Civil Liberties and Bill of Rights

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 9:35 pm on 19 June 1989.

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Photo of Mr Michael Stern Mr Michael Stern , Bristol North West 9:35, 19 June 1989

I entirely agree with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr Lawrence) about the extent to which a lack of definition of liberty has informed the debate. That is, perhaps, not surprising, when the director of one of our supposedly foremost educational institutions—the polytechnic of north London—believes that he is supporting liberty and freedom of speech, when he disapproves of a speaker at that institution to such an extent that he throws the whole weight of the administration of that polytechnic behind organising a rival meeting so that people are not encouraged to hear that of which the director disapproves.

The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan), who introduced the debate, listed a number of part-imaginary and part-real areas in which he believed that human rights has suffered in the past 10 years. I should like to put the other side of the case, which has not been entirely explored in the debate so far—the extent to which the Government in the past 10 years have buttressed and extended human rights by their realisation that there can be no liberty and no enforcement of rights without, at the same time, protecting those rights by ownership of property, and by relating the availability of liberty to that of the right to own and the right to choose.

I cite just a few examples. I am sure that, like me, the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland represents a constituency which consists in part of council housing. I am sure that like me, he has discovered over the years that the one area that dominates his constituency surgeries, and which, above all others, creates unhappiness and a feeling that rights have not been given or have been taken away, is that of monopoly municipal housing. That is not surprising. If we consider housing in terms of human rights, the right of the council tenant is the right to take what he or she is given or nothing, whereas the right of the home owner, or of the tenant is a sector where there is nore than one landlord, is the right to choose the type and location of housing appropriate to the individual. That is the fundamental truth. It is this Government who have so extended that right of home ownership and are now in the process of extending the right to choose between landlords. Those are rights which were almost completely forgotten by previous Governments and certainly rights to which Opposition Members are very late converts.

Another example is that until the Government came to power, a person in employment was frequently offered the right to join a pension scheme but that right was not a right —it was a legal obligation. If the person did not want to join the pension scheme because it was wholly inappropriate to his circumstances, under every previous Government the only remedy was to leave the job. The present Government have created the right to say no—the right not to join a wholly inappropriate scheme.

There is another matter that has not been mentioned. I defer to no Opposition Member in looking to the roots of trade unionism and the extent to which in their early days trade unions represented an extension of human rights to the individual, but I hope that the Opposition join me in accepting, at least in part, that in the 1960s and 1970s that form of trade unionism had been subsumed in a trade unionism that was an instrument of repression which took rights from people rather than adding to them.

I have referred to respects in which the Government have extended liberties, but I should like to refer also to aspects where they have reduced the power of the state, thereby extending liberties. One of the Government's first actions was to abolish exchange controls. In so doing, they showed that they had the self-confidence to say to ordinary people, "You have a freedom that was not previously given, at least since the war—if you do not like this country, you have the freedom to go elsewhere and take your property with you." No previous Government had ever dreamed of giving such a freedom because no previous Government had had the self-confidence to know that most people would not want to take it once it was open to them.

It is easy to pick isolated matters on which those who wish to attack our society have, in recent years, lost part of the right to attack it, but under the Government there has been a great extension of freedom for ordinary people.