The article is mainly just another attack on ECHR oversight , but it does take a bit of time to lament that Johnson's government isn't sufficiently Conservative and gets plenty of kicks in on Blair (who the Left of course idolise to a man jack as evidenced on here)
It's just maddening, really. They can never be happy just with power - the sickening march to the Right has to be cast as "too Leftist". A devastating 'Hard Brexit' that upended society and threatens livelihoods (and possibly lives) is described as 'technical'. None of it is enough for them, they want to rouse the mob to demand more. And of course, if you look at the comments you've got a load of morons parroting all the recent talking points... telling the WFH civil servants to brush off their CVs etc.
Spoiler
Who governs Britain? It certainly isn’t Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. You may support his Rwandan refugee policy, or you may loathe it. But the central promise of his Government was that such important decisions would be taken in the UK, with the ballot box the ultimate arbiter. The European Court of Human Rights’ decision to effectively block the Government from sending refugees to Rwanda thus symbolises the moral and practical implosion of his project. He was elected to take back control, to give a voice to the culturally conservative majority, to wrestle power from acronym-wielding experts, and yet is proving laughably ineffective at influencing, let alone directing, affairs of state.
Even the Supreme Court agreed that there was no reason why the plane couldn’t take off – but then the judges in Strasbourg swept in, reminding Britain that it isn’t in charge. The Government knew this might happen, but took no measures to prepare, and I doubt it will really do anything meaningful about it now. That is why so many Tory voters have lost patience with Johnson: he is all talk, and no delivery.
The Blob is naturally making the most of a weak Government that doesn’t seem keen to exercise power. Take education: ministers don’t believe in “decolonising” universities, so why is it happening? The Tories don’t think that girls should be banned from wearing skirts, so why are some schools imposing such absurd rules? How come the Education Secretary wasn’t even aware that his own bill contained provisions that would revoke the independence of free schools?
Or take welfare: during Covid, the sanctions imposed on recipients who turn down jobs or miss meetings were suspended. The Government says that it wants to fully reintroduce conditionality, but so far this has not fully happened, which is one reason why the total number of people on out of work benefits is above 5 million at a time of extreme labour shortages. As to taxation, Treasury mandarins believe that it should go up, and that tax cuts today would be inflationary, and the Government simply acquiesces. Or inflation: the Bank of England isn’t being held accountable. Devolution, an ultimate Blairite project, doesn’t work as currently constituted, but keeps being extended by clueless Tories.
Tony Blair was devastated by the referendum, but he is having the last laugh. We’ve ended up with a technical Brexit in which Britain is subservient to a permanent Left-wing, politico-managerial class. Many Tory MPs might as well be Labour MPs, and vice versa. Nothing has changed: Whitehall Blairites seized the power relinquished by Brussels’ social-democrats.
More money is being spent on the NHS and the public sector than even Blair could have dreamt of; taxes have shot up far more quickly than under Labour. All of Gordon Brown’s extensions of the welfare state remain largely intact, and now social care is being nationalised, creating yet more dependents on state largesse. Command and control environmentalism pervades all policy, and price controls are back. The labour market is more regulated than ever.
The Government’s debilitating inability to say anything intelligent on human rights sums up the predicament of Tory Britain. One of the big Left-wing untruths of the moment is that membership of the European Convention of Human Rights is necessary to enjoy human rights, and that without it we would turn into a totalitarian hell-hole. It is absurd – none of the non-European liberal democracies are members, and yet all protect human rights – but still the Left is winning.
The ECHR was originally proposed by Churchill to enshrine rights and protect democracy across a Europe that had only just emerged from the horrors of fascism, genocide and the Second World War. It made sense, in the context of the time, for the likes of Germany, Italy and France to sign up, but Britain should have pursued its own path, just as America, Canada or Australia chose to rely on their own domestic rules and courts. Churchill didn’t realise how a well-intentioned document would be weaponised by a new generation of anti-democratic Left-wing activists.
England had led the world on individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, Habeas Corpus in 1679 and the Bill of Rights in 1689, and the common law, the judiciary and the jury system were hugely effective at protecting the individual against the power of the executive. Relative to almost everybody else, we were a human rights success story. It is true that a number of gaps soon became apparent – for example, British free speech was insufficiently protected – but we could have resolved all of these domestically through legislation. There was also (and remains) a case for another, broader modernised Bill of Rights, but that too should be a national endeavour.
By the 1980s, the Left had become obsessed with the idea of granting the ECHR judges more power over an ever-broader conception of human rights. They wanted to build an international, technocratic class divorced from national accountability and from the common law tradition, and loved the activist nature of the Strasbourg court. By enshrining the ECHR into British law via the Human Rights Act of 1998, Blair helped cement his cultural putsch.
Real rights violations by rogue states weren’t blocked – absurdly, Russia ratified the ECHR in 1998 and will only be properly kicked out in September – but the court dedicated itself to creating new rights out of thin air, deciding that prisoners should be allowed to vote. It extended its reach into overseas military occupied areas and war zones, and decreed that “whole life” sentences violate human rights unless they are “reducible”.
The problem is that extricating ourselves from this madness would take great political skill and energy. The ECHR and the Council of Europe are separate from the EU, but the latter insisted on membership of the ECHR as part of the Withdrawal Agreement, and Blair baked ECHR membership into the Good Friday Agreement and the legislation that created Scottish devolution. Dominic Raab’s strategy is to largely return to the pre-1998 settlement and dilute the Human Rights Act, rather than to tear the whole of it up. I doubt these reforms will be enough, but the tragedy of what should have been a great reforming government is that Johnson has run out of time to take back control.
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