Human Rights must protect everyone or they protect no-one
The rightwards radicalisation of England and thus the UK Government is accelerating under the glare of Nigel Farage and even former “left” politicians like Keir Starmer are responding not with condemnation but by saying “we’ll do it more efficiently”.
Farage’s latest policy proposal is to remove the UK from the European Convention of Human Rights and to cancel the concept of human rights for all except British citizens. He plans to replace the system with a “British Bill of Rights” that will allow any behaviour that isn’t explicitly illegal - which raises an important question: Which human rights abuses does he plan to commit against another human being that are currently disallowed?
We have an answer to that. Just weeks after more reports that the UK leaked the personal information of Afghans who collaborated with British forces before the Taliban reconquered the country (some of whom were still in Afghanistan and some of whom received emergency evacuation), Farage has stated that he’s willing to strike a deal with said Taliban to “return” those who made it to Britain. For his part, when Starmer was asked about it, the former human rights lawyer said that he may be willing to do it too.
Farage’s plan to scrap ECHR faces strong practical challenges. Its application in Northern Ireland is baked into the international treaty of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and thus attempting to disapply it there could be effectively vetoed simply by Ireland saying “no”. Only if Northern Ireland leaves the UK would that challenge disappear, though this kind of provocation may be something that pushes that process along.
Similarly, in Scotland, ECHR is baked into the Scotland Act and thus for the UK Government to disapply it here would require a legislative consent motion from the Scottish Parliament which is unlikely to be granted. However, the UK Government could also choose to ignore that consent motion (applying a precedent set by the Brexit Act) or a Prime Minister Farage could simply amend the Scotland Act directly to allow his Government to commit human rights abuses here.
But these challenges are not the same as saying he won’t try to do it if he’s in power or that politicians like Starmer won’t try to do it for him.
The threat to those he’s aiming at - mostly poor, mostly vulnerable migrants who he thinks can’t fight back - is direct but do not make the mistake of believing that this will not affect you either. Human Rights must apply to everyone or they ultimately apply to no-one. Giving the UK Government the power to strip an individual of the human rights for any or no reason allows them to do that to anyone. One only needs to look at how Trump is currently treating his former allies when he decides that they have grown past their usefulness.
You cannot even assume that British citizenship will keep you safe as Britain has also set precedents around stripping people of their citizenship even if it makes them stateless.
This all begs another important question for Farage and all other politicians who are trying to win votes upon the touchstone of “leaving ECHR”: “Which human rights currently protected by ECHR do you, personally, no longer wish to be protected by?”
Because if you start declaring some humans to be a second class of humans and to be less worthy of rights and protections, it’s only a matter of time before someone else declares you to be less worthy of them too.
