However easy it is to dismiss the idea of Kensington's absentee investors as the subjects of human rights, it is more difficult to demarcate a 'true' human rights discourse from cynical appropriations of it. The 'human right to dominate' exists alongside the human rights of the dominated, and human rights have often proved more useful in protecting the wealthy and legitimising the interventions of the most powerful states than in protecting the powerless. Rather than being an isolated instance, Finkelstein's argument for the human rights of property owners has a long lineage among neoliberal politicians and thinkers. When former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher began privatising council housing in the 1980s, she justified it as a way to secure human rights. Evoking a deep connection between liberty and property, Thatcher argued that 'countries which deny private property rights also deny other human rights'. The claim that property rights are an 'essential foundation for other human rights', as the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman put it, provided a political justification for the neoliberal counter-revolution of the late twentieth century.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 7