I don’t think I have read a more depressing article in recent months than one which consisted of extracts from the diary of a classroom teacher in a comprehensive school.  Two things, in particular, struck me, as a former schoolmaster: the resignation of any ability to exercise proper discipline by the writer and (partly the cause and partly the consequence of this) the assertion by 14, 15 and 16 year olds of their “rights”.  Goodness knows how even more impossible the job would become if we gave 16 year-olds the vote!  But I will not pursue that one for the moment – save to say it is one of the most absurd propositions put forward by serious people in my thirty-four years in the House.

When I was a schoolmaster, and for many years afterwards, no one seriously questioned the right of the teacher to impose discipline.  We had a range of sanctions to draw upon – detention without consultation, extra work that had to be done and, if all else failed, mild – and it was mild – corporal punishment.  The only right that responsible parents and children keen to learn were bothered about was the right to be properly taught. 

When I entered the House I was passionate about human rights.  I still am, about the essential human rights to which everyone is entitled in a civilised country: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly and freedom to vote.  The first parliamentary task I took on was the chairmanship of the newly formed Campaign for the Release of Soviet Jewry.  When I did no one could have predicted that within my parliamentary lifetime those essential freedoms would have been obtained by the Jews of the Soviet Union.  And I little thought that the Soviet Union would be no more or that the Iron Curtain and its most tangible manifestation, the Berlin Wall, (which I visited as a young Member of Parliament in the autumn of 1970) would have been consigned to the history books by the turn of the century.  But, side by side with those happy changes has been the inexorable rise of political correctness and the demeaning of the term human rights so that it has become a weapon to be brandished by the litigious.  The prospect of customers suing coffee shops because they had scalded themselves with hot coffee (on the basis that they had not been told that it was hot) and of children lodging formal complaints when they have been kept in school for more than fifteen minutes would have seemed as unrealistic as the pulling down of the wall in 1970.

In a sense it is all the fault of we legislators.  When a dog has bitten a child, or an old age pensioner has died after eating paté, or someone has sustained a nasty fall in the work place, the clamour that “something should be done” has often led to ill thought out and draconian legislation, imposing more and more conditions and, in the process, establishing more and more rights.  We have reached the stage where food standards and health and safety have restricted the activities of rural jam makers and youth leaders anxious to give healthy young people an experience of outdoor pursuits. 

And, in the desire to be fair to everyone, and in the name of some spurious concept of equality, Parliament has piled absurdity upon absurdity until we have now reached the stage where we are in the process of passing a law which says, in effect, that a man who has dressed in women’s clothing for a couple of years and likes to call himself female can, without any genital abnormality or operation, be issued with a second birth certificate, asserting that he was born a woman.  As a result of the attempt to translate into legislation so many of the often contradictory good intentions of those who quite genuinely want to be good neighbours (and are afraid to stand up for anything for fear of offending somebody) we have created a society where there are no commonly accepted standards of what is right or wrong, decent or indecent, and where each person’s rights are someone else’s responsibility.  No wonder anarchy reigns in so many classrooms. 

Aside from all of this, two things seem set to dominate the parliamentary agenda over the coming months – the continuing aftermath of the war in Iraq and the continuing arguments over our own constitution, and the European one.  As far as Iraq is concerned, I still believe that the Prime Minister led his government in the right direction and the Official Opposition was right to give support.  A series of dreadful incidents in Baghdad and elsewhere should not shake our resolve.  No sensible person, after all, could seriously have expected repression and tyranny to be replaced by democracy overnight – and surely no one can seriously suggest that the continuance in power of Saddam Hussein, the alternative to war, would have brought peace and freedom to Iraq, or stability to the Middle East.

As for the constitution, the Prime Minister’s back of an envelope reforms of the office of Lord Chancellor were inept in their introduction and the implementation process threatened to be crass in the extreme until the House of Lords sensibly sought to apply the brakes.  On the European Constitution, the Prime Minister has sensibly changed his mind and decided to promise a referendum.  I do not like referenda.  But we have now had so many in this country, some over relatively trivial issues, that it would have been absurd to deny one on one of the most far reaching constitutional changes in our history.  And it is all the more necessary when the government of the day has the sort of massive majority this one enjoys.