The fundamental human right to call table tennis any name you like

Happy New Year. A friend has reminded me of my responsibilities to this blog, so here is the first post of 2009.

I helped on a tour of the exhibition this morning by groups from the Home Office and the Mayor of London’s office. On the way round I point out the horrible suffragette doll, which was apparently shoved through a Welsh suffragette’s door by an anti-suffrage protester in the 1910s.

I wondered if we should now think of it as constructed not from a ping-pong ball but a ‘whiff-whaff’ ball – although this Johnsonian name for table tennis has been contested.

As the tour ended, a discussion about rights and responsibilities – two current political buzzwords – began. Should the two be linked, or are rights inalienable? Some, such as those staked out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act are certainly not contingent on good behaviour, but are qualities inherent in being human.

But other aspects seem more contractual, especially those that relate to the social contracts set out by Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. John Stuart Mill has another, more practical, view altogether.

I had planned to talk for 30 minutes, but the tour had lasted an hour, and I worried that I had bored for England. But as it was only just 9.30 in the morning, perhaps this was a sign that the exhibition had sparked our interest?