Thread by @AdamWagner1

On human kindness.

(A thread)

2/ I thought I had become desensitised to the caustic state of our current politics. But I must admit the events of this week have taken me aback.

I have some thoughts about we have got here. And how we might make things better. They revolve around kindness. And Winnie the Pooh.

3/ Having closely followed the Labour antisemitism issue for 18 months or so, the revelations from Panorama about Labour’s procedures did not surprise me. But seeing the human cost, the mental health issues, even thoughts of suicide, did.

4/ And what most bothered me was the reaction from those defending Labour. The dismissal, the hostility, the lack of empathy on social media is ugly but expected. The reaction from the Labour Party itself, the brazen aggression against damaged former employees, was something new

(an aside: who on Earth was advising them? No wonder they are being sued. What a foolish thing to do, do they not know about victimisation?)

5/ Another thing happened involving a work colleague which you may have read about, and which I’m going to have more to say about soon, but it’s all of a piece.

6/ This reignites in me a question which has gone round and round in my mind for the past 18 months. How can a group of people who both call themselves, and I’m sure believe themselves to be, anti-racists behave in this way?

7/ And what I mean by that is how did we get to a point where an idealistic (and I sense, with a little relief, diminishing) group believe they must accuse former employees, who obviously feel they were participating in a racist institution, of conspiracy?

8/ I am a human rights lawyer. My path to this vocation was in a sense a negative one. As a Jewish person steeped in European history, I have always been sensitive to the populist currents which in every part of the world in every time, have swept away minorities like my own.

9/ After 9/11 I experienced populist anger for the first time and I didn’t like it one bit. I urgently sought out a system which provided some level of a safety net against populism. I found it in human rights law. Or I thought I did. Wrote about that here prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/how-t…

10/ Human rights are premised on the identification of a core similarity in each of us: the need for dignity, self-respect, and to flourish. The core value is that more unites us than divides us - and from there then you can produce a set of tools to protect the core.

11/ I have now practised human rights law for 10 years and I know a lot more than I did. I am still optimistic but I also see that human rights laws are no panacea. They are no less, but also no more, than a safety net. For when things get really bad.

12/ How do we stop things getting to that stage? This is where kindness comes in. The founders of the modern human rights movement lived through WW2, and its build up. They didn’t expect human rights laws to solve all problems. But they understood the core liberal values might.

13/ That’s what Eleanor Roosevelt, key in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, meant by human rights beginning “in the small places, close to home”. A usually forgotten bit of the quote: “unless those rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere”.

14/ It’s what David Maxwell Fyfe, the British prosecutor (and Tory) who played an equivalent role for the European Convention on Human Rights, meant when he spoke of “something [which] are surely universal: tolerance, decency, kindliness”.

15/ This is quite a British conception of human rights - They start in the smallest interactions between us. In the kind word or gesture, not in grand proclamations. When Maxwell-Fyfe said those words at Nuremberg in 1946 the world had had quite enough of grand proclamations.

16/ This brings me back to Winnie the Pooh. My children love A. A. Milne. I have read his stories to them many times. They are funny, wistful, poetic, but they also (for being about animals) demonstrate a beautifully humanist sensibility. Nobody is perfect but everyone is loved.

17/ A few years ago I found out something amazing. A. A. Milne (and other authors) played a key role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Of course he did. rightsinfo.org/universal-decl…

18/ And whilst it an important part of the human rights and anti-racism movement is to loudly call others out, and fight racists (sometimes literally), that is only part. It can’t be the whole. And at the core is how we treat each other.

19/ I look at what’s going on in the Labour Party at the moment and I think that those two aspects, fighting for human rights and living human rights, have become decoupled. People have lost their moral compasses. They have forgotten how to be kind.

20/ I tweeted quite a bit about the importance of culture - in addition to process - in anti-racism and I think that this is of a piece with that. Human kindness must be at the heart of any institution which calls itself anti-racist. Otherwise it cannot practise what it preaches

21/ Human kindness may not sound as grand and muscular as other great words and concepts but I believe it is the lifeblood of human rights.

We must see the humanity in each other.
We must care for each other.
We must be kind to each other.

22/ “In the small places, close to home…

“… unless those rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere”.

/end