Yesterday Suella Braverman unequivocally stated that, as Prime Minister, she would work to withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The reaction she encountered on social media was, of course, predictable. To say she was portrayed as a right-wing nut-job, a kind of amalgam of Cruella de Vil and Josiah Bounderby, Dickens’s heartless capitalist in Hard Times, is probably an understatement. As usual in politics, however, there is a bit more to this than meets the eye.
To begin with, Suella has only said directly what other politicians have hinted at before: think Theresa May’s tentative suggestion about exiting the ECHR in 2017, briefly floated and hurriedly withdrawn as too hot to handle. More recently, Dominic Raab’s pointed reference to human rights inflation emanating from the Strasbourg court.
Secondly, Suella is probably right. The case for staying in the ECHR gets more threadbare by the week: many on the right, myself included, think that in the end we will have to withdraw.
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