Inhuman rights

Long before Jack Straw did us all a massive disservice by enshrining the European Charter of Fundamental Rights into our Law, the average person had a fairly clear idea of what did or did not constitute right and wrong.
For instance, under English Common Law the idea that crime begat punishment went unchallenged for a thousand years.
Behaviour towards others was, for the most part, covered by the ten basic laws that Moses handed down to the children of Israel. If one wanted a settled, orderly society it made pretty good sense not to steal, or covert your neighbour's ox or his wife. Stealing, likewise, was proscribed for the very good reason that it tended to upset the victim. Of course, the first four Commandments are not particularly relevant in our increasingly secular society. But, the other six provide a fairly straightforward framework for civilised behaviour.
So, we ticked along for a milennium and built a pretty reasonable legal system around these relatively few basic ideas. Because the rules were so few and easy to grasp, there was never any real doubt when lines were being crossed. If you stole, killed, lied about your neighbour or coveted his goods and chattels you were going to be held to account. It was easy to distinguish between the victimiser and the victim in the majority of cases.

That is no longer the case. Jack and his lawyer chums have altered the basic rules with the introduction of their human rights legislation.Six simple commandments have been replaced by 54 Articles, creating a whole new stratum of legal argument. This may be great for the lawyers, but it takes the legal process several steps further away from most people's instinctive sense of what constitutes right and wrong.

In this new Human Rights wonderland, for instance, judges see nothing odd or insensitive in refusing to deport a convicted terrorist back to Iran because the possible threat of torture would breach his Human Rights. As he can't be deported, he has to remain in this country. He has no job and, having spent the last 28 years incarcerated in a British gaol, he's unlikely to have had much opportunity to play the stock markets or build a buy-to-rent empire.
So, the only way he can remain in one of the world's most expensive cities is at the taxpayers' expense.

The judges who reached this great decision would probably tell you that they have to consider the Law as it exists, not the consequences of its implementation. Which is why I hate the Human Rights culture we have fostered. Because, while our ex-terrorist gets to visit the gym, the library, meet his mates and generally lollygag around our capital city, there are old people all over Great Britain who might have to choose this winter between heating their home or eating. Some of them, undoubtedly, will be in their parlous position because they failed to salt something away for their old age. A fair few might have gone through their whole lives scrounging off the state. But the majority will be people who have worked all of their adult lives and, in many cases, through their teenage years as well. They will have paid taxes for forty or possibly fifty years and made National Insurance contributions for a similar length of time. Many would have spent time in the Services.

Now, in their dotage, they have to scrape by on £40 to £100 per week. Of course, these pensioners can always apply for additional benefits but, unlike our Iranian friend, whose every need will be met by solicitous officials keen to ensure that his Human Rights are left unsullied, they will have to fill in copious forms, take various means tests and have their lives generally poked and prodded by nosey officals to qualify for them. This is what happens when you allow the law to become an abstract thing. It might be an amusement to those of a legal bent to debate the nuances of a particular point of Law. But it has as much relevance to Natural Justice as the old religious debate concerning the number of angels that could dance on a head of a pin. It constantly throws up anomalies like our Irtanian terrorist friend and countless others who end up sucking the life out of our benefits system while native British pensioners are left to flounder on the fringes of the system with insufficient money to feed or keep themselves warm.
For them, the only Human Right, apparently, is to live an impoverished but dignified old age until such time as they give up the ghost and quietly fade away.