Good news everybody! You have a fundamental human right to a satellite dish. When it comes to human rights, the BSkyB is not the limit, but it is certainly the icing on the cake.
To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?
Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.
The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?
If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)
How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?
If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?
Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.
We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.
So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?
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