Rights do not fall from the sky. People
who are fortunate enough to be a British citizens through birth or choice are
richly endowed with rights thanks to a long historical struggle to establish
legal, then political and finally social rights. These rights are made real by
institutions including parliament, courts, the police and the welfare state over hundreds of years.
Much of today’s human rights rhetoric is
preposterously ahistorical. It also individualises rights, disguising the
degree of interdependence that underpins them.
Rights are connected to
obligations and duties, some
rights, such as the right to equal treatment if you are gay, are just the
enforcement of widely accepted norms. But in many cases the right claimed by
one person, especially rights that require funding such as the right to
education or decent housing, creates a corresponding obligation on another
person to supply the wherewithal to make the right possible.
The rhetoric of rights entitlement is
usually directed at the state but the state, in this case, is just other
citizens. A strong sense of one’s rights as a citizen can empower and protect
but in recent years there has been a ‘rights disconnect’: a declining
willingness of those called upon to fund, through their taxes, the rights of
others. Behind rights often lies redistribution, and that requires the
willingness of the strong and affluent to feel some connection to and sympathy
for the weak and the struggling. And that in turn requires some sense of shared
citizenship and space.
Source
http://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-1/a-postliberal-future/#THE
CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM
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