It should come as no surprise that the latest assault on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is being led by Nigel Farage.
His hostility toward the very concept of human rights is longstanding, and his disdain for international co-operation and consensus seems to be what gets him out of bed in the morning.
Farage’s politics are defined by a single, consuming obsession – opposition to immigration and asylum seekers. His rhetoric seeks to divide, to scapegoat, and ultimately to dehumanise.
Yet the fact that a politician like him wants to drag the UK out of the ECHR tells us something deeply reassuring, that the convention is doing precisely the job it was designed to do – protecting all of us from the whims of populists and authoritarians like him.
When figures on the far right rail against the ECHR, it reveals exactly why we need it. They want to strip away basic protections, to leave the vulnerable defenceless and ensure that their own excesses go unchecked.
The ECHR stands in the way of those objectives and that tells us everything we need to know as to why it is so desperately required.
It’s worth reminding ourselves what the ECHR actually is. Born from the ashes of the Second World War, it was crafted when the horrors of the Holocaust still loomed large, it was designed to ensure that such atrocities could never be repeated.
The UK was there at its very creation – in fact, the UK was the first to sign it, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Winston Churchill, one of Farage’s supposed heroes.
The convention was the first legal instrument to give binding force to the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the right to life, liberty, security, privacy and family life and the prohibition of torture.
These are not partisan ideals – they are universal ones.
The ECHR is also a living document, which means that it evolves and develops along with our society, continuing to adapt as conditions emerge and protect freedoms that most of us take for granted. It is everything that this new generation of right-wing populists despise.
Most people rarely think about the ECHR, and that’s the point. It’s not designed to be visible or controversial; it’s there to ensure governments act within the bounds of decency and legality. It’s the quiet guardian of our freedoms.
Leaving the ECHR, as Farage and his Reform UK party propose, would do nothing to “stop the boats.” It wouldn’t fix the asylum system or help deportation cases. What it would do is tear holes in the fabric of UK law and shred what’s left of the UK’s global credibility.
Currently there are only two countries in Europe outside the convention – Russia and Belarus. That’s the company Farage wants us to keep and perhaps that should not surprise us either, given his record of so often playing the apologist for the Kremlin, or the rather inconvenient fact that the party’s former leader in Wales was found guilty of taking bribes from Russian interests.
But it is not just the ECHR that is in his sights. Reform also want to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 – abolishing its 16 core protections and leaving the UK almost alone in the world without a domestic human rights framework. In its place, he promises a so-called “British Bill of Rights” – or, the Clacton Commandments, as you might call it.
This would enshrine the “right to do whatever you want, if it’s legal”. This is zealotry at its most absurd, bizarre and dangerous.
The consequences of all of this would be catastrophic. As well as relieving us of the Human Rights Act, leaving the ECHR would rip apart key elements of our devolved settlements, ripping away one of the most cherished principles of the Scottish Parliament – that all devolved law must comply with the ECHR.
It would undermine the Good Friday Agreement and jeopardise a host of international treaties. In Scotland, where respect for universal human rights is woven into our legal system, it would strike at the heart of our civic values.
The right’s claims about human rights law are not only dangerous – they’re dishonest.
Since 1980, the European Court of Human Rights has found against the UK in just 13 removal cases – only four of them concerning family life.
More Britons have become millionaires in the National Lottery each year than foreign nationals win human rights appeals to remain here.
Far from weakening border control, our membership in the ECHR strengthens it, enabling co-operation with European partners on crime, people trafficking, and people smuggling.
Dismantling these partnerships would make Britain less secure, not more.
Unfortunately, instead of standing up for the integrity of the ECHR, the Labour Government has begun to echo Reform’s rhetoric – accepting their premise that there is “something wrong” with the convention and that it needs “reform” and made compliant with government objectives.
Just like in the general debate on immigration, this Labour Government ventures onto his territory and accepts his general contention. The public is then left to choose between Farage’s wrecking ball and Labour’s timid retreat.
No wonder he’s running rings around them. No wonder his poll lead over Labour continues to grow.
If the Government truly wants to fix Britain’s immigration system, it should focus on the real issues: a lack of safe routes, a broken asylum process, and years of underinvestment.
The ECHR is not the problem – it is part of the solution.
The European Convention on Human Rights is not a foreign imposition. It is in fact something that the UK itself helped create and promote. If anything it is a solemn promise we made to ourselves after the war – that human dignity and freedom would never again be sacrificed to political expediency.
To abandon it now would be to betray that promise. We should defend it vigorously and we should never, ever tear it down or surrender it to satisfy the populists and their invidious agenda of division, hate and authoritarianism.