Unconventional

Of the 246 Conservative members of the House of Lords, almost all hold positions well to the right of Margaret Thatcher, but most would be classified as “wets” by the people who now decided these things, yet none has resigned the whip in support of Gavin Barwell. Everyone knows that there are at least 146 reasons why Barwell ought to be a pariah, 72 deaths and 74 injuries that required hospital treatment, after the then Housing Minister had been given, “clear warnings to review fire safety rules in the months leading up to Grenfell, but failed to reply to letters or meet with the MPs raising concerns.”

Not that that is why Kemi Badenoch has withdrawn the whip. Rather, she has done so because of Barwell’s support for Net Zero and for British membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, principles on which Badenoch has been elected to Parliament on all three occasions that she ever has been. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Boris Johnson described her destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

As for the ECHR, it did nothing for the residents of Grenfell Tower, as it had nothing for the miners. In the last 10 years alone, the ECHR also 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, or now of the National Security (State Threats) Act.

Barwell is about to be joined in the Upper House by Brian Leveson, and nothing in the ECHR would have precluded the implementation of the original Leveson requirements, nor has anything prevented the novel approach to safeguarding the Free Press that is the requirement of Government permission to acquire a newspaper. The same would have been true of David Lammy’s attempted abolition of almost all trial by jury and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, again going back to the newly ennobled Leveson.

The ECHR will not save us from digital ID or from facial recognition, of which the former will be necessary both to enforce a social media ban on under-16s and to impose a curfew on what were to be 16 and 17-year-old voters. The ECHR 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 does not prevent a judge from sentencing absolutely anything as terrorism, and that without even having informed the jury of that possibility before it considered its verdict. 

The ECHR presented no obstacle to vaccine passports. It did nothing for Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, George Galloway, or the late Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky. Most countries that subscribe to it already have identity cards. And when Badenoch and Robert Jenrick were in office, then 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 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 European Union 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 Jeremy 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?