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On the news this morning, Radio4 Today programme, there was a piece about how teachers will have the right to search pupils for knives and alcohol and stuff. BBC News story here.

Giving teachers this kind of right makes me feel uncomfortable. I'd always assumed that teachers and schools could do this, they can force you to open your locker and if they think you've got something illegal in your school bag they can demand to have a look. But now its enshrined as a right.

The thing with rights is that they can be taken away.

Its something to do with the UK's Common Law and the rest of the world's Roman/Stalinist/Napoleon Code. In the UK everything is permitted except those things which are illegal, whilst the alternative is everything is illegal except those things which are permitted.

When more and more activities are enshrined as rights, the potential to have these right's taken away becomes greater and greater.

There was some MP complaining about the press slagging off some other MP's crap performance at asking questions in parliament, it was on the Spectator website, I think the quote was something like "Until you've had to stand up in the House of Commons and ask a question, you've got no right to criticise anyone else's performance". That terrifies me, that some elected official thinks that being able to criticise something else is a right, which some folk are qualified to have and that other people are unqualified and do not have that right.

Unless there's a bloody revolution there's no way to get rid of the concept of enshrined rights without actually taking away the right.

Don't get me wrong, its not that I think people shouldn't have 'the right' to do something, its just that the right shouldn't be enshrined or documented. It should just be self-evident and undeniable.

After something has been defined and enshrined as a right, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can only take that right away.

Actually, I vaguely remember reading about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, how it came about just after the second world war, and how it was the victors of the war who wrote it.

Its not universal.

The defeated nations didn't write it, only the winners did, and they have their own cultural bias.

Imagine, if you will, just briefly, that the axis won the second world war, and their moral values wrote a universal declaration of human rights. It wouldn't be pretty, but that's only cos of our perspective.

Does that make sense?

Ach, I'm just rambling now.

I gotta print some labels for RES039, its a 100R 0806 surface mount component.