Effectively. And they’re right.

Commissioner for human rights Alvaro Gil-Robles has slated Blair and co’s insistence on being able to lock us all up as they deem fit (and the rest) in no uncertain terms. There is, he rightly says,

“a tendency increasingly discernible across Europe to consider human rights as excessively restricting the effective administration of justice and the protection of the public interest.”

No arguments from me.

“Against a background, by no means limited to the UK, in which human rights are frequently construed as, at best, formal commitments and, at worst, cumbersome obstructions, it is perhaps worth emphasising that human rights are not a pick-and-mix assortment of luxury entitlements but the very foundation of democratic societies.

“As such, their violation affects not just the individual concerned but society as a whole: we exclude one person from their enjoyment at the risk of excluding all of us”

Spot on.

This, of course, comes as that piss-poor bill outlawing “incitement to religious hatred” is published – a wonderful piece of legislation which will enable the rabid religious loons to persecute all those who disagree with them – if not actually in law, then with the effective moral backing of a law in terms of the self-censorship it will produce and the green light it will give to the likes of Christian Voice and their ilk to further hassle anyone who dares to criticise them or their fictional God.

But the most worrying thing is that I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with useless Tory leadership hopeful David Davis…