This week, Strasbourg judges bestowed upon us long-suffering Britons yet another human right -- the right to be rude and inaccurate about someone at public expense. In declaring that Helen Steel and David Morris, the so-called 'McLibel Two', should have been publicly funded in the successful libel case brought against them by McDonald's, the European Court of Human Rights effectively said that taxpayers should foot the bill for individuals to malign corporations and other individuals.

Almost every day, it seems, the human rights industry throws up fresh absurdities as it trains its legal guns on what it deems to be unfair or prejudiced. Take the Samaritans. Of all of the many groups who do essential work with the needy, it is hard to think of a body that commands more unequivocal respect. There is probably no organisation that is by definition less prejudiced against any individual. Yet astonishingly, the quango that distributes National Lottery money to good causes has turned the Samaritans down for a much needed £300,000 grant on the grounds that it has failed to do enough to meet the needs of 'target groups' -- asylum-seekers, ethnic minorities and the disadvantaged. Instead, this quango has handed £360,000 to a group that campaigns to legalise prostitution and brothels.

You have to pinch yourself. By what warped reasoning can prostitution possibly be more of a good cause than saving people from taking their own lives? And exactly why, to these ethically lobotomised quangocrats, are the lives of some types of people apparently of more value than the lives of others?

This kind of perversity has now degenerated even further from rank injustice into the undermining of social order. Police officers around the country say they are being forced to spend valuable man-hours and resources in protecting drug traffickers, robbers and gunmen from other drug traffickers, robbers and gunmen. Time they could be spending protecting the lives and property of the innocent victims of crime is having to be spent on protecting people who should by rights be arrested and locked up instead.

This crazy state of affairs has come about, according to the police themselves, because human rights legislation has imposed upon them a clear 'duty of care' to protect not only the law-abiding but anyone suspected of being 'at risk'. So we now have the farcical situation where gangsters dial 999 to report that one of their members has been abducted, and expect the police to come to the rescue.

More and more, this country appears to be run by a nightmarishly irrational and malevolent bureaucracy straight out of the imagination of Lewis Carroll or Franz Kafka. Never has a society paid more attention to human rights, the promotion of tolerance and the curbing of prejudice. So how on earth have we managed to put decency and common-sense into such sharp reverse?

The villain of the piece is that very same human rights culture which, far from expanding human freedom as it purports to do, has become instead our society's most powerful means of suppressing it. This is because it has put legal muscle and the threat of financial or other penalties behind the ruthless enforcement of anti-discrimination law.

Yet this law is actually nothing of the kind, since it promotes the most active and reprehensible discrimination against a wide variety of blameless individuals.
That's because the term 'discrimination' has been hijacked by the pernicious ideology of 'victim culture', which attaches it to any apparent disadvantage suffered by any groups which regard themselves as powerless -- principally ethnic or sexual minorities, disabled people or women.
Since they define themselves as victims of the powerful, it follows that any disadvantages in their lives can never happen by chance or because of some inherent problem in themselves. Indeed, even if they behave badly, 'victim culture' absolves them of any responsibility on the grounds that they are 'oppressed' and thus immune from blame.

The only people who can ever be guilty are those deemed to be in power -- men, the middle classes, white people, the physically able. In other words, mainstream society -- whose principal crime is that it is mainstream, and is therefore by definition exclusivist, elitist, racist, sexist and innately beastly to any group that considers itself to be handicapped by anything.

The principal engine for this victim culture is human rights legislation, which therefore constitutes a fundamental attack on mainstream values. This is why it actually victimises the Samaritans and the true victims of crime. But this human rights culture is attacking not only blameless groups of people but also the bedrock values of our society. This is because its anti-discrimination provisions rest on the premise that no moral judgments can be made to draw distinctions between people.

Anti-discrimination law holds that, in the interests of equality, everyone must be treated in exactly the same way and be entitled to exactly the same outcomes in their lives, regardless of their circumstances or behaviour. This, however, is not equality so much as 'identicality', in which the effects of difference are simply denied altogether. It means that whatever people do, or whatever differences there are between them, they are all entitled to claim exactly the same outcomes as their 'rights'.

This doctrine of identicality has had a baleful effect. For a start, it has made the governance of Britain increasingly impossible -- paralysing immigration and asylum policy, for example -- and even exposing us to danger. Take the key judgment by the Law Lords which said foreign terrorist suspects could not be locked up without trial, the ruling which plunged the government's anti-terror policy into crisis.

The judges compared foreign and British nationals, and decided that as the former were not being treated in the same way as the latter, this constituted unlawful discrimination. But this was not to compare like with like. Foreign nationals do not have the rights or responsibilities of British citizens. What's more, British nationals cannot be deported, nor once arrested are they free to move to another country, as are the foreign terror suspects who can leave at any time if another country will take them. So to say that it is discrimination to treat foreign suspects differently from Britons is grotesque -- an absurd logic which was driven to its inevitable conclusion when the Home Secretary duly declared he would lock up British suspects without trial as well.

But identicality is doing yet deeper damage. For its bar against judgmentalism makes it an enemy of morality itself, which by definition discriminates between right and wrong, truth and lies. So human rights law simply tears up our moral rules, including the concept of truth itself. That is why it has allowed trans-sexuals to destroy the birth certificate which reveals the sex into which they were born, and present instead a new birth certificate solemnly declaring the lie that they were born in the opposite sex.

Since discrimination between right and wrong lies at the very core of our Judeo-Christian moral codes, identicality is the principal engine for the destruction of fundamental western values. The very factors that make these distinctive, the moral rules deriving from Biblical authority, have to be struck down instead by the secular faith of human rights.

That is why those who most lose out under anti-discrimination law tend to be Christians or other defenders of traditional beliefs. So a black church was hounded for employing a black Christian technician on the grounds that this discriminated against Asians. A Christian mother and toddler group was told by its local council to paint the boys' and girls' lavatories the same colour, put away its Bibles and celebrate non-Christian festivals. Harry Hammond, an evangelical preacher, was convicted of a public order offence for displaying an 'insulting' sign condemning homosexuality and immorality -- even though he himself had soil thrown at him and water poured over his head.

And anti-discrimination legislation has even undermined the rule of law itself, when the Court of Appeal ruled that gypsies should be allowed to breach the planning laws since they were entitled to 'the right to family life' like anyone else -- regardless of the fact that they were acting unlawfully in pursuing it. The terrifying thing is that our entire intellectual and ruling class appears to have succumbed to this madness. Thus Sir Ian Blair, the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was not only reported as saying that the police were still institutionally racist because all the country's institutions were racist, but also has ordered that the force's motto be changed, at a cost of many thousands of pounds, in part because the old one featured joined-up writing that 'discriminated against short-sighted people'.

Job applicants throughout the public sector are required to demonstrate the purity of their commitment to anti-discrimination. Once, the British civil service was a model of competence and dispassionate professionalism. But now, it masks its dreary mediocrity and sloppiness by presenting every policy through the pious prism of 'targets' for its ruthless onslaught against mainstream culture. Whitehall has turned into a secularists' Salem.

The root cause of this travesty is that our intellectual class now fanatically subscribes to a grand ideological project: the creation of a utopia where everyone will be treated identically, and all distinctions based on disapproving judgments will be stamped out -- except, of course, the judgment that such judgmentalism is wrong. But in doing so, it is stamping out the individuality that makes us human.

The truth is that the human rights culture is not about rights at all, but about power -- the power to shape society in the image of which its framers happen to approve. It is nothing less than a revolutionary project to dissolve the bonds of national values and replace them by a universal, secular creed enforced by judges and quangocrats.
Despite the fact that it is based on a post-war convention designed to prevent any repetition of the horrors of fascism in Europe, anti-discrimination law has turned into a weapon of oppressive social control. Because it claims to embody universal values, it brooks no opposition. But it is not universal at all, since human rights law requires judges to arbitrate between competing values.
It is rather the principal weapon of a particular ideology which seeks to ride roughshod over values rooted in the culture, laws and traditions of individual nations, and in so doing trample common-sense, decency and democracy itself underfoot in a world turned upside down.