Unconventional Thinking

“UK is home to twice as many AI companies as any other EU country,” tweeted @10DowningStreet. It has been amended, but the idea that Rishi Sunak voted Leave is as farfetched as the idea that Jeremy Corbyn voted Remain. Regardless of who was in government, all pretence to have withdrawn from the European Union will have ceased less time in the future than the referendum now is in the past.

There is never going to be any pretence to have withdrawn from the European Convention on Human Rights. Suella Braverman may hate Priti Patel, who reciprocates, but she is her worthy successor in doing nothing. Under Braverman, as under Patel, the Right gives the Home Office a free pass, both on wokery, which it exhibits no less than any other Department of State, and on spending, such as the £400 million per year to rent a barge that it would cost only £50 million to buy.

Like Patel, Braverman plays the “It's not racist to want to talk about immigration” card, as if anyone had ever suggested that it were. If there was ever a taboo against discussing immigration, then I must have been in a coma. Far from his having been banished after the Rivers of Blood speech, Enoch Powell remained highly prominent for the remaining 30 years of his life, always treated as the expert and allowed to set the terms anything up to 10 years after his prediction about “the whip hand” had been disproved. Nor did the immigration debate die with him. 25 years later, it continues as it always has.

Not even Braverman’s brilliant mind could convince anyone that Rwanda was both a demi-paradise, and so horrific that no one would ever run the risk of being sent there. Whatever it is, it is presided over by one of Tony Blair’s closest allies and most reliable employers, Paul Kagame, who in 2017 was re-elected to a third seven-year term with 98.79 per cent of the vote. Rwanda is now in the Commonwealth, but that exists to do little or nothing more than hold the ailing Commonwealth Games, and the revolution in Niger is about to send liberation sweeping through the old French and Belgian Empires in Africa, the injection of West German capital into the oppression of which was no small part of why the EU was created.

Like the Ascension Island Plan that lasted less than a day, the whole point of the Rwanda Plan is that no plane should ever take off. This scheme is designed to invite endless “thwarting” in order to stir up the base. Rwanda has said from the first that it would take only a few hundred people per year, but do not hold your breath even for that. We know a gimmick when we see one. So we are not the target audience.

The ECHR has not prevented the enactment of the Public Order Act that Labour has entirely predictably promised not to repeal, despite the fact that even the Police have apologised for arrests made pursuant to it, which had led to no charges so pursuant. Most Labour MPs and the whole of the party’s staff are well to the right of at least half of Conservative MPs, and comprise a downmarket reserve team for when the Conservatives needed an occasional spell out of office.

Of course, nor has the ECHR prevented the enactment of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, of the Nationality and Borders Act, of the Elections Act, of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, of the National Security Act, or of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. It will not keep the Online Safety Bill off the Statute Book. No one seriously imagines that a Labour Government would repeal any of those, either.

The ECHR does not preclude the Home Secretary from stripping people of their British citizenship, now without even having to tell them. It has presented no obstacle to vaccine passports. It is doing nothing for Julian Assange. It is not breached by the Trade Union Act 2016. Most countries that subscribe to the ECHR already have identity cards. Thus defined, Keir Starmer is indeed a human rights lawyer.

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 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?

Still, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

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, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.