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We’ve just got a puppy. Lovely little fella he is. Before we got him we sat our eight year-old down and had a long talk about how a puppy would change our lives and how much hard work and dedication would be needed.

Now we have the puppy that’s been forgotten. Cuddling the puppy is fine – who doesn’t like cuddling puppies? But the walking, training, and active input? The shiftless eight year-old doesn’t enjoy that so much. It’s hard work. You see, when you’re eight, the idea of having a puppy is very, very nice. The annoying reality? Not so much.

Which brings me to human rights. Obviously.

You see, when you’re the government, the idea of having human rights is very, very nice. The annoying reality? Not so much. Look at the kids losing their minds in Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Reminisce on the ‘humanitarian intervention‘ conducted with airstrikes and cluster bombs and depleted uranium and beatings and hoodings and murder. Watch a British government nuzzling beheaders and torturers in the name of business. See Jack Straw flashing his petticoat at the Daily Mail and accusing the Human Rights Act of being a ‘villains’ charter’.

For some unexplained reason Gordon Brown gave the keynote speech at the Equality and Human Rights Commission yesterday to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Chuckle Brothers, a more appropriate choice, were presumably busy. You really do have to wonder how Brown summons the balls to turn out on such occasions. Anyone with a scrap more of self-awareness and scrap less self-denial would have stayed at home, nursed a beer and covered up the mirrors.

He even had the sheer big brass bollocks to quote Eleanor bloody Roosevelt – ‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home…’ – and then proceeded to list atrocities far away while his government helps cover up corrupt arms deals with dictators, demonises the unemployed, terrorises asylum seekers, and debases itself before tabloid newspaper editors who hate their readers almost as much as they hate foreigners, homosexuals, the unemployed, the weak, the vulnerable, and New Labour. The so-called underclass, the despised Great Unwashed of Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell’s and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s sweaty power fantasies, have far more insight into human dignity.

Like the eight year-old with the puppy, Gordon has a pleasant but hazy idea about human rights. Everything else is irritating piles of poo and puddles of pee for somebody else to clear up. Yeah, that’s right – I said poo and pee.