Ep. 236 Individual and Collective Rights (Update)

Hello and welcome back to the A Level Politics Show. A brief word from me, I'm excited to announce the next chapter for the A Level Politics Show with the launch of Politics in Bullets, a revision note service like no other for both teacher and students. Politics and Bullets update throughout your A Level to take into account the fast-paced nature of politics. The examples that your friends and the year above used for their exams might not be the ones that you'll need to refer to, especially now we have Trump in the White House and yet another Prime Minister in number 10. One purchase for the current set of revision notes will unlock access to future changes which usually come after I've recorded a podcast and started to turn my transcripts into digestible revision notes for the students I teach. These revision notes are available to buy now at the A Level Politics Show.co.uk. That's the A Level Politics Show.co.uk. Don't forget the there. You can buy them separately for papers 1, 2 and 3 or buy them as a bundle at a discounted rate. Check out the episode show notes for the link or head direct to the A Level Politics Show.co.uk to look at some previews of the notes so that you can make an informed decision. No hidden fees, great learning. Righto, let's get going. So for today's show I'm turning to Paper 1 and to the topic of rights which has come up a few times in different guises. In 2020 the question focused on whether pressure groups or government legislation were better at protecting rights. In 2025 the question was easier. How well are rights protected essentially? Yet the question and number of students asked me to record a pod on in 2026 focused on individual and collective rights. A question on these types of rights has come up just once in 2022 and simply asked whether both were protected. Given the examiner's desire to not repeat exact questions we shall slightly change the wording today to help you prepare a little more efficiently. The question today is simply this evaluate the view that collective rights in the UK are better protected than individual rights. Now before we move on we have to pay our usual visit to Keyterms Corner. Keyterms Corner. What are individual rights? These are rights that belong to a person regardless of personal characteristic. They apply to all individuals regardless of race, religion or gender. What are collective rights? These are those rights that belong to a specific group. This group might share a particular characteristic so gay rights for example or they might refer to a group in an organisation, workers rights for example. What is my direction? It is this. Collective rights are not better protected than individual rights since both are in conflict with one another and a denial of one type of right, often comes at the expense of the other. Now I would normally suggest a right by right approach to this question so maybe look at gay rights, workers rights and racial rights and compare the collective and individual rights within each category. I think that can get fairly complicated, fairly quickly. Perhaps easier to show your knowledge of specific individual rights, collective rights and then how to conflict in your final paragraph or the while continually referring back to the question which one wins. Is it collective or individual rights protected better? Okay, let's get going, starting with individual rights. Now it might be a good thing to simply list some individual rights before getting into the meat of the paragraph and that's what I'll do here. Individual rights can include the freedom of expression, the right to privacy, the right to demonstrate, the individual right to strike in pursuit of pay and employment rights and they might be further these individual rights through specific pieces of legislation. Arguably we can make the case that collective rights are protected better than individual rights because these individual rights have not been protected well enough. In terms of freedom of expression, the right wing cites the online safety act which pressures tech companies to take down harmful content on social media as having a chilling effect on free speech. The left wing cites various bands and slogans used in protest marches associated with progressive causes such as those held up in the pro-gaza rallies as having an equally negative impact on freedom of expression. Let's also consider the right to privacy. There is increasing pressure on the government to curtail rights in the name of national security. Witness the pressure the government placed on social media companies such as WhatsApp to allow crime fighting agencies access to encrypted messages and its 2025 attempts to compel Apple to allow a back door to its encrypted cloud services. The right to demonstrate has also been limited. The coronavirus act 2020 gave police unprecedented power to break up gatherings like the Sarah Everard vigil. The public order act 2023 appears to have been misused by police on occasion. Peaceful protesters at the King's Coronation were arrested. Groups organising protests have been banned. Palestinian action is now a prescribed group under anti-terror laws. Moving on, the right to strike in pursuit of pay and employment rights was limited by Tory governments. The Trade Union act 2016 limited the right to strike due to turn-out thresholds and the minimum service levels act 2023 threatened this right still further. Let's also consider specific pieces of legislation that harm individual rights. The UK Constitution is not entrenched, which means a simple act of parliament can take away individual rights. Lack of entrenchment means government can scrap rights legislation, notwithstanding clauses in the Safety of Rwander Act, would have allowed the removal of illegal immigrants from the UK by directly ignoring other laws preventing this from being allowed. Some laws protecting individual rights have not seen the light of day, including the right of the terminally ill to end their life, a bill to do so was amended to death in the unelected laws in 2026. Yet let's challenge some of this in order to make the case that collective rights are not better protected. Individual rights are sometimes very well protected in the UK, sometimes better than collective rights. The lack of entrenchment I just spoke of allows new individual rights to be introduced, such as the right of 16 and 17-year-olds to vote contained in Labour's 2026 representation of the people bill. Such laws build upon a very sound foundation ranging from the Magna Carta that banned arbitrary arrest in clause 39 to the Human Rights Act that gave individuals the right to use UK courts to claim their ECHR rights. Let's turn back also to some of those specific individual rights I mentioned earlier. Freedom of expression is ingrained into the UK's rights-based culture, hence the inhibition of political leaders to extend the scope of hate speech. The right to privacy has been protected. The Coalition's scrap plans for compulsory ID cards in 2010, arguing that they would be intrusive and Labour quickly ditch similar plans in 2026 after the extent of opposition became apparent. In 2011 the Coalition decided that DNA and fingerprints of individuals not convicted of an offense would have to be destroyed. The right to demonstrate is alive and well. Exhibit A is the anti-improbe Brexit demonstrators. Exhibit B is the anti-inheritance tax protest from farmers and Exhibit C is the weekly, often daily protest to free Palestine. The right to strike has been hugely enhanced by the Employment Rights Act 2025, which scrapped the Tory era legislation on turnout thresholds and minimum service levels, which I mentioned earlier. Thus we can say that collective rights are not better protected than individual rights because we can make the case that individual rights are protected pretty well indeed. It's now turned though to analyse some specific collective rights. Collective rights, here's a short list. They include the right of religious groups and other minorities to not be subjected to hate speech and hate crimes. A community's right to enjoy protection from terrorism and to be shielded from inconveniences of strikes and demonstration, and they also might be protected in legislation passed by Parliament or by the devolved bodies. Let's take the first right on this list, the rights of religious groups and other minorities to not be subjected to hate speech and hate crimes. The Scottish Parliament were the first part of the UK to extend protections under hate crimes legislation to the transgender community. In 2026 the Crime and Policing Act extended hate crime legislation to cover violence based on sex, which would entail much harder sentences for perpetrators of violence against women and girls. Let's also consider the collective right of the community to be protected from terrorism. We can point to multiple attempts to ensure this, including the extension of detention without trial, the increase in counter-terrorism spending, the prevent scheme in schools and colleges, the teaching of fundamental British values in schools and tutorials, warning about in-sale culture, the 2025 proposals to clamp down on online sales of knives. We also have Martin's Law that was passed in addressing the Manchester Arena attack, requiring public venues and events with capacities of 200 or more to implement anti-terror preparedness plans. A new youth diversion order scheme has been introduced to intervene early with young people involved in terror-related activities all in the name of keeping the community safe from acts of terror. There have been laws passed that focus on the right of the community to be shielded from the inconveniences of strikes and demonstrations. The Policing Act 2022 banned noisy protests and the Public Order Act 2023 sought to prevent individuals from causing mass disturbance, allowing tough sentences for members of just stop oil and other groups who block motorways. Government legislation has defended collective rights. The Equality Act 2010 banned discrimination based on gender, sexuality and a whole host of other protected characteristics. The Employment Rights Act 2025 gave maternity and paternity rights for all workers on their first day of employment. Yet while all of these individual examples show that collective rights have been protected, we can find just as many examples of them not being protected, thus proving the argument that they are not better protected than individual rights. Let's return again to the rights of religious groups and other minorities to not be subjected to hate speech. Rights culture is under attack from an anti-work backlash. Asylum-seeking communities felt deeply threatened by far-right riots in the summer of 2024. Political rhetoric has led to further intimidation. Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe described asylum seekers as conmen and as common scumbags. His party is calling for mass deportation of immigrants and reform UK as pledge to scrap indefinite leave to remain, even for current recipients. Labour and the Tories have partly aped the populist right by making it tougher to achieve permanent settled status. All of these proposals and incendiary comments, yes, Keir Starmer, I'm thinking of your island of stranger speech, have further strained race relations. In England and Wales, race hate crimes increased by 6% in the year ending March 2025. Thus, we cannot say that collective rights of minority communities who feel threatened by all of this have been protected very well. Moving on to community protection from terrorism, it is unproven that the restriction of individual rights, such as the right to fair sentencing, will really make the community safer. In term, in Northern Ireland, simply increased community tension and the threat of terrorism. It became a great recruiting tool for the IRA. The prevent scheme in schools has been heavily criticised, firstly for its discriminatory impact on Muslim students who feel targeted and also for operational failure. The Southport killer who attacked and killed young girls at a Taylor Swift themed birthday party was referred to prevent on multiple occasions, so to Jake Davison, who murdered five people in Plymouth. What about the right of the community to be shielded from inconveniences of strikes and demonstrations? Well, quite simply, they haven't. Junior doctors, teachers, nurses, workers of all kinds, transport workers, et cetera, have staged mass war counts in the last few years, owing to the cost of living crisis and the failure of wages to keep pace with inflation. Right-wing politicians, and even some in the centre of politics, see the soaring NHS waiting list as at least partly caused or exacerbated by such strikes, thus your collective right to receive health care has been affected. Thus collective rights are no better protected than individual rights. Equally, we can make a final case. These two types of rights are not mutually exclusive. The expansion of one often leads to the couldtellment of the other and the protection of both largely depends on circumstance. We can also argue that what in fact is an individual right and what is a collective right is open to interpretation, so let's move on to these issues after the break. Granted, specific circumstances may elevate collective rights over individual rights. Terrorist instances often place collective rights, i.e., the right to feel secure, over individual rights, which include free and fair trials and sentencing, the right to privacy, et cetera. The Covid pandemic suppressed individual rights, such as the right to piece of the assembly. Over collective rights to be protected from Covid, Covid passports and mask requirements on public transport all sacrificed individual freedom in the name of public health, a collective right. The wider political culture may also be considered, especially where we have an anti-work backlash against established individual rights traditions. The Tory anti-immigration legislation sought to clamp down on the individual right to claim asylum, claiming a collective community right to not be invaded in sequela Braveman's words. Yet party divides also affect the debate. The lockdown, pitted libertarian conservatives against one nation conservatives, freedom day under Boris Johnson, restored the individual freedom of movement, perhaps at the expense of public safety, which is a collective right. In many examples, it is hard to decipher which is a collective right and which is the individual right. Two Supreme Court decisions summarized this difficulty. In October 2018, the UK Supreme Court ruled that a Baker could not be compelled to right support gay marriage on a cake, which was requested by a customer for a same sex wedding. The decision appears to have upheld the individual right of a Baker to their freedom of conscience. They could not be compelled to right something that went against their own beliefs. However, in coming to this decision, the court may have affected the collective right of the LGBTQ community to access to services, and this instance the buying of a cake of their choice. Yet, we could look at this case a little bit differently. We could see the Baker's part of a wider Christian community concerned about these sorts of issues, and the court upholding their collective right to be concerned, and we could see the customer as simply a gentleman who was denied service, and therefore the individual right was affected. In 2025, court ruled that transgender people could not have access to women's only spaces. Is it the collective right of biological women to feel safe being protected here, though, or is it the collective right of the transgender community to be accepted as women? There's been threatened. Thus, in a way, what is an individual right? What is a collective right? They're too often hard, too hard to ascertain, and thus the question over which is protected best is rendered rather moot. Thus, collective rights are not better protected than individual rights. Individual rights, such as the right to vote, have been extended recently. Given that social anxiety around climate change, national security issues regarding terrorism and fear about hate crimes in minority communities are growing alongside fear of immigration, it is hard to say that collective rights have been better protected. Furthermore, collective rights are sometimes hard to adequately decipher, and the conflict between the two, the idea that the suppression of one comes often at the expense of the other, demonstrates that collective rights are in no way better protected than individual rights. That's because if you extend an individual right, you often curtail the collective right, and vice versa. I hope you enjoyed today's show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, then why not subscribe to Plus Plus Plus for just £1.99 a month, you get access to the complete back catalogue of shows, all 236 of them at the time of recording. Cancel any time, deets in the show notes, no hidden fees, just great learning. Okay, peeps, until the next time. Teraa!