litigants making symbolic points. The Human Rights Act makes the European
Convention part of UK law, so that those deprived of one of rights by UK
legislation can ask an ordinary court to protect them.
The actual working of the HRA is complex, and as yet little tested. The
overwhelming problem, which was not solved, is that British constitutional
doctrine makes Parliament sovereign. Although there might have been strong
public support for the idea, the Government (and indeed the opposition) were
not prepared to go all the way and allow a court to overrule Parliament and
actually annul a law as unconstitutional. The most an English court can do if it
is unable to interpret an offending law to make it compatible with the
European Convention rights, is to issue a declaration that the law in question
offends these rights. If the court makes this decision, however, it is still required
to uphold the law against the plaintiff. There is provision in the HRA for the
government to use a ‘fast-track’reform system to amend any law against which
a declaration is issued. So far this has not happened. If governments regularly
do amend such offending laws, the HRA will have achieved a sort of
compromise between the protection of rights and parliamentary sovereignty.
Hume
David Hume (1711–76) was a philosopher and political thinker of the Scottish
part of theEnlightenment. Although he is principally famous as a philoso-
pher, his importance as a political thinker is still considerable and, perhaps, too
often disregarded. As a philosopher he was noted for his defence of empiricism,
and his resoundingly common-sense approach spread over to his political
theory. In some ways he can be seen as a precursor of two vital movements in
social thought: the creation of autilitarianapproach to political and social
philosophy; and the instigation of a ‘value-free’ political science based on the
building up of scientific generalizations from observing actual social behaviour
rather than one based on deductions from any notion of innate norms or moral
truths. His major political ideas are found in a section of his principal work,A
Treatise of Human Nature, and a collection of essays on political topics. A good
example of his approach to political questions comes from his treatment of
property law. Hume does not argue that any particular set of laws about rights
to property have any special rectitude, but simply that, in order to have an
organized and efficient social system, there must be some set of fixed rules.
Thus for himnatural lawis a highly pragmatic set of rules fitting particular
circumstances. Similarly he provides a defence for the existence of an aris-
tocracy (which would hardly be accepted today) not on some special, even
‘divine’ right of the landed gentry, but simply in terms of the likely commit-
ment to social stability and sensible long-term policy-making of those with a
permanent, but self-interested, reason to wish for the best return on their
Hume