The Prime Minister has just announced that he would wish to make changes to the Human Rights Act. I have a problem with this. The basic issue is that this PM and his party are not guided by founding principles. The high theme of this government is "whatever works". For me that is extremely dangerous. A state that fails to establish explicitly where its limits truly are will expand to control all things. Political principles are not about what the State should do , but about what the state should not do. These limits to state power are the key to a successful democracy. The Human Rights act explicitly sets out what the State may not do. Tinkering with it can only increase the scope of state power and that must be resisted.
The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics. Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie. The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship. The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and
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