You’ll regret not having a Human Rights Act when Labour get back in

I’ve been thinking about the Conservative party’s proposal for a Bill of Rights and am finding it difficult to make up my mind. On the one hand, I like the idea of making the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom the ultimate guarantor of our human rights rather than the European Court. British judges are surely more reliable guardians of liberty than the jurists in Strasbourg. But on the other, I’m nervous about the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights becoming less sacrosanct, particularly Article 10, which deals with freedom of expression. I’ll explain what I mean by that a little bit further down.

Let’s start with a straw man. The fact that David Cameron has said he would like to repeal Labour’s Human Rights Act doesn’t mean he’s seeking to disapply the European convention. On the contrary, his proposal is to embody the convention in a British bill of rights.