No Right

As a former critic of the European Court of Human Rights, I have to say I am impressed by the recent expansion of their remit. In granting themselves godlike powers to overrule national sovereignty they have opened up shop as the go-to destination for travellers on the grievance highway. No slight, no inconvenience, however trivial must in future be endured because they are there to fight your cause and bring much wonga raining down on your violated person.

I’d like to be taller, so I reckon the ECHR should sue my long-dead grandparents for not providing me with taller parents and the means to feed me a protein-rich diet in my developing years. Also, as it has rained almost every day since September (in my memory) my enjoyment of the golf course has been interrupted. This is climate change at its most extreme and I must be compensated for the poverty of my existence.

After all, if it is good for the elderly Swiss ladies who have just given the impetus to the ECHR’s overruling of the democratic principle, it’s good enough for me. Concerned that hotter summers meant a challenge to their lifestyle in wealthy, orderly, tidy, safe Switzerland, these ladies successfully elicited a judgement from the kangaroo court of clowns, that this was an infringement of their right to private and family life.

That’s right, the very same carriage of the ever-expanding human rights gravy train has been applied to climate change in the same way as having a pet cat allows them to block the deportation of violent sexual criminals. Only last week the deportation of a convicted Afghan flasher in London, a repeat offender, was blocked because such a crime would bring greater punishment in Afghanistan. Really? I would have thought that a regular tormentor of women would be right at home in a shithole that weaves wife-abuse into the very fabric of its meagre culture.

The court has decreed that governments have a legal duty, enshrined in international law, to not only protect their citizens from the effects of climate change, but to halt that same global phenomenon. Switzerland, they decided, had not done enough to reduce carbon emissions. Switzerland, that industrial titan of several billion inhabitants, all spewing toxic filth into the air day and night… the filthy, dirty bastards!

Over here in the UK a Brit is now in on the act and suing the Government for breaching his human rights because coastal erosion claimed his home. Kevin Jordan has been quoted as saying, “I am now what you call a climate refugee. I lost my home with no compensation. I am now in local authority accommodation. My lovely sea views are reduced to a ground floor flat looking at cars going past.” Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Have you ever heard of insurance, Kevin?

But in any case, so bloody what? Can we now sue the British government because climate change is causing millions of economically unviable, potentially dangerous sub-Saharan Africans to invade our shores? The ECHR has become an expensive joke, propped up by the abject fear of governments to challenge its rulings. The duty of lawyers is to apply the law, not to modify it, pervert it and use it in any way they see fit. Does the electorate have a human right to sue itself if it brings in a useless Labour government later this year? Not enough parking near the doors at Tesco? Surely, I have a human right to park as close to the store as I desire?

Leaving the suffocating embrace of the ECHR, and the clutches of all such over-arching international human rights legislature should be an absolute priority for any sovereign nation. It is yet another post-Brexit failure of our government to use our departure from the autocracy of the EU as a spur to develop genuine independence. Citizens of sense should be rising up against the asininity of the law and saying, proud and loud: “You have no right!”

Setting you free

I feel ashamed. Yesterday I mocked a young person’s dream when I quote-tweeted his offering that in the future, the robots will do the work while everybody gets to live a life of leisure. His was in response to a declamation by a trans comedian that work was not a moral duty, but that everybody deserved “basic human rights to food, water, shelter, and health care (among other things) whether or not you work.” One wise response came from a healthcare worker explaining that in order for ‘her’ to enjoy those human rights others would indeed have a moral duty to work. Touché.

Where do these people come from? Sure, there are artists and performers and great thinkers without whom our lives may be less rich and therefore deserve, perhaps, an indulgence to free them from the bounds of common toil. But then again, there have been many examples of cultural greatness who have sprung from the working masses and plenty of high profile artists and writers earn a handsome living from the commercialisation of their talents.

No, on balance I think it’s fine as it is. If you didn’t work, what would you do? Most people haven’t the imagination or the ability to apply themselves to acquire new skills at a level which is its own reward. Those who do so despite their other life commitments, of which work is generally the most important, are to be admired. Imagine though, if the field were flooded with people desperate to find validation for their existence. A world of no-work would be like ‘reality’ television in real life. The horror.

The devil, they say, finds work for idle hands to do. If you want a concrete example of that just look at politics; an artificial Westworld where nothing is necessarily real and people play out scripted lives over and over again, presumably in the hope that this time it will work out better. Can you imagine if many more people were persuaded that politics was a worthwhile way of spending your days?

But what about the robots? Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was released in 1927 and we still don’t have that return to serfdom, so beloved of the left’s ideologues; the supposed enslavement of the masses to the whim of the cruel and wealthy elites. Seriously, look around you. You have the best living standards, the greatest freedoms and the biggest opportunities of any population that has ever lived on this island. It is precisely because of those freedoms that you have the ability to complain about it all the time.

With few exceptions, those who make the most of the opportunities will be those who do so through work. Don’t look for reasons not to graft; graft harder. Don’t bleat on about human rights and how – somehow – others must procure them for you; grab them for yourself. Be better, work harder, get good. Keep learning, keep improving and then employ those same efforts in your non-working lives. You want the freedom to do as you wish? You gotta work, bitch.

Cage aux Fury

So, Call me Dave is talking tough on terrorist suspects', deportation and appeal. "Deport first, ask questions later" screams this Daily Mail headline. Obviously he has no chance but he's trying to make some electoral inroads to back up previous out-of-office claims that he was going to sort out this sort of nonsense.

Nonsense? Of course, with Abu Qatada's safety costing us a £3billion per minute and literally tens of millions [estimated figures] of foreign criminals roaming the streets in slavering, rabid, skull-crushing, granny eating mobs of personified hatred, it is an utter nonsense that we can't drive this garbage from our shores. The problem, according to the article is that "Strasbourg has taken a hard-line on removing anybody to a country where torture or ill-treatment takes place."

Well then, the solution is in our own hands. We're too bloody soft. And of course - you know me so well - I have a neat and obvious and cost-effective solution. Let's round up the fuckers and house them all in one big cage - plenty of room in the middle of Hyde Park - open to the weather and open, also, to spectators. Then we'll have the satisfaction of not only knowing where they all are, we'll be able to see justice in action.

Even better, it will become a tourist attraction and provide small-scale employment opportunities for vendors selling sticks and stones and pork scratchings to chuck at them at feeding time. It will be horrible in there! It will be inhuman. And it will be exactly what they deserve.

Go on, son, lob a scratching at 'im. They love it!

And don't you worry about the plight of all those poor human rights lawyers currently fighting for the right of these undesirables to remain in the United Kingdom. Get this right and they'll all decamp to Strasbourg and Jordan and Saudi Arabia where they will tirelessly line their pockets fighting for their deportation.

No need to thank me. 

Bang to rights

Tired of becoming the world's gaolers it seems we may have stumbled upon an ages-old solution to our overcrowded prisons. Import crime, export punishment. But, sod the human rights mountebankery, if we're going to make a real difference we should do this right. For a fraction of the £400million-plus it supposedly costs to keep them here and rather than simply giving the money away to 'foreign' we could do so much better.

There are thousands of uninhabited islands which would be suitable and island prisons have a long and illustrious history: Devil's Island, Alcatraz... Australia... so, why not?

Now I'm not suggesting that the league table there doesn't include some quality, modern-day Lex Luther style criminal masterminds, but I'm guessing the majority are simple thugs that the world would be better off for not having to feed. I'm also pretty certain that regardless of how much money our deluded masters throw at them, their home countries just don't want them back.

So, my solution is neat, tidy, satisfying and final. Buy an island, build a fence round it, dump the scum on it... then bomb the fuck out of it. Don't tell me that doesn't make you smile... just a bit?

Mental

Grist to my mill to see this Daily Mail article which considers a supposed human right to claim benefits and lead a comfortable standard of living. Yet this isn't a comedy sketch and nobody is laughing. (In fact, the removal of the sense of humour from the national psyche seems to be yet another part of the Socialist project to destroy all that was once good about the British - will the last comedian standing please turn off the lights?)

We live in a world where, it seems, individual rights take precedent over the rights of the majority; over the national good. From a once-upon-a-time where children were to be seen but not heard, today the mewling infant is given immediate succour and an example is set for the rest of its life. Scream and ye shall gain.

From the shrieking demands of various left-wing special interests, we end up with the ridiculous notion of equality AND diversity being conjoined in a single oxymoronic phrase. All must have prizes, all must be happy and if governments have to pay people not to riot, which is what we're really talking about here, so be it. Anything rather than face reality.

And the reality is that equality is a delusion that could only be swallowed whole and supported by the mentally ill.

It used to be a joke when, in the nineteen seventies, the criminals' arrest mantra "I know my rights" began to be taken up by one and all in a disturbing swell of individual entitlement. Now, everybody knows that the rights of the criminal far exceed the apparent rights of their victims. Habitual offenders hypocritically demand personal rights to trespass even as they deny those rights to those they trespass against.

Where is the right not to be burgled, the right not to feel a minority in the country of your ancestors, the right not to have to hand over every penny of your life's earnings to get what others - the idle - get for free? If you have the right to choose indolence, surely I have the right NOT to pay for your choice?

The only winners here are natural criminals. By natural criminals I mean those who want what I've got without having to work for it - a dole-monkey is no different from a burglar. Or a criminal defence lawyer, for that matter. Because those who aid and abet crime are themselves part of the crime.

Once upon a time two things would have been certain in the case of Hannah Bonser, the cold-blooded murderess jailed for killing a teenager for no reason whatsoever. The first is that it would probably have never happened. The second is that she would have been swiftly tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. But, her human right to deliberately interfere with her mental balance, coupled with her human right to therefore do what the fuck she wants, has led to a defence (thankfully failed, yet paid for by us – we’re all still victims here) that she was not accountable for her actions. 

You’d have to be mental to believe that this system of abused human rights legislation ought to be extended still further; even thinking about it is enough to drive you round the bend. When will we say enough is enough? Last year's rioters were criminals or the criminally stupid. Maybe the next crop will be judged merely criminally insane and thus not responsible for their deeds. 

Shoot me now.