The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

Those Who Administer 223
safeguard of individual liberty, being a guarantee against
government tyranny and economic oppression—a view
likely to have been confirmed by the peasants of Eastern
Europe had they been given such an opportunity. This
Jeffersonian view was modernly reasserted in Hayek's
liberal thought. The Jefferson justification of liberty also
rests on the right to life, which requires to be a fully
human one. Modernly, the concept of property has been
broadened. It now includes the social and economic
rights, but it is as yet not generally employed to cover
rights not to be excluded. If it were, it would become
apparent that a share in political power and a set of
power relations, enabling the individual to have a fully
human life, also flow from the concept of property. If
property again becomes seen and is justified as instrumental
to a full and free life, this will be a return in a
wider and more effective sense to 17th century concepts
of a man's property "in his life itself, in the realisation of
all his active potentialities." 45 That concept is the
equivalent of "citizenship" and modern human rights, to
whose evolution all United Kingdom political parties are
contributing.
In fact, politicians of all parties share elements of
thought taken from the three major traditions prevalent
in the United Kingdom since the 17th century: liberal
individualism, civic humanism and utilitarianism. In
deference to the present Lord Chancellor, one should
add that the Scottish Enlightenment incorporated all
three. So too, all political parties, drawing on these
traditions, have contributed to the growth of this
country's concepts of freedom, justice, citizenship and
human rights. All politicians have been concerned about
human rights, even if they have differed about the
meaning of particular values, the appropriate content of
human legal rights, the nature of mechanisms to ensure
such rights in practice and, in the infinite variety of