The Right's rights
The decision of the National Council for Civil Liberties annual conference to refuse to recognise the civil liberties of the National Front is an ironic footnote to the Charter of Civil Rights and Liberties it published, with due fanfare, on 22 February of this year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its founding. In the charter the NCCL pledges to safeguard the right to 'freedom of thought', to 'freedom of speech', to 'freedom of peaceful assembly and association', to 'legal advice and representation'. Not that the plight of the National Front particularly merits sor- row or outrage. But can the NCCL be so sure that the free exercise of rights by other minority groups does not also have undesir- able consequences? One executive member declared that the NCCL's natural consti- tuency is among the 'oppressed, trade unions, women, gays, black people' groups, it seems, uniquely endowed with virtue. To champion one group as against another is exercising one's free choice but it is nevertheless a political choice. There is no identity of interests between feminists com- plaining about discrimination, or blacks about unfair police harassment, or trade unionists campaigning for. a 'closed shop'. Only the fact of their belonging to an all- purpose left-wing medicine chest brings any coherence to these diverse issues. That the NCCL has championed such causes and has yet succeeded hitherto in convincing people that it is a non-political body was due to its oft-repeated doctrine of inalienable rights, the property of all individuals and groups, regardless of political affiliations — includ- ing the National Front. When the American Civil Liberties Union went to court, a few years ago, to defend the right of Nazis to march, it secured for itself the reputation of being a genuinely non-political body, and as a consequence, acquired many new members.
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