Bye, Convention?

I write this while putting on record my immense respect for Graham Stringer. As you will see, I do not think that he is wrong in principle.

In 2016, a second referendum on EU membership was Owen Smith’s signature policy for Leader, and Jeremy Corbyn wiped the floor with him. Yet Keir Starmer unilaterally announced that policy from the platform of the 2019 Labour Party Conference, Corbyn failed to sack him, and Boris Johnson, unable to believe his luck, called a General Election. In 2024, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights was Robert Jenrick’s signature policy for Leader, and he not only lost, but lost to Kemi Badenoch. Yet Badenoch is predicted to announce that policy from the platform of the 2025 Conservative Party Conference, and the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and to a lesser but not negligible extent the Labour Party, cannot believe their luck.

The ECHR is written, both into the Good Friday Agreement, and into the United Kingdom’s trade agreement with the European Union. No more than 50 Members of the last Parliament would have voted to withdraw from it. But I cannot understand why those who rejoice in that do so. In the last 10 years alone, the ECHR did not prevent the enactment of the Trade Union Act, or of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, or of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, or of the Nationality and Borders Act, or of the Elections Act, or of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, or of the National Security Act, or of the Public Order Act, or of the Online Safety Act, or of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, or of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.

The ECHR will not save us from digital ID. It does not protect cash. It is not helping the Palestine Action defendants. It does not preclude the Home Secretary from stripping people of their British citizenship, now without even having to tell them. It presented no obstacle to vaccine passports. It did nothing for Julian Assange. Most countries that subscribe to the ECHR already have identity cards. Thus defined, Keir Starmer is indeed a human rights lawyer. When Badenoch and Jenrick were in office, there was no section 35 order to prevent Royal Assent of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill that banned nothing for which people were not already being arrested in England, complete with records of non-crime hate incidents on things like DBS checks.

Nothing that had largely been written by David Maxwell Fyfe ever did have anything to do with those of us who sought to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. Not the EU into which he castigated Anthony Eden for not having taken the United Kingdom at the start. And not the ECHR, either.

There was a reason why the ECHR’s incorporation into British domestic law was never attempted by any Labour Government until Tony Blair’s. It duly proved useless as civil liberties were shredded; it was the 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 continued into and as the age of austerity. Long before Brexit, Covid-19, or the invasion of Ukraine, even as Red Cross food parcels were distributed to our starving compatriots, human rights legislation was 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, the order to which the Reichsbürger would wish to return, 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 Corbyn. Not that he helped himself by backing down when he ought to have been fighting back. But “Equality and Human Rights”? What equality, exactly? Which human’s rights?