13 August 2023 , 19:35
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What has the European Convention on Human Rights ever done for us? Apart from curbing police powers, safeguarding victims of domestic violence, forcing schools and councils to treat the disabled with respect, allowing gays to serve in the military, banning corporal punishment, ensuring fair trials, protecting both privacy and expression, guaranteeing freedom from torture and serving as the cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement and peace in Northern Ireland?
The bleak truth is Conservative extremists – including a third of feeble Rishi Sunak’s revolting Cabinet –would strip us all of basic, vital rights by withdrawing Britain from international standards that we proposed.
Suella Braverman and other crazed Tories lobbying for the UK to follow Putin’s Russia and tyrannical ally Lukashenko of Belarus by becoming the third European nation outside the ECHR are trying to demonise refugees, migrants and Rwanda.
They are entitled to be treated decently too, of course, and Britain, if we are to be a respected and responsible nation, must obey international agreements freely signed. But the European Convention and Court that judges actions is a bulwark for us all against domestic dictatorial politicians.
Ignorant and deceitful, these Right-whingers overlook that the Convention was proposed by our own Winston Churchill after the Second World War to entrench fundamental principles across Europe following the horrors of Hitler and Nazism. Some deliberately confuse it with the European Union, an entirely separate and smaller organisation.
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Draw a Venn diagram, however, and I’d wager we’d find a considerable overlap between ECHR vandals and Brextremist liars, NHS privateers, shacklers of trade unions and hammerers of the poor. Sunak appears to realise that leaving the Convention, an idea stupidly fuelled by Theresa May during her time in No10, would be a disaster – and less wacky Tory figures may eventually prevail.
But Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Tory realists either argue the case for the Convention loud and clear or we’ll risk a repeat of the EU disaster.
History repeating itself would be a tragedy.