When a terrorist plot to blow 10 planes out of the sky was revealed in August, John Reid, the British home secretary, said that those who worry about protecting human rights in the campaign against terrorism “still don’t get the point”. He meant that they do not accept that the idea of human rights celebrated after the second world war as a defence against state totalitarianism is obsolete in the new age of fanatical terrorism and should be scrapped. But it is Mr Reid and others who think like him who still do not get the point. They do not understand what human rights are and why the honour of the British nation would be soiled by their proposals.

Mr Reid thinks that human rights are like speed limits that may be high when the risk is minimal but should be lowered for dangerous stretches of road. That is a misunderstanding of the concept of human rights. It was, indeed, the horror of the 20th century tyrannies that brought this concept into prominence and produced international treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights and domestic statutes such as the British Human Rights Act. Democracies had witnessed the desecration of a principle that they had accepted as the foundation of their civilisation. This is the abstract principle, from which all concrete human rights flow, that the existence and dignity of every human life is of high and equal intrinsic importance.