Yes, Amnesty International is campaigning for the retention of the Human Rights Act

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a poster campaign I noted on London Underground, Act for the Act, a seemingly independent (though not exactly so, as I pointed out) campaign to retain the Human Rights Act. I ended my posting with the words:

My own suspicion that it will not be long before the likes of Amnesty, an NGO as well as a quango, become donors and participants in the campaign. At the very least they will start using it for their own purposes. In fact, their campaign has started already though the Amnesty name is in small letters at the bottom of the page. We must all look for those small letter at the bottom of the page in various supposedly charitable but actually political campaigns whether they are to save the HRA or affirm the UK's membership of the European Union.

I have written about Amnesty International before, pointing out, as have many other people that the organization that was founded for the purpose of helping "prisoners of conscience" long ago lost its way. Calling Guantanamo "the nearest thing we have to a Gulag today" and describing an Iranian film about the stoning of a young woman merely sensational shows that it has become what many of us in the seventies and eighties suspected, a completely left-wing organization. Its campaign against capital punishment, regardless of whether it follows a free and fair trial, is irrelevant to its original purpose and its recent campaign for abortion in Ireland is outrageous, regardless of one's views on abortion (no, I am not going to discuss it so don't bother). It's not as if there was a shortage of prisoners of conscience across the world.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that Amnesty International, a soi-disant charity but, in fact, an NGO, has joined or, to be quite precise, started the fight for the retention of the Human Rights Act because, apparently, without it "universal freedoms turn into privileges for a chosen few". I assume Amnesty International and its "talented" research staff know nothing about the history of this country and have not bothered to read the various carefully argued articles on the subject such as this one by the eminent legal expert, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky. (Here is his own site.) Oh wait, the article was published in Standpoint, a right-wing monthly journal. Can't read that, if you work for Amnesty International.

Inevitably, the NGO in question conducted an opinion poll and found that there was "No appetite for scrapping Human Rights Act". Actually, what they found was that the overwhelming majority of those they asked did not think it should be top priority for the government, which is not quite the same thing. Also, we are not talking about an out-and-out scrapping, which implies an abolition of the fairly old concepts of freedom and human rights but a substitution by a separate Bill of Rights. It might work or it might not and that is something that needs discussing. But I do object to this dishonest political campaign by a taxpayer funded organization.,

On the other hand, I caught sight of a short article on the subject in today's morning freebie, the Metro, which told me that the ubiquitous Charlotte Church and the actress Juliet Stevenson are among celebrities who are opposing the "scrapping" of the HRA. That settles that, then, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky or Charlotte Church on the subject? You decide. Wait a minute. There is a name missing. Where is Benedict Cumberbtach? Don't tell me that he has not made a statement or given an interview yet. Panic over: just found this. Phew! And who better to speak up for the HRA than Vanessa Redgrave, life-long supporter of Trotskyites, left-wing tyrannies and terrorists?

Celebrities talk utter rot - shock

The celebs are on the warpath again and, as ever, have managed to bamboozle a few people. It's as if a stupid idea becomes less stupid if it is articulated by the likes of Dame Judi Dench (a wonderful actress but hardly a thinker) or Sir Ranulph Fiennes (also not a thinker). And, as far as this blog is concerned, anything that the ArchDruid, Dr Rowan Williams supports is ipso facto suspect. (Ha! Didn't expect that, did you?)

The matter in hand is the government's proposal to sell Britain's forests or, to be quite precise, those that belong and are administered by the ineffable quango the Forestry Commission with a bit of interference from other ministries and regulatory bodies, to private individuals, organizations, companies and, if it is right, voluntary bodies. Shock, horror! Anyone would think that the total devastation of ancient hunting forests has been proposed.

As Eamonn Butler says in today's ASI blog:

From the sound of it, you might think that Britain's forests are going to be sold off to keep Rupert Murdoch in paper, or maybe concreted over for car parking. Hardly. State forestry is a mess, and private ownership will revitalize it, and will actually extend the public amenity that our forests afford us. Private owners are actually more likely to encourage public access than the Commission has been – they can see more commercial potential in doing precisely that.

The Forestry Commission already plans to sell small bits of its forest estate, which will earn taxpayers a useful £100m. The question mooted by the government today is whether it should sell the whole lot. That's actually no really big deal. The Commission owns only a fifth of England's forest land. Most of the rest, about 68%, is already in private hands. (Various government departments, like Defence, own other bits too.) Many of the celebs who are saying how much they love forests could well be thinking about ones that are already private.

And private forestry is already heavily regulated in terms of the owners' obligations to the protection of nature, logging schedules, public access, and development. Thos protections would remain, even if the whole estate were sold. And indeed there would be extra protections for ancient woodlands like the Dean, New, and Sherwood forests. As in New Zealand and other countries, there could be a mixture of commercial, non-profit, community and mixed ownership.

In a previous blog Dr Butler referred to the various celebs who had signed a sobbing letter to the Sunday Telegraph as being "thick as two short planks" an obvious but still accurate description. Furthermore, he gives very good reasons why we should not assume that the celebs in question actually know what they are talking about. In this blog's opinion, a period of silence from all of them starting with His Bloviation, Dr Williams, would be very welcome.