Chris Moores. Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Britain

In his recently published book Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chris Moores traces the developing relationship between human rights (or civil liberties) and civil society in the United Kingdom during the last century, primarily paying attention to the period from the 1930s onward. The main, but not exclusive, focus of this book is the campaigns of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), a key non-governmental organization formed in 1934—known simply as “Liberty” since 1989—that continues to work nationally for the protection and promotion of human rights. Little academic attention has been paid to the work of human rights organizations in the UK, so this study makes an important contribution to understanding the role of these often-overlooked participants in the struggle for human rights. This book is well researched and has clearly been written with great care; the chapters chart with detail the various campaigns and developing strategies of the NCCL as it struggled to secure a place for human rights on the political agenda over the decades, from the hunger marches of the 1930s to the adoption of the Human Rights Act in 1998. Foregrounding the work of the NCCL over a lengthy period of time exposes the highly contingent and contested nature of human rights. This struggle over rights makes for a compelling story of resistance, failure, and compromise that takes in many of the key political events of the last century. Challenges to the NCCL’s work arose immediately: the fledgling and avowedly anti-fascist organization faced severe criticism for its apparent communist sympathies, and divisions about how to respond to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists led E. M. Forster, the NCCL’s first president, to resign in 1948.

Civil liberties · Compromise · Foregrounding · Human rights · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies