This psychobabble was the basis for finding that the press could not photograph Princess Caroline of Monaco, even in a public place, and in due course for awarding £60,000 to Max Mosley for intruding on his "zone of interaction with others". The News of the World had libelled him by accusing him of indulging in a Nazi sex orgy (he had only been engaged in an English sex orgy) but the European Convention allowed him to sue for breach of privacy. This meant that the paper lost its right to trial by jury-traditionally a safeguard for freedom of speech, especially in libel cases, thanks to the jury's power to award "the lowest coin in the realm". The result is that non-fiction books about the recent past are, prior to publication, being gutted to remove any detail to which a living person might take exception, on the basis that it interferes with their "psychological integrity" or "zone of interaction with others".

The Convention is in some respects out of date. It has a very nasty exception to freedom of speech and assembly, which permits governments to gag and to discriminate against "aliens", meaning anyone who has not taken out British citizenship. And it has no mention of the rights of children or of the disabled, subjects of UN Conventions in recent years. It is silent about environmental rights, which were unheard of in 1950 but are of urgent importance today, requiring safeguards against pollution and ecological degradation. It makes no mention of economic and social rights that have been included to valuable effect in more recent constitutions, such as that of South Africa.

In other advanced countries, a Bill of Rights, especially if embodied in a constitution, can become a powerful symbol of national identity. In the American constitution, the Bill of Rights is the bedrock of civil culture. In Canada, a country with no particular history to speak of, Pierre Trudeau's objective of strengthening national identity with a Charter of Rights has largely been achieved. In Britain, although the Convention has been valuable in filling some gaps in the common law and encouraging more principled adjudication, it has done little to conduce to the "culture of liberty" that its proponents (myself included) predicted back in 1998, largely because of the perception that it is "European". Its Euro-prosaic language is uninspiring and it lacks any preamble that roots it in British history or experience. And, as the Foreign Office noted at the time, some of its Articles were "too loosely drafted to provide effective guarantees of the rights they contain".

For these reasons, David Cameron's call for a British Bill of Rights deserves enthusiastic support, although some Europhobic members of his party have applauded it on the misunderstanding that it will mean abandonment of the European Convention. It will not: ultimate compliance with that Convention will remain a treaty obligation, as it does for 46 other European countries. But with a tightly drafted British Bill, the cases upheld at Strasbourg should be few and far between. In any event, that court is deluged with complaints (80,000 at latest count) of much more severe breaches from Russia, its former satellites and from Turkey. Europe-wide standards have had to dumb down to accommodate them. The court is likely to overrule a few British court decisions, e.g. by giving prisoners the right to smoke (why not? — it's in the Geneva Convention) and by requiring repeal of laws which ban political and "advocacy" advertisements on television (ITV needs the money).

But Labour shows little enthusiasm for any change. The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, precently brought out an incoherent Green Paper on something he called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities", in which nobody showed the slightest interest. The organisation Liberty — paradoxically— is opposed to a British Bill of Rights, apparently on the principle of "better keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse". No doubt it fears that a Tory-drafted statute would be tough on refugees and immigrants. But their liberties, too, are a proud part of our history, and Strasbourg would remain to protect them if the new parliament were to put them in jeopardy.

But Bills of Rights do not come ready-made. Cameron should turn his mind to forming a non-partisan drafting committee, and then perhaps to summoning a National Convention to approve it. That could be followed by a referendum in which the people could decide whether to entrench the rights to which we have always paid lip-service, but which no previous government has dared to protect from the vagaries of panicked or prejudiced parliamentary majorities.