ECHR exit: Sledgehammer to miss the nut

You’ve probably seen the news that Nigel Farage has committed to plan of sorts. There’s a first time for everything I suppose. The first step of Reform's plan is to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and to scrap the Human Rights Act, which enshrines the convention in British law. This would then be replaced by a British Bill of Rights, which would only apply to British citizens and those who have a legal right to live in the UK. The legislation would not include any reference to human rights but instead refer to terms such as 'protection of liberty' and 'free speech', The Times reported.

There is no sign that anyone in Reform UK has given the matter any serious thought. Quite obviously it bumps into the same problems as Suella Braverman’s plan in respect of Northern Ireland. As I’ve outlined several times now, this opens up a huge can of worms in relation to the GFA and the Windsor Framework and it really does look like a huge glue trap.

There are then questions as to how a British Bill of rights would function. There’s little point in crafting specific questions since Reform themselves will not have asked any serious questions of themselves as to how this might work or what obstacles it might bump into. Reform just has to look like they have a vague outline of a plan and any old shtick will do so long as it sounds vaguely plausible to those who don’t ask very many questions. The workability of a policy has never worried Reform before and they’re not about to start worrying now.

What’s notable here is that there is a difference in approach between Reform and Suella Braverman in that Braverman’s Prosperity Institute report favours a reversion to the British system of common law, whereas Reform’s model presumably works on a similar basis to the HRA. (I can’t say for sure and I don’t think even they know).

That then puts Reform at odds with Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. Since Lowe is infatuated with David Starkey and the restorationist agenda, it is likely they, like Braverman, favour the common law approach. The factions who want us to leave the ECHR can’t agree on how. Each will dig their own respective holes.

It actually defies any deeper analysis since neither faction have really put pen to paper or put their thinking caps on. For my part, I think it’s overkill. The ECHR is a huge red herring. The Strasbourg court has only ruled on 29 immigration related cases since 1980, and the problems we’re experiencing are to do with British judges in British courts and the broader dysfunctionality of the Home Office. For some reason, the right have got it into their heads that the entire system must be bulldozed rather than correcting the problems.

I’m of the view that we only need review the asylum application process, emphasising the Section 37 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 - which basically reinforces the notion that asylum applicants travelling from a safe country are in fact illegal immigrants. I think it would only take one bill, not dissimilar to the Safety of Rwanda Act to disapply the non-refoulement conventions and to cut the ECHR out of any appeals process.

It would take a little bit of lawyer-proofing but the bottom line is that parliament is sovereign and the ECHR has no black helicopters to swoop in and enforce its rulings. We only need leave the ECHR if we concede that parliament is subordinate. But it isn’t. There is no ECHR Factortame equivalent ruling. The rest, as they say, is politics.

The danger for the populist right is that ECHR exit and legislative reforms promise much but delivers little. Getting a grip on immigration and the adjacent issues is as much a matter of sorting out proper enforcement structures with decent leadership.

A year ago, my policy approaches were in the same ballpark as the populist right, though my approaches were more nuanced. A lot has changed though. I'm less concerned with passing and repealing laws. I've come to understand that that is a systemic problem with leadership and warped priorities across the civil service. It's as much a problem with the incentives in the system that produce such deranged values and low quality people.

Take the panic about freedom of speech in the UK. You might disagree but I don't think there's much wrong with the law as it currently stands. It could maybe use a few more protections, but the most egregious cases we've seen have been where there's been no obvious adult supervision. We get low IQ plod sent out to harass people over nonsense because we have particularly stupid police commanders who want to please their political masters.

Ordinarily, that wouldn't be so much of a problem if the courts and the CPS were functioning. No sane adult would have thought prosecuting Lucy Connolly over a deleted tweet was an adequate use of a courts time. Which then brings us to the judges. I'm starting to wonder if they’re a whole other species.

The same bureaucratic mediocrity has long infected the armed forces too. If you want to rise up the ranks in the RAF, you ditch aeroplanes as fast as possible and instead start writing papers on how to ethnically balance the RAF and ensure the service is meeting its Net Zero targets. The right bangs on about DEI and all that, but DEI is just the latest fad for HR driven organisations, and if it wasn't DEI it would be something equally inane. As such, if you go into power with ideas about banning DEI, they blob will move on to the next fad because that's who they are.

That then brings us back to the lack of leadership and the lack of proper scrutiny and oversight. As such, if I were building a party like Reform, I would want a comprehensive policy base, but I would also be looking at task force select committees for the future, and selecting candidates on the basis of how useful they will be in holding various service bosses to account.

That may, in the end be all that’s needed. Lowe and Farage et al keep banging on about abolish quangos, but a secretary of state can fire quango bosses if they do not perform. They just tend not to. Why not wield the power ministers and MPs actually have?

I don't even think you necessarily need to fire civil servants to improve the culture either. All that's needed is the right incentives and disincentives. Even the wokest senior civil servants will fall into line if they realise their pension is contingent on results. Meanwhile, though we no longer put people in the stocks and pelt them with rotten tomatoes, the next best thing is putting them in front of committees of hostile MPs. We don't see nearly enough of this. With the right level of public buillying, particularly of police commanders, we will soon see standards improve.

All the time I'm moving away from any notion of a great reset/restoration, because a great purge doesn't guarantee improved standards. The churn could even make things worse. Ultimately, the culture of government is rotten, and it starts with the leadership. As such, it's as much a matter of people as it is of policy. If we want Britain fixed, we're going to need a party with impressive policy but also impressive people. That could be the Tories (in theory), but it's never going to be Reform under Nigel Farage, and certainly none of the wannabe alternatives.

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In other news, the website I announced a month ago is now in the user acceptance testing stage and I’m busy uploading and editing content. I am on track for launching it some time in September, but I might wait until after Kemi Badenoch has made her policy statement on ECHR exit. My head still isn’t fully back in the game having taken a couple of weeks out to go plane spotting, but the slow march back to the drudgery of politics has begun. I’ll keep you posted.