By Matthew Barrett
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Yesterday in Parliament, Richard Bacon, a Conservative backbencher, tried to introduce a Bill which would repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. One of Mr Bacon's lines of argument was that the legal requirement for Ministers to amend legislation – without a vote in Parliament – in order to comply with European human rights legislation – is "fundamentally undemocratic":
"Under section 10, a Minister of the Crown may make such amendments to primary legislation as are considered necessary to enable the incompatibility to be removed by the simple expedient of making an order. In effect, because the accepted practice is that the United Kingdom observes its international obligations, a supranational court can impose its will against ours. In my view this is fundamentally undemocratic."
Mr Bacon also compellingly argued that the controversial social issues that judges often like to get involved in should be decided by "elected representatives and not by unelected judges":
"[T]here is no point in belonging to a club if one is not prepared to obey its rules. The solution is therefore not to defy judgments of the Court, but rather to remove the power of the Court over us. … Judges do not have access to a tablet of stone not available to the rest of us which enables them to discern what our people need better than we can possibly do as their elected, fallible, corrigible representatives. There is no set of values that are so universally agreed that we can appeal to them as a useful final arbiter. In the end they will always be shown up as either uselessly vague or controversially specific. Questions of major social policy, whether on abortion, capital punishment, the right to bear firearms or workers rights, should ultimately be decided by elected representatives and not by unelected judges."
When the motion was put to the House, it was rejected by 195 votes to 72. Those Conservatives who voted not to reject the motion, and support the repeal of the Human Rights Act, are listed below.
- Peter Aldous
- David Amess
- Richard Bacon
- Stephen Barclay
- John Baron
- Andrew Bingham
- Brian Binley
- Bob Blackman
- Crispin Blunt
- Peter Bone
- Angie Bray
- Andrew Bridgen
- Dan Byles
- Alun Cairns
- William Cash
- James Clappison
- David Davies
- Philip Davies
- Jackie Doyle-Price
- James Duddridge
- Charlie Elphicke
- Graham Evans
- Mark Field
- Andrew Griffiths
- Robert Halfon
- Gordon Henderson
- Nick Herbert
- Philip Hollobone
- Adam Holloway
- Sir Gerald Howarth
- Stewart Jackson
- Bernard Jenkin
- Gareth Johnson
- Marcus Jones
- Andrea Leadsom
- Peter Lilley
- Karen Lumley
- Anne Main
- Jason McCartney
- Stephen McPartland
- Stephen Metcalfe
- Nigel Mills
- Andrew Mitchell
- Anne Marie Morris
- David Morris
- Stephen Mosley
- Sheryll Murray
- David Nuttall
- Matthew Offord
- Neil Parish
- Stephen Phillips
- Christopher Pincher
- Mark Reckless
- Jacob Rees-Mogg
- Laurence Robertson
- Andrew Rosindell
- Henry Smith
- Mark Spencer
- Iain Stewart
- Graham Stuart
- Justin Tomlinson
- Andrew Turner
- Martin Vickers
- Charles Walker
- Robin Walker
- Mike Weatherley
- Heather Wheeler
- Craig Whittaker
- John Whittingdale
- Bill Wiggin
- Sarah Wollaston
The full arguments can be read on Hansard.