Danny Kruger: We need a new framework for human rights in the United Kingdom

We need a new framework for human rights in the United Kingdom (Image: Getty) As today’s report from Civitas shows, our continued membership of the European Convention on Human Rights is, sadly, at odds with this principle. The problem isn’t the Convention itself. It was written in the 1940s with the help of British lawyers sent by Winston Churchill, and the text chimes with the rights and liberties won for the British people by Parliament over centuries. The problem is the way the Convention is applied both by the judges at the European Court in Strasbourg, but also by our own, home-grown judges here in the UK. When David Cameron came to power in 2010, he was focused on restoring the public finances (Image: Getty) We saw last year, when an unnamed European judge issued a late-night injunction that grounded the plane carrying illegal migrants from the UK to Rwanda, how Strasbourg is prepared to use the ECHR to undermine British sovereignty. But since 1998, when Tony Blair passed the Human Rights Act that brought the ECHR into British law, our own courts have become activists for a set of values that are very far from the values of those postwar British lawyers. When David Cameron came to power in 2010 he was, rightly, focused on restoring the public finances after Gordon Brown’s debt-fuelled spending binge. But the real legacy of Blair and Brown’s time in office wasn’t the mess they left the economy in. It was the constitutional and legal framework they created, including the Human Rights Act, the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act – all of which Cameron left untouched. Each of these laws has empowered activists and lawyers who are bent on dismantling the traditional British model of personal freedom and responsibility. If we are to win power again, my Party needs to recognise we made a mistake in 2010 by continuing on the path set by Tony Blair. We need a new framework that will defend individual rights and liberties, including those of refugees, that is founded on the essential principles of national sovereignty and Parliamentary democracy. Danny Kruger has been the Conservative Member of Parliament for Devizes in Wiltshire since 2019.