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No Rights Without Responsibilities
From: The British Library
| By:
John Fitzpatrick |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 John Fitzpatrick tackles the meaning of one of New Labour's favourite terms, "rights and responsibilities," focusing in particular on the somewhat loaded term "responsibility." Fitzpatrick's basic critique of New Labour is that through offering rights in exchange for responsibilities Labour undermines the respect and autonomy traditionally accorded to the individual. He further suggests that true responsibility cannot be imposed but can only be taken by free individuals. He argues that individuals should maintain a sense of themselves and their potential to realise higher levels of freedom. |
 think at the outset of this debate we should be very wary about the terms themselves, not least because they have been so consistently promoted by this government--"rights and responsibilities" has been their mantra. |
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| Credit to New Labour | |
Our agenda today has been set for us by those who champion the "Third Way," the dream so close to many New Labour politicians. For them the precept "no rights without responsibilities" is almost an article of faith. |
To its credit, New Labour seems to have a better grasp than any of its competitors on the national stage of the utterly changed circumstances in which politics has to operate today, and of the failing purchase of those categories "left" and "right." And to its credit as well, New Labour has taken the weight of the serious underlying problems to which the rights-and-responsibilities debate is addressed. |
There can be no argument about the existence of those problems. There is no argument that there is a society before us in which there is very little consensus and indeed little connection in an increasingly individuated population. There is clearly a deeply felt need for some clarification about how we should live, and an anxiety about what we should expect of ourselves and of each other and of the state as well. I think it is also to the credit of New Labour that it takes seriously the issues of crime and the fear of crime, and also the question of the extent to which welfare provision creates structures of dependency. |
Defining the term "responsibility"
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| Defining the term: responsibility | |
But in fact a discussion about those issues could take many forms. We could today have a discussion called "How Do We Best Promote Trust and Confidence Between People?" We could have a session called "How Can We Best Promote and Develop a Positive Vision for the Future?" But we don't, because, of course, the dominant response to these issues has been to channel them under the rather legalistic rubric of "rights and responsibilities," and the key word here is "responsibilities." |
This debate is not actually, in my view, addressed to the hoary old question "Where should the line be drawn?"--on the one hand, allowing maximum liberty to the individual, and, on the other, protecting the liberties of other individuals in society and the community as a whole. That line has been drawn and redrawn, and discussed and rediscussed, ever since law existed. |
The discussion today is actually directed at promoting a certain sort of responsibility in society. And at one level that is very understandable, and even plausible. In the circumstances I have just described, why would the government not seek to promote a more active, committed, involved, engaged citizenry? Why wouldn't it? The problem is, of course, and it is a central problem here, that the sort of responsibility that they are talking about cannot be imposed, and many of the measures that they undertake are apt to undermine rather than encourage a constructive sense of responsibility in the population at large. |
"No rights without responsibilities"
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| "No rights without responsibilities" | |
The terms in which it is advanced are very instructive. The government talks of a new social contract. And a key term in the new social contract is "no rights without responsibilities." Not "rights and responsibilities," note, but "no rights without responsibilities." Jack Straw, in October '98, in promoting the Human Rights Bill in Parliament, said very explicitly, "There can and should be no rights without responsibilities, and responsibilities should precede our rights." Well, just think about what that means. |
The first thing to say is that it is not a contract at all between free and willing agents. It is a diktat. There is no question of its being negotiated and agreed. And what does it actually mean, "no rights without responsibilities"? Should I tell my clients on Monday, "Well, you've got a right to a fair trial, but it might depend on how responsible you've been"? What shall I say to somebody who's been employed for 20 years and says, "I want to claim unfair dismissal"? Shall I say, "Well, you've got the right to claim unfair dismissal, but were you a responsible employee"? And what about the right to vote? Have you asked yourself whether you exercised that responsibly last time you voted? |
This is not a pedantic point. We sort of know what the government intends us to understand, but what they are actually saying is breathtaking: "You the individual start with nothing. First comes the community. We speak for the community. You behave yourself and we'll give you some rights." And I think it would be difficult to understate what a grave attack that is on the respect and the status that the individual has had in our polity, on the moral autonomy that has been granted to the individual. Far from recognising an active, engaged, committed citizenry, that approach recognises just the passive recipient of rules, and laws, and rights from above. |
Imposing responsibility
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| Imposing responsibility | |
And, of course, from that attitude flows the Crime and Disorder Act, the Immigration and Asylum Act, the attack on juries, the antiterrorism provisions going through Parliament, and the whole lecturing, hectoring, moralising attitude of the government. The bill to regulate e-mails is another prime example. Seeing mistrust and suspicion and fear, the government compounds it. "We don't trust you," they say. And in the process they suggest that the problem actually derives from selfish, antisocial, irresponsible behaviour. And their statist reflex is to seek to control, and to regulate, and to impose responsibility on that. |
Well, responsibility cannot be imposed in any true sense of the word. Responsibility must be assumed. We take responsibility. Obedience can be imposed--on a sullen and recalcitrant and unstable character--but responsibility must be taken by people in circumstances in which they are capable of assuming it. And we might also ask why it is that when the contract is imposed, the first people required to be responsible are the poorest people, those seeking job seekers' allowance. They are the first people to whom the contract is applied, the first people who are required to show this responsibility. |
The concept of freedom
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| The concept of 'Freedom' | |
It seems to me that in this context, for us today, freedom has two important meanings: first, the freedom of the individual to act without unnecessary restraint--our liberties; and second, and I think much more important, freedom as an idea, as an aspiration. The very concept of freedom, the very fact that we have the concept, still implicitly acknowledges that we are in some important senses enslaved--by nature, by necessity and by the limitations and constraints that we put upon ourselves. And it acknowledges the idea as well that we can do so much better. The crucial point here is that the more we lose that idea of freedom--that we can do better, that we are in some senses constrained and enslaved--the less important our individual liberties will become to us, and the more confused we will become about the exercise and operation of those liberties and what the government does about them. |
New Labour
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| New Labour | |
My point is that New Labour does not have that vision. New Labour has no sense of that but has turned "there is no alternative" into a virtue and a philosophy. And therefore, today, it seeks fundamentally to consolidate and maintain the status quo--to manage it, to control it and to regulate it. |
Well, we might not have all the answers about how we resolve all our problems, and how we transcend the limitations that we have. But I think we know that the absolute precondition for progress in that direction is that we defend our room for manoeuvring, our space, our openness, our flexibility, our sense of ourselves and our abilities, and trust in cooperating with other people, in a useful and constructive, rather than a suspicious and fearful, way. That is not a call for anarchy, regardless of frameworks; it is an expression, I think a necessary expression in a discussion of freedom, of faith in other people, and in their ability to address and to resolve the problems that confront them. And it is a call to New Labour to stop talking about rights and responsibilities, and to show us some respect. |
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