I'm beginning to wonder whether "rights" are a dead-end street and what we should talk about is liberties. In UK custom, or at least aspiration, my liberties let me do anything I bloody well choose, save for a few things forbidden by law. It's quite important that the forbidden things be few, whatever exactly that means, so that a citizen has some chance of knowing what they are or of easily finding out. For the same reason, they should not be changed often. The source of these liberties is clear: they emerge from our history. We needn't assume that they are universal, god-granted, fit for foreigners or the like. They are ours. The Americans' are theirs. Etc.

Ah, now to get nearer the point: a Constitution would have the purpose of restricting what a government may forbid. The problem then is how to (1) keep the constitutional court honest (unlike SCOTUS, which is drifting in the direction of simply enforcing the whims of the Justices) and (2) how to make it effective (what is to be done when a government simply ignores its judgements?). Easy-peasy, then.

I'm with you on the one right thing, and I think your formulation of a corresponding responsibility is a good one. I suppose that what I dislike about "human rights" is when they go off to loony things like the right to a job and the right to clean water. But as long as we keep it to the right to do as you like, balanced with the responsibility for those actions, that makes sense.

I also like the American conception of the citizen as opposed to the subject. I think this is where the UK suffers from its history. Because a subject must be subject to someone (previously the monarch, now in practice the Government), you have an inbuilt inequality, even dependency (a dependency mindset which plays into the hands of socialists). On the other hand, a citizen is someone without a builtin dependency or inferiority to anyone; the government governs with the consent of the governed. This was the great breakthrough of the Americans.

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

I don't so much object to P. J. O'Rourke's famous line, as find it completely vacuous. If the concept of "right" covers absolutely everything, then we may as well delete it from our vocabularies.

In the UK, we don't have the right to do anything except what the law says we can do.

I'd turn it round: in the UK we have the right to do anything except what the law says we can't do. You find that "appalling" - I just find it tautologous. The alternative is that we have the "right" to break the law, which I find a bizarre and contradictory notion.

Actually I think on the substantial issues here I agree with you: I'd also like to see a written constitution which would ensure that the law doesn't prevent us from doing things that I feel strongly we should be allowed to do (e.g free speech, etc). The rest, I guess, is just semantics.

> The alternative is that we have the "right" to break the law, which I find a bizarre and contradictory notion.

So you don't believe you have a right to criticise religions?

Interestingly, George Galloway also believes that sovereignty lies with the people

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/ ...0001BCE0403.htm (about one third of the way down the page)

"I suppose that what I dislike about "human rights" is when they go off to loony things like the right to a job and the right to clean water"

Are you being sarcastic? Surely people deserve both of those things. I don't imagine you'd enjoy it if you didn't have one or other of them.

There's a difference between a right and something you deserve or wouldn't enjoy not having. A right is something you can do, not something you can have.


> George Galloway also believes that sovereignty lies with the people

No he doesn't. He believes that power should lie with the Far Left and the USA should be opposed no matter what, and attaches himself to whatever wagon he thinks will best advance those causes at the time. He opposed Saddam when he was supported by the US, and supported Saddam when he became an enemy of the US.

He said that the fall of Soviet Communism was the saddest event of his life. One of the all-time great examples of the people taking sovereignty away from the state for themselves -- the fall of the Berlin Wall -- he thought was a Bad Thing. Ditto the freedom of everyone else in Eastern Europe.

So you don't believe you have a right to criticise religions?

I believe I *should* have the right to critices religions, and I'd welcome a constitution which guaranteed me that right. But if criticising religions was made illegal (and that law was actually actually enforced), then I wouldn't have that right. Which would suck.

I think we can agree that we see rights differently. I also think that both our views are reflected in the way the word's usually used. It's a hazy concept.

I will say, though, that your point that the word loses all useful meaning if it includes everything also applies to your definition: if it simply means "whatever's legal", then there's no point discussing rights; you may as well just discuss law.

Agreed: although rights can be embodied or enabled by some kind of constitutional law, they only become a useful concept if they are seen as more fundamental than ordinary laws in some way. And they don't have to be in a Bill of Rights or other constitutional document.