Poppy Coburn is a journalist.
The Government’s proposed Bill of Rights is dead. Allegedly. For the third time. If true, this move was somewhat predictable: Dominic Raab, the Minister who kept it on life support, resigned from his position as Secretary of State for Justice last month. With a full-deck of legislation to push through before the next election, this Cameron-era proposal had been deprioritised: the Government has its hands already full, what with regulating our most popular messaging service out of the country and ensuring that no housing can be built ever again.
Raab’s Bill of Rights was probably destined to fail, anyway. It attempted to replace the Blair-era Human Rights Act, which brought the European Convention on Human Rights formally into British law, and thereby to circumvent some of the more undesirable Strasbourg dictacts favouring the rights of convicted terrorists and illegal migrants.
Essentially, the Bill would attempt to allow us to ‘pick and choose’ from judgements, with Raab making it clear that he wanted ithe Supreme Court to have final say in decisions – something that would go against the ECHR. You can’t sign up to the Court and ignore the case law.
It’s possible that these inherent contradictions were welcomed by some as a means of launching a full-scale revolt against the Court. Raab’s case for keeping the Bill tracks with this end, which he himself has said may happen. Were the Bill indeed linked to exiting the ECHR, it would compliment the Home Secretary’s work on the Illegal Migration Bill (recently passed through the Commons) and the push to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, which was previously scuppered by last-minute injunctions from European judges grounding flights.
While public interest in mass migration dipped in the years following the 2016 Brexit referendum – perhaps thanks to a misplaced perception that ‘taking back control’ would involve slowing demographic change – recent polling suggests the problem is once again rising in the public consciousness. The ECHR is separate from the EU – which hilariously refuses to sign the convention over fears of diluted sovereignty – but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Government wished to beat the dead horse of ‘European bureaucracy’ one last time, to squeeze the very last bit of Brexiteer enthusiasm left.
The British Bill of Rights was a Cameroon idea, in response to concerns over the Human Rights Act. Murmurs about reform of the Supreme Court have broadly come to nothing. These are both domestic considerations, and problems well within the remit of parliamentary control. The over-emphasis given to blockages inflicted from the ECHR on issues of border control is narratively incompatible with other European signatories who have managed to approve fewer applications of asylum, just by working within their own domestic legal framework.
If net migration rises even higher this year than last year’s net total of 504,000, a convenient focus on the comparatively small number of illegal boat crossings may become increasingly tricky to maintain. On the basis of numbers alone, we are living under the most pro-immigration government in British history. Why, then, go through all the hassle of leaving the ECHR?
This is not a problem of external meddling, but of will-power. The real lesson to come out from what seems to be yet another legislative capitulation is this: we have entered the era of anti-politics, wherein apathy rules supreme and “it’s unworkable, unjust and quite possibly unlawful” is our motto. One forgotten Bill, poorly thought-out and perhaps doomed to fail, might be nothing. But after 13 years of government time is running out for the right of the Conservative Party to create a lasting legacy.
As Duncan Robinson has pointed out, the “Conservatives have pledged to scrap or heavily reform [the] Human Rights Act for the past 13 years and failed to do it. By contrast, it took New Labour about a year to introduce the act”. It’s difficult to escape the perception that when meaningful political change does occur under the Conservative party, it is either by mistake or is so bland or leftist that you can quite easily imagine a Labour Prime Minister having done it anyway. Right-wingers tend to deride the sentiment that small-c conservative politics only exists to ‘conserve’. In the case of the contemporary Conservative Party, this seems indisputably true: we are perfectly preserving the legacy of New Labour. The Human Rights Act became law in 1998. It might as well be the Magna Carta.
The Conservative Party seems to be allergic to doing things, whether that be building houses, securing a cheap and plentiful supply of energy, prosecuting and locking up criminals, or securing our borders, the most fundamental requirement for the maintenance of a nation state.
Instead, we witness a bland simulacrum of political life, where communications strategy is perceived to be more meaningful than legislative action, and where expectations from the electorate exist to be managed rather than fulfilled. The Conservatives have begun acting as though they were already in opposition, free to toy with and drop ideas on a whim. If they carry on, they may find their wish – to point the finger at everyone else, free from responsibility – will come true.