I have problems with the argument that health is a ‘right’. Many unfortunates, for genetic or other unknown (or known) reasons, are born without health or are predisposed to ill-health. How can they have a ‘right’ to health? From whom can they claim that ‘right’?

If the ‘right’ is to ‘health care’, I see a further difficulty. I agree that no one, in a civil society, should be denied the health care available to their fellows.

However, to argue that we have a ‘right’ to the services of another person diminishes that person’s civil rights.

We cannot demand service from a fire-fighter, ambulance driver, teacher, policeman, nurse or doctor. If the service is available, each has as much ‘right’ to it as anyone else. None should be denied.

The ‘demand’ for services, as in the UN Declaration (still honoured more in the breach than in the observation), is more appropriately handled through political and electoral processes.

The danger in turning such demands into ‘rights’ is that we lose sight of the fundamental importance of rights: since Magna Carta, they protect us from the State’s exercise of arbitrary power. Achievement of that world-wide (regrettably still a long way off) is the basis from which demands could then reasonably be made.