Rifkind, Blunkett and Straw give Starmer cover to suspend the ECHR

Sir Malcolm Rifkind announced in a letter to Friday’s Times that he has changed his mind. This Conservative former Foreign Secretary now favours withdrawing from, or suspending, the European Convention on Human Rights “so far as it applies to illegal migrants”.

He “salutes” two former Home Secretaries, David Blunkett and Jack Straw, both of them Labour, for reaching the same view, and hopes “the Prime Minister and the Cabinet will accept that this is the only way of averting what is becoming a national crisis”.

Sir Keir Starmer finds himself in an uncomfortable predicament. He believes in human rights. In Tom Baldwin’s sympathetic account of him, published just before the last general election, we find Starmer saying that when he read Law at Leeds in the early 1980s, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, “struck a deep chord with me – and it still does”.

Starmer tells Baldwin that the world came together, with Britain in the vanguard, to prevent any repetition of the “horror of Nazis being able to pass legislation in Germany which allowed them to torture, murder and massacre their own citizens”, and goes on:

“This was a way in which any government could be held to account for their actions, not because they had broken their own laws, but because they had committed crimes against humanity itself. Britain helped ensure that all people all around the world – the weakest as well as the most powerful, those who are different from us as well as those who are the same – have a right to demand freedom.”

Starmer reminds us, as defenders of human rights doctrine generally do, that two British Conservatives, Winston Churchill and David Maxwell Fife, led the way in enshrining those rights in the European Convention.

What now is the Prime Minister to do? He came to power promising to “smash the gangs”, but this he shows no sign of being able to achieve.

Meanwhile about 32,000 asylum seekers continue to be housed in hotels. Ministers have promised to end the use of hotels for this purpose by 2029. We shall see.

On Friday the Court of Appeal ruled that the Government can continue using the Bell Hotel in Epping to house asylum seekers.

It was at once clear that this was a pyrrhic victory, for it enabled Nigel Farage to assert that “illegal migrants now have more rights than the people of Essex”.

Let us forget for a moment Farage the irrepressible saloon-bar orator, and consider instead the weakness of Starmer’s position.

While still a law student, he came to believe, as he puts it above, that any government can be held to account for its actions, not because it has broken its own laws, but because it has committed crimes against humanity.

Human rights take priority. They are of universal application, rank above merely national law, and are generally asserted by human rights lawyers against the nation state.

This doctrine may act, no doubt, as a corrective to the overweening exercise of state power.

But it is a perilous doctrine for a Prime Minister to hold. The PM must uphold the law of the land. He or she has been elected on the understanding that defending the rights and freedoms of his or her compatriots takes priority.

Not long after the promulgation in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Michael Oakeshott said in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics:

“Freedom, like a recipe for game pie, is not a bright idea; it is not a ‘human right’ to be deduced from some speculative concept of human nature. The freedom which we enjoy is nothing more than arrangements, procedures of a certain kind: the freedom of an Englishman is not something exemplified in the procedure of habeas corpus, it is, at that point, the availability of that procedure. And the freedom which we wish to enjoy is not an ‘ideal’ which we premeditate independently of our political experience, it is what is already intimated in that experience.”

The British, Americans and others found it expedient during and after the Second World War to issue various general statements about what it had all been for.

But the freedom they and others were defending had existed, and evolved, for many centuries before that. When they spoke of human rights, what they meant were the fundamental political rights which should exist in a democracy, and which, quite palpably, did not exist in the 1940s, and do not exist now, in large parts of the globe.

For Oakeshott, politics was “the pursuit of intimations; a conversation, not an argument”. He derided the idea that it was possible to provide an abstract of politics, a crib, a technical training which could take the place of the unselfconscious following of a tradition of behaviour.

When Starmer fell with delight as a young man on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he perhaps mistook it for a kind of manual, which shows us what we should do.

But without interpretation in the light of circumstances, human rights are useless. Not long ago, Tony Blair assured us we were bringing the blessings of democracy and human rights to Afghanistan, and many so-called experts who knew nothing whatever about Afghan society, neither the languages nor the customs nor the history, were dispatched there to bring about this implausible transformation, which ended not many years later in headlong flight.

Does Starmer understand the discontent felt in many districts of Britain at the housing for years on end of asylum seekers in local hotels?

And does he regard the flying of national flags as a legitimate form of protest?

Perhaps he does. A few months in to his prime ministership, he took to describing himself as a pragmatist who will always act in the national interest. He is certainly enough of a pragmatist to have regard to his own interest.

The Conservatives are expected to announce before party conference that Britain should leave the ECHR, and to devote the conference itself to economic policy.

So although Farage is just now making the political weather, Starmer will not be acting alone if he decides the moment has come to suspend the ECHR “so far as it applies to illegal migrants”.

One might almost think Rifkind, Blunkett and Straw, all of them more experienced politicians than Starmer, have agreed to offer him cover, so the PM can claim not to have been blown off course by Farage.