Good morning. It is three minutes after 10, and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC.

I'm a big fan of institutions, as you know. I think that the bad stuff happens when people in power start undoing things that have been put in place to protect the population.

You can hear it happening a lot at the moment with human rights.

There's a fundamental misunderstanding among people who think that they're opposed to human rights.

And it's a misunderstanding that's best expressed by the fact that they appear to have forgotten that they're humans.

So protecting everybody sometimes involves protecting people who you don't think deserve protection.

But that's the point about the use of the word human, or universal, if you prefer, universal human rights.

A very good example at the moment in British political discourse of how easy it is to persuade people to oppose something that is literally designed and and

successfully to protect them but but not every institution not every

exercise of law and regulation is going to be by definition a positive thing

again for risk of reaching for the extremities, the people that hid

Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam were breaking laws, breaking rules.

The people who dobed them in and consigned them to the death camps were obeying laws. They were

acting legally. So it is silly to

suggest or even to think that all laws or rules or regulations are good things. Nonetheless,

in this country at this time, I find it much easier and it's a bit of an odd position for a phone in host to take traditionally

although I'm going to have to stop saying that because I've been doing this for so long as traditions

have changed um usually you're supposed to attack the verdicts handed down by judges and you're

supposed if you don't like them regardless of the fact that you weren't in court and you heard

none of the evidence and you invite people to ring in and agree with you that the law is an

ass and that they're flipping out of touch judges don't know what they're talking about and you

amplify completely made up or horribly exaggerated stories about people being granted asylum because

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