Friday, 9 October 2020

Materially Alter The Spirit

Who needs "security ties" to the EU? We all know what they mean. And if the European Convention on Human Rights is the price of keeping them, then that says it all about the ECHR.

Nothing that was largely written by David Maxwell Fyfe ever did have anything to do with the Left. Not the European Union into which he so castigated Anthony Eden for not having taken Britain at the start. And not this, either. There was a reason why its incorporation into British domestic law was never attempted by any Labour Government until that of Tony Blair.

It duly proved useless as civil liberties were shredded; it was the dear old House of Commons that stopped the detention of people for 90 days without charge. And it duly proved useless as the poor, the sick and the disabled were persecuted on a scale and with a venom that had not been seen since before the War, if ever. That persecution has of course continued into and as the age of austerity. Against that, human rights legislation has been of only the most occasional use, if any. That has always been the intention. 

In May 1948, the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights, in The Hague. Addressing that assembly, Winston Churchill called it "the Voice of Europe". 

But in fact it was mostly made up of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives' work was trying to delude themselves that so did they.

In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the Social Democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. Lo and behold, Blair had it written into British domestic law. 

And lo and behold, the body that he created for its enforcement, when it has not been sacking its black and disabled staff first, and when it has not been failing to find anything wrong with the Government's handling of the Windrush scandal, played a key role in bringing down Jeremy Corbyn. Not that Corbyn helped himself by backing down when he ought to have been fighting back. But "Equality and Human Rights"? What equality, exactly?

Certainly not economic equality, and there can never be any without that. In each constituency in 2024, there should be one candidate, of any party or none, who subscribed to this and thisThe complete list of those candidates would appear here, and anywhere else that would publish it. If I could raise enough money to be a viable candidate, then I would contest the seat where the most people had offered to sign my nomination papers. Please give generously.

4 comments:

  1. Abolition of the Human Rights Act was in David Cameron’s 2015 election Manifesto and the Conservatives now plan at least disapplying parts of it for Priti Patel’s upcoming Bill to speed up deportation of illegal migrants. But try and find anyone on the Left who supports abolishing it.

    Just one would do.

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    1. I laughed to shard when I read that comment, that I spat out my tea.

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  2. Has abolishing the HRA ever been in a Labour, Lib Dem, or even Green manifesto? Reviewing or abolishing it has been in a Conservative manifesto twice.

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    1. And yet there it is.

      The thing is probably not actively harmful, unless you are as vicious as Priti Patel. But it is very difficult to see what good it does.

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