THIS week, let’s talk about human rights. More specifically, let’s talk about the main legal document which underpins our human rights in Scotland and the UK, and which helps provide the ultimate recourse should those rights ever be breached by an overreaching government, whether it happens to be in Edinburgh or London.
I’m talking of course about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – continued adherence to which is what some would have us believe is the biggest single stumbling block to resolving the small boats “crisis” and restoring “common sense” to public life.
Utter nonsense, of course. But then, it’s far easier for some legislators to try and blame a foreign-sounding treaty than it is to deliver an immigration and asylum process that is fair and works.
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Or have public services which don’t require a convenient scapegoat to excuse their shortcomings after two decades of failed austerity.
Among other things, the ECHR offers guarantees for citizens of signatory states of the right to life, liberty, privacy and a fair trial; freedom of expression, association, conscience and religion; and freedom from discrimination.
You know, all that sort of snowflakey, wokey-dokey political-correctness-gone-mad kind of stuff, which these days can be guaranteed to reduce a range of right-wing political and media grifters to a purple-faced state of performative apoplexy in their desperate search for clicks, likes and attention.
It’s the sort of document you’d think anyone on the right of politics genuinely worried about liberty and the coercive power of the state would be quick to rush to the barricades in order to defend.
However, these are not normal times, as the sudden appearance of roundabout painters and peripatetic hotel-botherers shows.
Nevertheless, there is a head of steam building in Westminster politics – from the usual suspects of the Tories and Reform UK as well as their “Blue Labour” fanboys and girls – that the ECHR is now surplus to requirements in the UK, and can be easily dispensed with in the convenient pursuit of other objectives.
However, there’s a big, Northern Ireland-shaped stumbling block to being rid of the ECHR. This is, of course, the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement – the foundation document for delivering peace in Northern Ireland, and which squares the circle between competing Nationalist desires for a united Ireland and the existence – for now at least – of a Unionist majority.
The latest example of trying to find a way around this comes in a report from the Policy Exchange think tank. I don’t think I’m doing their report a disservice by summing it up as follows.
Namely, that nothing in the Belfast Agreement commits a UK Government to remain in the ECHR in perpetuity, presumably on the assumption that those rights which the ECHR underpins could be replicated somehow in “British” law.
As arguments go, it might be true, but it’s not a lot of use in the real world.
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It's a bit like arguing that it’s possible to cut off all the legs of your dining table after serving your Sunday lunch without there being any adverse consequences – just so long as you take the precaution of putting something else in their place to hold up the table and stop everyone’s dinner from crashing all over the floor.
As a point of law, then, it seems pretty useless. As a point of politics, however, it is as inept as it is dishonest.
Firstly, this argument demands acceptance that all those living in Northern Ireland who could not trust the British state to defend their civil rights in the past, should nevertheless now trust the British state to defend their rights into the future through purely domestic law.
Let me break this to them gently – that’s just not going to happen. Ever.
Secondly – much as it grates to do so – let’s take a leaf out of the Supreme Court’s approach to the proposed legislation for a referendum on Scottish independence, and look to the purpose of what’s really at the back of calls for ECHR withdrawal.
Whenever some lackwit Tory or Reform MP demands that the UK withdraws from the ECHR, they certainly aren’t doing it from a British sovereignist point of view, much as they might protest otherwise.
They are doing it because they really don’t like the fact that while parliament can pass laws, the separation of powers means that it is for those much-maligned “unelected judges” to interpret those laws.
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They are doing it because they don’t like the fact that the ECHR would impinge on the ability of the kind of government that they would aspire to run to remove the rights of people to do and say things, or live in ways of which they personally happen to disapprove.
Nigel Farage, not to mention his Poundland Tory counterparts in Robert Jenrick and Chris Philp, and the Labour Cabinet that trails along in their wake, all make great play of their “national pride”, as they attempt to surf a wave of manufactured culture war outrage.
Their nation isn’t my nation. But it’s a shame that their national pride doesn’t seem to extend to having pride in a nation which treats the vulnerable well, treats minorities fairly, upholds the rule of law and respects international agreements freely entered into.
To return to Churchill; you have to wonder which side they are really on.
Do they prefer to side with those who wanted to try to “guard” a never-threatened statue of Churchill, or will they instead guard the statutes which protect all of our fundamental rights, which he did so much to bring to post-war Europe?
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