Kemi Badenoch’s announcement of a Conservative party inquiry into a British withdrawal from the European convention on human rights (ECHR) should fool no one. The working party under the shadow attorney general, David Wolfson, announced on Thursday, will not look dispassionately at whether the UK should withdraw. It will merely try to say why and how. The policy of withdrawal itself is almost, to coin a phrase, oven-ready.
This back-to-front policymaking process exemplifies the party’s rudderless drift under Mrs Badenoch. Tory policy is not now in the hands of the leader or the shadow cabinet. It is in the hands of Reform UK and the opinion polls. Mrs Badenoch is a follower of events. Hers is the approach of someone still trapped in a party bubble which is consumed by the belief that withdrawal is the key to regaining the Conservatives’ squandered popularity.
This is nonsensical politics for the Tories. But it is also dangerous for Britain. The UK’s long commitment to international law is a cornerstone of this country’s soft power standing in the world. Labour’s reassertion of this approach, with its clear signal to the world that Britain can again be trusted as a partner, has generated national benefits since the party returned to office last year.
This does not mean that every aspect of international law (of which the ECHR is part) is unchallengeable or holy writ. The primary responsibility for the rule of law and for human rights is at the national level. The states that signed international covenants and treaties after 1945 “did not give an open-ended licence for international rules to be ever more expansively interpreted or for institutions to adopt a position of blindness or indifference to public sentiment in their member states”.
Those words come from the current attorney general, Richard Hermer. They were part of his lucid and balanced lecture on security to the Royal United Services Institute last week. To judge by the fury it unleashed among the Daily Telegraph and Spectator writing classes, you might think that Lord Hermer had insisted that only lawyers like him could solve the world’s conflicts and injustices, and that anyone who disagreed with him was a Nazi.
Lord Hermer said no such things. Those who read his lecture will instead find an explicit attempt to depolarise the debate. He criticises as “romantic idealists” those who treat international law as the reign of universal moral principle and who abhor all concession to nation-state interests. But he also denounced the “pseudo-realists” who argue, amid the current unravelling of the post-1945 order, that nation-state interests can now take precedence over law. This, he said, was Russia’s argument in Ukraine (he was too craven to mention that it is Donald Trump’s philosophy of government too). British politicians drawn to this exceptionalist thinking in the name of realism risked committing “deeply unserious acts in a deadly serious age”.
To leave the ECHR would be just such an act. But its consequences would be desperately serious. It would give succour to authoritarian rulers on all continents. It would drain Britain’s reputation for reliability again, as Brexit did. And it would achieve none of the goals in national security, criminal justice and migration control that its supporters imagine. Lord Hermer is right that serious problems can ultimately only be resolved through negotiations, driven by politics, which are then knitted together in laws that must be upheld. You cannot have one without the other.
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