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Good morning Hardly a week goes by without a human rights issue becoming a juicy bone for a political or media dog-fight. This wasn't meant to happen. Some of the high hopes with which the Human Rights Act was passed by Parliament in 1998 have been disappointed, in particular that human rights per se could provide an agreed and mainly non-contentious basis for public morality in the modern world. As one commentator put it, we have moved on from the days when the Ten Commandments, and what you might call Biblical morality, told us the difference between right and wrong. We were progressing from a sin-based morality derived from religion to a justice-based morality rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights, which came into force in 1953. It proved to be not quite so simple. The reason may be because the 1998 Act said nothing about duties and responsibilities. Both the Declaration of 1948 and Convention of 1953 were largely silent on the subject. With the Second World War still fresh in everyone's memory, and people still stunned by what they had learnt about Nazi atrocities, the overwhelming need was for the better protection of the individual from an over-mighty State. In 1953, you could still say without much fear of contradiction that we were a Christian country, and the duties and responsibilities of citizenship seemed obvious. Reflecting on the 2008 financial crash in Wall Street, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, commented that "Democratic societies such as ours require a broad and deep adherence to a set of principles that are not subject to compromise." For Americans, he said, that was supplied by the Bill of Rights enshrined in the American Constitution. How they are applied is often the subject of dispute, but at least the argument is on an agreed basis. This is one of the reasons why I think there is merit in the Government's proposal for a new British Bill of Rights, not to banish the European Convention from our shores - how could we, as it was largely based on English common law? - but to spell out citizens' duties alongside their rights. These duties may look a lot like statements of the obvious, but if we do not state them they might not be obvious much longer. My guess is that we would end up with something not a million miles from the Biblical morality we started with. But it would not depend on the truth of one religion in particular. Then human rights would be in their proper context, and some of the disputes we have been having in recent weeks would be easier to resolve. For what the state owes the citizen would then be clearly balanced by what the citizen owes the state.