Bacon’s Human Rights Act Bid: National Sovereignty versus Supranationalism

Conservative MP Richard Bacon is a man who evidently knows his own mind, and is a backbencher who would appear from his record to act in accord with his beliefs rather than with a view to furthering his career in the parliamentary Conservative Party. Thus, he was in March 2003 one of only 15 Conservative MPs to vote against the Iraq War; in April 2006 he helped to precipitate the ejection of the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke from office following questions he fielded relating to what happened to released prisoners who happened to be failed asylum seekers, and he has for some time been campaigning for the reform of food labelling so that companies cannot claim – as they can at present – that meat produced abroad but packaged or processed in the UK is ‘British’. However, his efforts with respect to labelling ought to go further, for it would not seem that he has extended this principle to the compulsory identification of meat from religiously slaughtered livestock – halal and kosher – which constitutes a significant animal welfare issue.

Today, Bacon sought to bring about the repeal of Labour’s Human Rights Act by introducing a 10-minute rule bill. His rationale for its repeal rested upon his belief (and mine) that the manner in which it has been employed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to interfere with British law is “fundamentally undemocratic”. According to a BBC report he stated:

"A supranational court can impose its will against ours and, in my view, this is fundamentally undemocratic.

"Judges do not have access to a tablet of stone not available to the rest of us that allow them better to discern what our people need than we can possibly do as their elected, fallible, corrigible representatives.

"There is no set of values so universally agreed 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.

"In the end, questions of major social policy - whether on abortion, or capital punishment, or the right to bear firearms, or workers' rights - should be decided by elected representatives, and not by unelected judges."

Bacon’s reasoning based upon the principle of the law being responsive to and determined by the nation strikes me as a fundamental one, for who after all, appoints the judges in Strasbourg? To whom are they accountable? They, presumably, see themselves as akin to Plato’s ‘Guardians’, but their authority, clearly, is in direct contradiction to the principle of democracy and democratic accountability. If the ECHR ostensibly portrays itself as the defender of ‘fundamental human rights’, does its interference in national law not constitute a contradiction of the democratic principle? Is the right to change our laws and to political self-determination not then a ‘fundamental human right’? This seems to be the ECHR’s view, and as such, it undermines its own credibility by taking such a position.

Although Bacon managed to muster the support of 72 MPs, unfortunately his bill was defeated, for 195 voted against it. One of his leading opponents was Labour MP Thomas Docherty, who did make the valid point that the authority of the ECHR in the UK arose not from the act which he was seeking to repeal, but from our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, Docherty then went beyond any position to which I would subscribe, by making the baseless assertion that to depart from the Convention would somehow signal that we here in our country would condone torture or deny our citizens’ right to life, thereby setting a negative precedent for those living in countries struggling to obtain respect for individual rights and liberties. By making these points, he appeared to imply that the Convention was one of the few things restraining us from falling into a state of arbitrary barbarism, which strikes me as tasteless hysteria.

To assert the primacy of national law above the authority and decisions of any supranational court is not to deny ‘human rights’, but to affirm them, in the form of the recognition of the concrete democratic rights of the nation and its constituent members. I find torture abhorrent, and do not argue for our departure from the Convention so that we may implement such a vile practice, or to deny our citizens their ‘right to life’, but to assert the democratic right of the nation to determine its own fate. We need therefore to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as the European Union, for both departures would serve as necessary preconditions for the foundation of meaningful democracy and the revival of political participation in our country. Every nation deserves the right to self-determination, and at present, this is something that we are denied. 

Judges at the European Court of Human Rights

The Politics of the eternal Mirage

The Conservatives will bring us a referendum over EU membership! The Conservatives will scrap the Human Rights Act! This, so the Daily Mail and Telegraph would have you believe, is what is going to happen. Really? David Cameron gave his “cast-iron” guarantee that we would be allowed a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and the Conservatives in office have pledged to cut immigration to the UK to “the tens of thousands”. What happened? You know well enough: no referendum over Lisbon, and the first year of the Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition witnessed an increase in net immigration to the UK.

The Daily Mail’s near-hysterical jubilation over an announcement that there would be a debate in the House of Commons over whether or not to hold a referendum on EU membership would have the reader think that the UK’s withdrawal from the emergent superstate was a done deal. Quite clearly, it is not, for other than the miniscule cross-party ‘Better off out’ group (despite its title, it should not be confused with anything to do with Peter Tatchell’s hobbyhorse) in the Commons, who is there who would wish to ‘risk’ the public expressing its desire to leave the EU? Next to nobody. Both William Hague and David Cameron have been quick to stress their belief in the benefits of EU membership. The reality is, the only elements of the EU which they would like to see removed are those which accord some form of protection to people in low-paid and precarious employment. 

Theresa May says that she supports scrapping the HumanRights Act. This is about as meaningful as Obama saying that he supports a manned mission to Mars. Both May and Obama feel favourably predisposed towards these eventualities, but both know that they don’t stand a chance of coming about whilst they’re in office. Whereas the prospects of a manned Mars mission are held back by a combination of an absence of financial resources, an ailing NASA and a lack of real political will, the repeal of the Human Rights Act is blocked by the visceral opposition of the Liberal Democrats. Any move to jettison the act could put the Coalition in jeopardy, and that is why it is going to stay in force.

Thus, in an effort to portray the Conservative Party in a favourable light, both the Mail and the Telegraph have in effect run two ‘non-stories’ over the past week, tapping into the frustrated desires both of typical Tory voters and of the wider British public. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Conservative talk about these matters and its reporting in the slavishly obedient Tory press should thus be perceived as nothing more than populist mood music intended to improve the image of the Conservative Party rather than being indicative of any actual intent, let alone impending political action. This, naturally, is highly cynical and what we have correctly come to expect of the careerist politicians in our mainstream political parties. This is the politics of the eternal mirage: the mirage of democracy.

Is the Conservative Party a nationalist party? No. Is the Conservative Party a patriotic party? No. Is the Conservative Party the cod-British façade of globalist financial oligarchy? Yes!

To Rashida Chapti

Dear Mrs Chapti, I know that we are not formally acquainted, but I would like to extend my sympathy to you in your current predicament. Clearly, you are most unhappy about being separated from your husband and six children, and given that it is some fifteen years or so since you first came to England from India, and a full six years – according to Radio 4’s Today Programme – since you settled here, this sense of separation must be causing you some distress. Such distress in fact, that one of ‘our’ benevolent and public-spirited human rights lawyers has chosen to take up your case on your behalf. Believe me, I really do respect your right to a family life, and I fully encourage you to bring about a successful and permanent family reunion.

Mrs Chapti, if I am not mistaken, your love for my country must be great for you to have undertaken such an extraordinary course of action. Indeed, your husband too must be in possession of a pronounced love for my people and culture, as exhibited by your declaration that he as yet knows nothing of our language, and furthermore, has no intention of learning it should he take up residence here. You are a shining beacon Mrs Chapti, whose light shines out to countless millions! Indeed, these millions eagerly await the outcome of your case, for they too are keen to claim their ‘human rights’. How flattering it is in these times that the world should possess such a host of  ‘Anglophiles’!

By means of your wilful determination, you have managed over a decade and a half to master English so fully that you were unable to utter a single syllable of the language in your Today Programme interview, and thus had to have recourse to a professional interpreter. The efforts to which you must have gone to maintain such a profound state of  ignorance are nothing less than staggering. Moreover Mrs Chapti, believe me, I do understand that it can hardly be possible for your husband to afford English classes, for evidently such lessons must demand a titanic effort of saving, given that they must exceed the expense of you making regular transcontinental flights back to India. It is in full cognisance of your situation that I therefore proffer a suggestion which would yield an outcome that I am sure all of us would find thoroughly agreeable, and put an end to your state of psychological and emotional discomfort. Go home Mrs Chapti. Go home. Your husband and children are waiting for you. Whatever could stand in your way? 

Rashida Chapti - "a ravishing beauty" (Blind Pew)