Prompted by the economic crisis and the sixtieth anniversary of the UN declaration, human rights have been the subject of several pieces arguing that states should have a stronger role to ensure that people’s rights are protected. But human rights are not guaranteed by defining them as such, rather they arise by defining the corresponding duties which confer those rights. Once the duties of...

Advocates of our policy often find themselves in conflict with both “left” and “right”. The discussion below, which arose out of an article on Libertarianism, is an example of the latter. I wrote… There is just one flaw in the libertarian argument but it is fatal. It fails on the question of land rights. Nozick, one of the prophets of modern libertarianism, skirts over...

I came across this in a Guardian discussion group just now, written by someone with the pseudonym MrDismal. Apart from the slight inaccuracy in the first sentence, it puts the issue beautifully, taking a bigger view…

The news gets stranger. The UK pound continues to drop, now on the news that the government will breach its self-imposed borrowing limits, which have proved to be worthless when they might have been most needed. Clearly, Gordon Brown’s economic policies were not designed to withstand stormy conditions. An expected shortage of tax revenues, combined with a growing bill for unemployment benefit,...