act Reform: A Modern Bill of Rights — Consultation.)

You know who else championed putting “the common good before the individual good”? Hitler. And Stalin. And Mussolini. And Mao. And Ceauşescu. And Castro. And his son Trudeau. And every dictator ever—including present-day masochist-fascist Rodrigo Duterte, who stated:

Love of country, subordination of personal interests to the common good, concern and care for the helpless and the impoverished—these are among the lost and faded values that we seek to recover and revitalize as we commence our journey towards a better Philippines.

Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden dissects the psychology of the aeons-old despotic demand for individuals to sacrifice for the “public good”:

With such [collectivist] systems, the individual has always been a victim, twisted against him-or-her-self and commanded to be ‘unselfish’ in sacrificial service to some allegedly higher value called God or pharaoh or emperor or king or society or the state or the race or the proletariat—or the cosmos [or Covid]. It is a strange paradox of our history that this doctrine—which tells us that we are to regard ourselves, in effect, as sacrificial animals—has been generally accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for humankind. From the first individual … who was sacrificed on an altar for the good of the tribe, to the heretics and dissenters burned at the stake for the good of the populace or the glory of God, to the millions exterminated in … slave-labor camps for the good of the race or of the proletariat, it is this [collectivist] morality that has served as justification for every dictatorship and every atrocity, past or present.
—The Psychology of Romantic Love

Academy of Ideas explains How the “Greater Good” Is Used as a Tool of Social Control:

It appears we have arrived at the “stage of ultimate inversion” predicted by Ayn Rand:

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Whether it comes in the guise of “wider society,” “wider public interest,” “society as a whole,” “the greater good,” or “public health,” “the common good” is always a euphemism for seizing individual rights to enhance tyrannical powers, as Albert Camus so incisively captured in his 1955 speech Homage to an Exile:

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
—Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

Subsuming the individual into the collective is the very definition of totalitarianism:

Every private act—a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician—becomes a public act. Every private right—to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing press—becomes a public right. Every private institution—the hospital, the church, the club—becomes a public institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.

The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought—and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an ‘authoritarian personality.’ A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand—the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens—95 per cent or so of the population—duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.

The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul, consuming its members for its own purposes. For the duration of the emergency the city does not exist for the citizen but the citizen for the city.

—Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

Kołakowski further underscores this equation:

Total power and total ideology embrace each other. The ideology is much more comprehensive (at least in its claims) than any religious faith has ever been. Not only does it have all-embracing pretensions, not only is it supposed to be infallible and obligatory, but its aim (unattainable, fortunately) goes beyond dominating and regulating the personal life of every subject to the point where it actually replaces personal life altogether, making human beings into replicas of ideological slogans. In other words, it annihilates the personal form of life. This is much more than any religion has ever prescribed.

 

From rights to what?

In the proposed Modern Bill of Rights, the Chapter 3 summary contains several alarming examples of what the authors believe is “flawed” about the original Human Rights Act, such as:

  • “the growth of a ‘rights culture’ that has displaced due focus on personal responsibility and the public interest”

  • “public protection put at risk by the exponential expansion of rights”

Anyone alert to the threat of tyranny will read these lines with a cynical eye toward the underlying meaning. With Covid having been used as a pretext for imposing increasingly autocratic restrictions over the past two years, the intention of these statements could not be clearer.

Scare-quoting “rights culture” conveys a sneering condescension toward those “Deplorables” and “Brexiteers” who dared exercise their critical thinking skills to make decisions about their personal health—unlike the Covidians who hypnotically obeyed their designated gods and virtue-signaled their veneration by sacrificing up their faces and arms.

Funny thing is, we Deplorables were right—and the pedestaled “experts” (yes, I’m the one using contemptuous scare quotes this time) were deadly, fatally, lethally wrong.

The cumulative scientific evidence has now irrefutably demonstrated that:

The UK Government is even facing litigation by a group of psychologists for the “grossly unethical” brainwashing tactics it used to whisk the populace into a psychologically traumatizing state of fear (as reported as early as December 2020 by UK Column):

Even the opprobrious SAGE Committee, whose factitious models were wielded to justify two years of Covid absolutism, is collapsing under the weight of its own Goebbelsian lies, as its chair, Professor Graham Medley, admits its “models had been at variance to reality.”

Individuals were coerced—without informed consent regarding the potential adverse effects—into submitting to hazardous experimental injections with a grisly safety profile to keep their jobs, access facilities, and even buy food. Many of those people either suddenly died or were so severely injured by the Covid vaccines that they can no longer work, thus negating their decision to comply with the illegal mandates to maintain their employment. In addition to losing their income, they are now saddled with spiraling medical bills with no legal recourse for compensation from the government-sheltered pharmaceutical corporations.

According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data, the injections not only fail to prevent Covid—they actually have a negative efficacy of up to 226 percent. For example, 40–49-year-olds who were gullible enough to get boosted have more than tripled their chances of contracting Covid, and deaths among the boosted population are nearly six times higher than those among the unvaccinated.

Researchers are discovering “consistent pathophysiological alterations” post-injection, and “lab studies show that mRNA vaccine DOES integrate itself into human cellular DNA.” Who knows what else they’ll find by the time this Mengelesque experiment ends since these drugs are still in clinical trials. Perhaps the subjects will end up like the victim of DNA experimentation depicted in the oracular O Lucky Man!:

Unless governments, corporations, and complicit agencies are intentionally trying to kill off massive swaths of the world population—which, frankly, looks to be the case as no degree of incompetence could account for the failure to alter course after the galactic spike in non-COVID mortality and injuries (especially cardiac ones in young, healthy, athletic individuals) coinciding with the global transfection rollout and the subsequent coordinated coverup of these fatalities—then it’s time to STOP all COVID injections now and hold the perpetrators of this murderous fraud accountable, even as they are attempting to sweep their crimes against humanity under the rug while redirecting attention to the next diversionary crisis.

 

Individual rights a poor second

What does this have to do with the UK’s proposed human rights reforms? Everything. 

Imposed in the name of “public health,” the worldwide Covid strategy emphasized the “wider public interest” and “broader needs of society” over “individual rights.”

Two years into these authoritarian measures, it is no longer possible to ignore the mass casualties and harm they caused. Had the rest of the world possessed the dictatorial and surveillance powers of China so admired by WEF middle-finger puppets like Trudeau—which this Modern Bill of Rights helps legitimize—even more people would have been forcefully experimented upon than already have been.

The point is, policymakers can be “mistaken” (being generous here), and requiring citizens to submit to their lock step edicts can endanger their lives and health. People have the rights to conduct their own research, arrive at their own conclusions, and make decisions about their own bodies, and those rights must be defended at all costs because, as Rod Serling notes, “the State is not God”.

If anything, the protections for individual liberties, rights, bodily autonomy, freedom of expression, and privacy should be increased to defend against the tyrannical and life-threatening encroachment of the State, but the proposed human rights reforms accomplish the reverse:

  • [#282] “The Convention recognises certain rights as ‘qualified’, which means they can be balanced with the rights of others and the needs of society in general. These rights include the right to respect for private and family life (Article 8); freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 9); freedom of expression (Article 10); and freedom of assembly and association (Article 11).”

  • [#290] “There are other rights in the Convention, known as ‘limited’ rights, which can be subject to restrictions, such as the right to liberty and security (Article 5) and the right to a fair trial (Article 6).”

Saying “freedom of thought” should be “qualified” and “balanced with … the needs of society” is literally describing thoughtcrime. If that doesn’t send an electrifying shock down your spine, you’ve probably never read or watched 1984, which is the world such Orwellian alterations will help bring to fruition:

Eroding (“qualifying”) the rights listed in #282 also appears to contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Amnesty International says:

outlines 30 rights and freedoms that belong to all of us and that nobody can take away from us. The rights that were included continue to form the basis for international human rights law.

Article 2 notes:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind.

It looks to me like practically every one of these articles has been violated in the name of Almighty Covid—including Articles 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30.

If you don’t think it was a malefaction against human rights to psychologically terrorize, deprive of employment, and threaten exclusion from society to coerce individuals into ignorantly accepting an untested, never-before-used technology whose long-term consequences are unknown, then it’s time for you to revisit the Nuremberg Code:

[T]he person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

Meredith Miller further explores these transgressions in The Violation of Consent:

  • “To oppose a person’s right to bodily autonomy is an attack on human rights.”

  • “Remember the power of your choice when you hear the social and political pressure (ie: bribing, shaming, blaming and guilt-tripping) to do something to your body that you are not okay with.”

  • “They aim to make you feel that you don’t have the right or the worthiness to make your own choice because your individuality is not valid when it comes to the greater good. You’re expected to sacrifice your own wellbeing for the collective.”

  • “Millions of people in history have been killed as a result of ideologies using the euphemism of the greater good.”

So, unless you want to be culpable for instituting verbiage changes that wind up macerating human rights, you will deep-six the Modern Bill of Rights and stick with the Human Rights Act 1998, International Bill of Human Rights, Nuremberg Code, and Declaration of Helsinki.

I know the tyrannical forces of global agencies, multinational corporations, and string-pulling svengalis are bearing down upon you, fully expecting you to comply with their authoritarian machinations as they’re so accustomed to their marionettes doing.

You will need to reach into the deepest part of your soul and rediscover your inner medieval knight to slay the technocratic dragon endeavoring to reboot the world.

As is posed in O Lucky Man!—a sibylline meditation on human rights in an age controlled by multinational conglomerates in connivance with the military-medical-governmental complex—“It’s a big challenge. You think you’re up to it?”

 

 

 

Article image: Alisdare Hickson | licence CC BY-SA 2.0