With rights come responsibilities

While I try not to repeat myself when I write, I am partial to a few mantras that seem so apt so often and are so irreplaceable that I trot them out with perhaps too much regularity.

Those who can, engage with the issues; those who can’t, resort to insults is one I use whenever anyone who ever had any objection to any development for any reason is dispensed with as a Nimby. It works for other topics too. Most recently I fired it off on LinkedIn and was confronted with an aggressive barrage of every criticism ever aimed at any person who ever deigned to hold non-lefty views. One moron culminated his diatribe with something like, “I don’t want you polluting my feed so I’ve blocked you. Ha!”

I wonder what his employer or clients would have to say about his lack of professionalism or even basic decency when they see how he responds to a polite (if pompous, I admit), mainstream comment. He’s done himself far more harm than he’s done me who, after a few glasses, imagines a potential lucrative new client telling him he’s a wazzock and has lost the contract. Ha!

A more recent mantra I’ve come across and used a couple of blogs ago is, I’ve always enjoyed the company of the fallible more than that of the judgemental. I first came across it in the context of Boris’s ousting, when one of his legion of admirers fully accepted all his flaws, but said she’d rather have dinner with him than any of his back-stabbing detractors. Me too! I mean, flaws and all, Boris is intelligent, engaging, affable and witty, and would be marvellous company whether scoffing fish and chips or Chateaubriand. Gawd luv ‘im. (Ok, he has been a bit of a cad to his wives, but I’m only talking one dinner here.) Whereas, who’d want to have dinner with Grieve, Heseltine, and the rest of ‘em – arrogant, self-righteous, humourless Stalinists, who would dominate dinner with their own opinions as if they were gospel and wouldn’t let their companion voice anything different or, if they did, they’d dismiss everything out of hand, even the viewpoint 1 + 1 = 2 if it looked like it was favourable to Brexit!

Then there’s a few aphorisms that have been well worn by Maggie (All Hail!), and now it’s my turn to get my pen around them:

• If they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument is actually a variation of the first one mentioned above. 

• The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money is the Lords’ Prayer of self-evident truths.

• There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. The reason I like this one, even out of whatever context she said it in, is that it smacks of not relying on the State or anyone else, but taking responsibility for yourself and for your nearest and dearest, which leads us nicely (how DO I do it) into the title of this blog: With rights come responsibilities.

The supposedly inviolable right spouted ad nauseum at the moment is a worker’s, particularly a railway worker’s, right to strike. If it’s not that then it’s the eco-zealots screeching like banshees that they have a right to protest against worsening climate change by blocking motorways. These zealots, eco or otherwise, think nothing about violating the right of an innocent person to go about their everyday business in order to get to work and earn a crust, or arrive in time for a medical appointment. And of course the worst affected are those who can’t adapt easily to the inconvenience by taking a taxi or bringing forward holiday entitlement, or delaying the medical appointment because they’re too sick or too worried. In other words, the strikers / protesters are disadvantaging those worse off than themselves. They can’t see that they have a responsibility not to make the lives of the less fortunate less tolerable.

You try explaining that on LinkedIn or in the pub and you’re accused of having the morals of a sewer rat. The fact is that those against strikes and protests, like me, are actually looking out for the least able in society (not that there’s any such thing as ‘society’ according to Maggie but now we’re splitting hairs), while the lefties are grinding them down to further their own punitive ideology. Funny that.

Then there’s the silly woman who wrote to the Times this week that she had every right to fill her kids’ paddling pool during the drought because the cost-of-living crisis meant she couldn’t afford to go on holiday. What about her responsibility to the farmers who could do with that water more than her spoilt brats? Or the chap who objected to being told not to cook on a barbecue … because it was too hot to use the oven indoors. Never heard of a salad or a sandwich? His rights obviously outweighed his responsibility to help minimise the risk to fire fighters.

And don’t start me on right-to-roamers, some of whom forget about the parallel responsibility to close gates behind them, not to trample on crops, drop litter, stress livestock, and not to park their cars inconsiderately, like in my gateway thank you very much!

The daddy of them all must be the right to free speech being a universal right, balanced by the responsibility to respect everyone else’s right to free speech. It’s very sad that I should be writing this the day after Sir Salman Rushdie was seriously injured as a consequence of exercising this right. And all J K Rowling did was express concern for his wellbeing and she too was threatened by the same crazy sect who demand the right to quote from the Koran, interpret it as suits their personal or political purpose, intimidate and insult with gay abandon, yet deny they have a commensurate responsibility to allow others the same rights.

Now you might think that attempted murder and threatening to commit murder were greater crimes than filling a paddling pool during a drought, etc. But in all cases, the bottom line is that the perps are protecting their own rights and turning their backs on their responsibilities. So if this were a moral philosophy paper rather than a hurriedly written blog because the sun’s about to go behind the yardarm and there’s a Pimms with my name on it, everyone would be as guilty as each other as having the morals of a sewer rat.

Discuss.