Britain’s welfare-state Labour government worked to keep economic rights out of the Universal Declaration.

Evidence

In 1947, the Labour government that built the UK’s welfare state sent its delegate to Lake Success with instructions to ensure the new human rights declaration contained no social and economic rights. Charles Dukes, the retired trade unionist representing the UK, presented his country as a bastion of freedom, social justice and equality. At the same time, he was tasked with deflecting challenges to Britain’s colonial empire, which then comprised thirty-eight territories with a combined population of 60 million people. The Colonial Office viewed the drafting of an international human rights document as a serious threat. Wary of the Foreign Office’s enthusiasm for the Cold War potential of human rights, a 1947 Colonial Office memo warned that the UK should not commit to a conception of human rights based too closely on the political and social conditions of ‘advanced Europeanized countries’; if such a conception were accepted, the memo warned, ‘(attractive as this might be for “having a go at the totalitarians”) we shall expose our colonial flank’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider literature on the UDHR’s drafting and the Cold War politics behind human rights — e.g. Moyn’s ‘Not Enough’ on the postwar divorce of human rights from economic justice.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how the same government that built the welfare state at home worked to deny social and economic rights abroad — the colonial provenance of the ‘negative liberty’ human rights regime.
• CANDY: A striking, tweetable irony: the UK, which was establishing universal welfare at home, instructed its 1947 delegate to block social and economic rights from the UDHR.