How Liz Truss can wrongfoot Labour over human rights

Liz Truss’s government has taken a deserved pasting in the polls for its slapdash economics, but all is not lost for the Tories: the party is doing a good job of holding the line on some of its more enlightened social policies – not least on ensuring freedom of speech.

Justice Secretary Brandon Lewis’s appearance at a fringe event yesterday was understandably overshadowed by other events. But his comments are too important to go unnoticed. Lewis told a Policy Exchange meeting he intended to fashion free speech laws to make clear there was a right to say what one thought, even if it offended others. The Justice Secretary also said that even if he had no plans to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), he remained committed to greatly limiting the influence of the court in its interpretation in the UK. Both announcements were pretty obviously cleared from on high.