You know things are bad when God is against you. The UK Government is planning to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, but according to the Archbishop of Canterbury sub-contracting out our responsibilities in such a way is opposite to God’s nature. “The principle must stand the judgment of God,” he said. “And it cannot.”

In the face of the archbishop’s righteous anger, the response of the Home Office was pathetic. The UK, it said, has a proud history of supporting people in need and has given hundreds of thousands the chance of a better future. However, is there any sense that the Home Office understands what those words mean? It would seem to most of us that, rather than seeing the issue in a compassionate or human way, they see it only in terms of economics, or politics, or nationalism.

The fact that the Home Office cited Britain’s history of supporting those in need was particularly galling. I once spoke to the historian Sir Antony Beevor about this and his great concern was that, rather than seeing the problem in human terms as we did in the 1930s with the Kindertransport for example, government had been guilty of a “dehumanisation of the other” and that it was fuelling, and feeding on, a rise in extremism. It wasn’t rising in the same way as the 1930s, he said, but history was there to teach us what the dangers are.

Sir Antony was also particularly worried about poverty and how it might be worsened by Brexit, which in turn was fuelled by nationalism. A small minority will do well under Brexit, he said, but he feared there would be a greater polarisation between rich and poor and the ones who would really suffer were those with the sort of jobs that were diminishing already, such as manufacturing. Poverty - like immigration, and health - is one of the issues by which we can judge a nation and Sir Antony’s judgement was clear: we’re failing.

So how to judge Scotland’s record? It doesn’t surprise me really that the fact the Scottish Human Rights Commission submitted a report to the UN this week was largely overlooked by most media, but one of the commission’s largest areas of concern was poverty. Their overall judgement on human rights in Scotland was also harsh - not as harsh, perhaps, as the Archbishop’s on UK immigration policy but harsh all the same. Scotland, they said, still has a long way to go before we can confidently claim that human rights are a reality in everyone’s lives.

Strikingly, the commission had criticism for both the UK and Scottish governments. The UK Government’s proposals to replace the Human Rights Act with a “watered-down” bill, they said, would put human rights at risk and was a direct contradiction of its own independent review as well as opposition from campaign groups, the Scottish Government and others.

However, there was also some serious criticism of the Scottish Government’s own record, on three issues in particular: poverty as I said, but also mental health and the conditions in prisons. On poverty, the commission said the Scottish Government was still not on track to meet its child poverty targets, but it also highlighted the fact that a household is made homeless in Scotland every 19 minutes. The commission said the government just isn’t doing enough.

Their judgement on prisons was probably even more damning and it’s an issue that particularly bothers me. The problem is that the justice system in the UK is based on a discredited principle: commit crime, go to prison (ideally in conditions that are so awful it’ll make you think twice), then come out and commit crime again then repeat ad infinitum. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a system that Fagin and Fletcher would recognise and it’s out of date and inhuman. It is a breach of human rights.

Some of the main concerns that the commission had on prisons were overcrowding, the use of restraints, strip searching, and the increased use of remand, particularly for young people, but I think the breach of human rights in the system goes even further than that. What about the right to education? Many of the men and women who are in prisons are there because the education system failed them and yet literacy, reading and education does not have the central place in prisons that it should have. If Scotland failed them on the human right to education at school, the least it can do is make it up to them when it sends them to jail.

The third main area of concern for the commission was mental health, particularly for children and young people and this is a problem we’ve known about for a long time, particularly the lack of beds in specialist units. In many ways, this goes back to the first issue - poverty - with those living in deprived areas experiencing more serious problems and a higher rate of suicide. But the Scottish Government is failing on the issue in the same way it is failing on drugs: when things go wrong and people need help, it probably won’t be there for them, or it will only be there after a long, long wait. The commission says urgent action is needed and the rest of us know what that means: more funding.

I’ve already said what the commission’s broad conclusion was: Scotland still has a long way to go before we can confidently claim that human rights are a reality in everyone’s lives, but the deeper issue of course is that the people whose human rights are being breached are also likely to be those with the least political agency. Children, who do not have the vote. The homeless, who are unlikely to vote. And the poor, who are less likely to write letters to their MSPs. I remember the former justice minister Kenny MacAskill saying at a meeting I attended that the loudest lobbying he got on crime was from wealthier parts of the country that were least likely to actually suffer from crime.

All of this creates a disincentive for a political party, or the Scottish Government, to do something - anything - because their inaction is unlikely to be punished as it doesn’t affect those who are most politically active and engaged and likely to vote: the middle class. There are admittedly a few signs of hope - the Scottish Government’s extra cash for rehab for example is a start - but the deeper problem may be an age-old one - one that Sir Antony Beevor touched on when he talked about the “dehumanisation of the other”.

What it amounts to is this: when we talk about human rights, do all really, really, deep down, think that they apply in the same way to everyone? To, for example, a man coming across the Channel to seek asylum? Or a prisoner in a cell in a Scottish jail? Or a young person using drugs and getting into trouble? I’m afraid many Scots would answer “no, they don’t”. But I agree with the words of the commission: human rights aren’t really human rights until they apply to everyone.

 

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