Rights – a movable feast (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, recently announced that her Party will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights if they win the next election. A big ‘if’ obviously, but, in stating at the same time that such a move was ‘necessary to protect our borders, our veterans, and our citizens’, it’s clear that what she was trying to do was to steal the clothes of her dangerous competitor on the right wing of British capitalist politics, Reform UK. She was giving a nod towards the extreme nationalism that currently seems rampant and gets expressed most virulently in the call to ‘stop the boats’.

Whether any such move would actually curb immigration is of course open to question, but, if what would seem to be the most overarching of rights – human rights – can be removed at a stroke by a government with a parliamentary majority, is there anything permanent or consistent in the notion of rights at all?

How many rights?

We certainly hear much noise about rights, both from those who want to do away with or weaken them and from others who oppose their removal or weakening. What kind of rights are we talking about? Well, to give a few examples, there are workers’ rights, pension rights, women’s rights, property rights, gay rights, the right to free speech, the right to family life, the right to privacy, the right to strike, the right to peaceful protest, the right to education, the right to a fair trial, and so on. A short time ago I found myself attending a lecture given by the Older Persons’ Commissioner for Wales on the subject of ‘How we move from principles to practice to make rights real for older people’. There are also some ‘rights’ which, while often talked about in the past, little is heard of these days – for instance, ‘the right to work’ or ‘ the right to rest and holiday’. There are also some bizarre ‘twists’ on the rights agenda, such as ‘the right to bear arms’ (usually with reference to the US), and ‘the rights of the unborn child’ (insisted on by opponents of abortion).

Looking at the broad historical context, rights are a feature of the fact that the system we live under has found ways of becoming more benign and less repressive. The overriding reason for this has been the perception by governments and wealth owners that those in society who have to work for a wage or salary to survive are more likely to do that readily and acceptingly and at the same time be more productive and efficient in their work if their lives are made not altogether uncomfortable. And indeed one of the effects of having the various ‘rights’ conferred has been to make us feel more comfortable in our position as wage slaves. But it took a long time. Most of today’s ‘rights’ would have been considered unthinkable not just in pre-modern times, where the ‘divine right of kings’ prevailed, but even in the early years of industrialisation and capitalist development. In the nineteenth century, for example, talk of, say, ‘women’s rights’ or the ‘right to education’ or ‘pension rights’ would have been unlikely to say the least. And, until well into the 20th century, even the notion of ‘workers’ rights’ was much contested, and only in recent times has ‘gay rights’ become part of the vocabulary of English. This kind of thing is of course still very much the case in many ‘less developed’ parts of the world where dictatorial or repressive regimes hold sway. Examples such as North Korea, Myanmar, China, Belarus and some countries in Africa and the Middle East come to mind.

Different ‘rights’ in different places

But, despite the existence of many kinds of ‘rights’ in most of Europe and North America, it would be mistaken to regard these as necessarily permanent or consistent features. They can easily be watered down or removed by the governments that oversee the system of production for profit and buying and selling that we live in (ie, capitalism), if it seems to them to be in the interest of the continued smooth running of that system to do that. A British government deciding to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, as the Tory leader has promised to do if her Party comes to power, would be an example of that. A recent example of this actually happening has been the watering down of the right to peaceful protest by the ban on demonstrations by supporters of the Palestine Action group. As for ‘the right to strike’, it still exists of course, but it has been chipped away at by various different governments, with the overall effect of making striking today markedly more difficult for workers than at times in the past. I have testified to another instance of the watering down of ‘rights’ in my own place of work, where the contracts signed by employees have moved from specifying a ‘maximum’ of 35 hours as the standard working week in recognition of ‘The European Working Time Directive’, to now specifying a working week of ‘at least’ 35 hours.

And there can also be striking differences between the most economically advanced countries in the rights they accord. The most ‘generous’ in this domain tend to be the Scandinavian countries, while in the United States, despite its being the hub of world capitalism, ‘workers’ rights’, for instance, are all but non-existent. To give an example, in Sweden parents are eligible for up to 480 days of paid parental leave from their employment, a policy driven by the idea that children well looked after by their parents are likely to be more productive and better socially integrated later in life when they enter ‘the world of work’. In the US, where a different ethic (more of a dog-eat-dog one) prevails, there is no statutory ‘right’ to paid leave, such being entirely at the employer’s discretion. This can create situations, as one commentator has put it, where ‘American parents scramble back to work days after giving birth’. To add to this, employment practice in the US regards work as a voluntary contract which can be dissolved at any time by either party without the mandatory right to redundancy pay for the employee.

A slippery concept

The reality is that ‘rights’ (like reforms) are very much a movable feast easily or not so easily granted but then rowed back on as convenient and also sometimes differing drastically even from one economically advanced country to another. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted everyone’s right to an adequate standard of living, including the right to food, public services and social security. But everyone knows that, in a world where people may be poorly paid, unemployed or homeless, this is no more than an unattainable wish list. What price such people’s right to an ‘adequate standard of living’ or their ‘property rights’? Again, while very few would disagree that people should have the right to free speech and the right to be free from arbitrary arrest or imprisonment, how does that square with the reality of a system where the accumulation of wealth for the already wealthy few dominates and allows authoritarian regimes (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, etc) to fly in the face of that?

In the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – marketless, moneyless, wageless, leaderless, and based on voluntary work, democratic organisation and free access to all goods and services – the slippery concept that is ‘rights’ will not enter into the equation. Instead, in a classless society of human freedom, needs, both practical and social, will be satisfied as a matter of course. Above all, the productive machinery of society and the goods and services it produces will belong not to one class, but to everyone as an automatic and inalienable ‘right’.

Howard Moss

Human Rights (1968)

From the August 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

A couple of months ago, twenty-four prisoners in the maximum security wing at Durham Prison barricaded themselves in their cells in protest against a new work system. They were, they said, only sticking up for their rights. On March 5 last, forty-one young soldiers protested against Army bull and red tape by marching in good order out of barracks — and back in again later. Sticking up, again, for their rights.

The same week, Emil Savundra and Peter de Quincy Walker appealed against the heavy sentences imposed on them after the collapse of Fire, Auto and Marine. They were only demanding their rights. The February issue of The Seaman, journal of the National Union of Seamen, invites all NUS members to exercise their right to apply for a place in the union’s national one-week educational course.

Get the point? The word "rights” means almost anything that anyone wants it to mean.

Governments talk about "rights”. The French constitution of 1946 proclaims that all men have the right to work, to strike, to take leisure, to enjoy culture, to take part in joint management and to have society’s help when they are unfit to work. These "rights” sound desirable enough— but dig a little deeper, and ask in whose interests some of them are proclaimed.

Nineteen sixty eight, for anyone who has been too busy campaigning against political prisoners, racial persecution and dictatorship, is Human Rights Year. This is a United Nations idea; it goes back to May 1946, when the first meeting took place of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the late President of the United States, was in the chair.

The Commission was expected to draw up two documents: a Declaration of Human Rights and an International Covenant (how these words roll off the tongue!) defining the principles of human rights and making them legally binding on all signatories. At the second session, at Geneva in November 1947, the Commission decided that three stages would be necessary — Declaration, Covenant, Implementation. The third session added a Preamble and eventually, in December 1948 in Paris the Declaration, and only the Declaration was accepted. The Covenant had to wait until 1966 for its adoption. And the Implementation?

Before anything can happen on that there must be some thirty-five ratifications and the UN admits there is little chance of that even though, it says, the Declaration embraces all the rights and freedoms essential for the dignity and development of the human personality. 

These are some of the rights covered by the Declaration: freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention or exile; the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of peaceful association, opinion and information; freedom to leave or enter a country.

Now any well-intentioned humanitarian like, say, the Duke of Edinburgh—who is a patron of the U.K. Committee for Human Rights—would readily pay lip service to these rights for the working class. So would a lot of Labour lefties, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Soper and the Communist Party, who are all in it as well.

The U.K. Committee, supported by 140 organisations, will be campaigning all this year and a very impressive programme they have. One of the high spots is the International Seminar on Freedom of Association, in London this month. The campaign has four main objectives: to publicise the Declaration; to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination; to end all discrimination against women; to help the peoples of Britain’s dependent territories to realise their human rights. Not bad. It’s only taken them twenty years to think up four objectives. And what chance have they of being achieved?

Lena Jeger, Labour M.P. for Holborn and St. Pancras, in the New Statesman (31/12/67) gave a run down on some of the fine-sounding articles, for example: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. The right to leave and return to any country.” And what did the Labour government do, a couple of months after she wrote that article, to the Kenyan Asians’ right to leave and enter any country?

The world situation was summarised in the UNESCO journal Courier of January 1968, in an article by Rene Cassin, former president of the UN Commission on Human Rights:

   Repeated violations of the rights to life, killings and massacres left unpunished, the exploitation of woman, mass hunger and starvation, the perpetuation of slavery, lack of proper education, disregard for freedom of conscience, opinion and expression, widespread racial discrimination and segregation, arbitrary government—all these and many other abuses are far too frequent to be denied.

In this sorry situation it would be better if the UN, instead of bewailing the fate of human rights, were to ask why they are so often violated. Sometimes it is simply a case of capitalism being unable to satisfy those rights. Thus although Article 25 of the Declaration states that everyone has the right “. .. . to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family including food, clothing and housing”, the November 1965 White Paper on housing stated that in Britain some three million families still live in slums, near slums or in grossly overcrowded conditions and the 1966 Annual Report of the Ministry of Health told us that "Of the 12,411 people in hostels for the homeless on one night last year 8,160—just under two thirds — were children.”

But what about the other violations of human nights—of human liberty? The plain fact here is that a ruling class which suppresses opposition does so because it sees that opposition as a threat to its own position. In Russia, for example, the state imprisoned the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky because it is afraid to allow too free a criticism of Russian state capitalism. This sort of event is not unknown in the so-called democracies of the western world. In wartime, for example, the British government assumes all sorts of dictatorial powers—and so it does in peacetime, when it considers the stability of British capitalism to be seriously threatened by, say, a strike.

If the history of Human Rights proves anything, it is that they cannot be achieved within a property society. The private property system is itself a matter of privilege and therefore a denial of the right of equal standing to the vast majority of the world’s people. Even more, a privileged class will always struggle to keep its privileges—often by force and suppression.

We have had World Refugee Year, which ended up with more refugees than it started with. We have had World Hunger Year — and we still have devastating famines. If Human Rights Year does as much for us. there will be a lot less freedom at the end of 1968 than there was at the beginning.

Joe McGuinness