This chapter argues that the consolidation of human rights owed as much to changes in the operational contexts, organizational priorities and the evolving forms of left wing and liberal politics during the final two decades of the twentieth century as to a whole-hearted ideological commitment to human rights. Tellingly human rights and the professional, independent, hierarchically managed and ‘respectable’ NGO activism developed alongside each other informed by the need to challenge ‘Thatcherism’ outside of party political or traditional social movement structures. Unable to engage with governments paying scant attention to civil liberties lobbying, human rights critiques enabled NGOs to challenge the systems within which governments and the security services operated as efforts to challenge the electoral hegemony of the Conservative Party failed. A desire to analyse and change the ‘rules of the game’ was manifest in forms of constitutional reform politics. With the traditional nation state apparatus seemingly non-responsive, human rights framed in an international context, appealed.