Abstract:The article asks whether the Human Rights Act can be described as a bill of rights. Concluding that the Act is effectively a Bill of Rights, it examines why there are calls to introduce a 'home-grown' Bill of Rights and why these proposals have surfaced now. Finally, it asks whether we can assume that such proposals would lead to better human rights protection, or whether it is possible to end up with less than we have now?

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For the last forty years or more, this country has appeared to be in the grip of one kind of national panic or another. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a moral panic that took hold of 'middle England'. Self-styled hippies and lefties were charged by an older generation with threatening the fabric of society. In the 1980s it was threats to national security that appeared to strike fear in the heart of the nation, from IRA terrorists to the spectre of a Soviet nuclear attack. As the 1990s progressed we were back to a moral panic again. The view that contemporary society was characterised by 'too many rights and not enough responsibilities' was shared by politicians, priests and political commentators alike.And then September 11 happened and the thousands of trees which were sacrificed to lament the 'me-too culture' of the previous decade obtained a reprieve. The nation's focus was once again on national securty. With the so-called 'war against terrorism' still raging -surely the first war in history with no discernible beginning and therefore potentially no end -this is where the nation's attention still rests. This is not to suggest that every national crisis is a figment of people's collective imagination. There is plenty of evidence to support the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in his assertion that Al Qaida and allied groups are motivated to kill as many civilians as they can for goals that cannot be met through "negotiable political demands" (Blair, 2004). (Although whether they have the capacity to do so is far less clear.) But the point is, in a world in which terrifying and tangible risks and dangers are mingled with perceived and exaggerated ones, it is understandable that many of us reach out for something (or someone) enduring to steady us.From the earliest time, human beings have sought touchstones to protect them from the unpredictable. For many people, now and in the past, God or religious values provide an element of consistency and comfort in a world that is both forever changing and forever racked by fears. But for those of us who have never been certain that we can rely on the supernatural to guide us -and even for many of us who do not harbour such doubts -human rights provide an attractive refuge from the vicissitudes of our world.It was this take on human rights that I sought to capture with the title of my book, Values for a godless age, that I wrote three years ago on the introduction of the 1998 Delivered by Ingenta to: University of Illinois At Chicago IP : 95.181.217.95 On: Tue