By Jeremy Sare, England.
Imagine a Democrat Congressman was caught making a false legal declaration to the police and was forced out of his very marginal seat, facing incarceration. The ensuing election would probably be an easy win for the Republicans, you would have thought.
Well so thought the Conservatives at the by-election in Eastleigh near Southampton, England last week. But in a two-horse race the Conservative candidate contrived to come third. The incumbent party held on, and second place was taken by the Tea-Party type candidate from the UK Independence Party which constitutes the acceptable face of the very right wing of British politics.
The obvious conclusion drawn by the grey beards of the Conservative Party is that their leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, has no prospect of delivering an overall majority in the General Election of 2015. Unless there is a new big idea.
So panic and back-stabbing has ensued. For their own purposes each faction of the party evokes the image of Margaret Thatcher and speculates what she would have done, in the same way Republicans seek guidance from the late President Reagan.
Much of the entrenched unpopularity of Cameron springs from his Cabinet’s perceived incompetence over the economy. His Chancellor George Osborne, who has no financial or business qualifications or experience, has made a series of judgments based on political prejudice rather than economic soundness. For example, next month when huge cuts in support for disabled families take effect, the top earners rate for tax is also to be cut from 50 to 45 percent. His former plea that “we’re all in this together” has been abandoned as more of a sick joke than a rallying cry.
All Prime Ministers are pulled in different directions but the particular pressures for Cameron look too much for mere mortals to bear. To satisfy the huge phalanx of right wingers he must throw them some policy ‘red meat’. But to impose greater cuts on welfare would drive millions teetering on poverty line straight over it and confirm the party’s ‘nasty’ image it has been at pains to detoxify.
Cameron and his team have been scrambling around trying to identify a ‘cost neutral’ solution to display tough patriotic credentials without making anyone, especially the poor, poorer. The big idea they have stumbled upon is to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA). The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling said: “I cannot conceive of a situation where we could put forward a serious reform without scrapping Labour’s Human Rights Act. “
This Act is the domestic version of the European Convention on Human Rights drawn up immediately after WWII. It is the nearest thing in Britain we have to a written constitution and protects family life, privacy and the right to a fair trial. So why is this a bad thing exactly?
Criminals seeking to use any desperate defence to evade prosecution will reach for HRA, invariably it doesn’t do them any good because one person’s rights need to be balanced against another’s. So a burglar may claim to be imprisoned would damage his right to family life but any court would overweigh the right of residents not to be burgled of their property. The HR defence doesn’t work in about 69 out of 70 attempts.
But to read many British tabloids you might get a different impression. They have created a ‘bogey man’ out of the HRA, perhaps because of its European origins and their deep antipathy to anyone beyond the white cliffs of Dover.
The falsehood they seek to perpetuate is that the Convention was an appalling social liberal experiment created by pro Europe idealogues. In fact it was drawn up by British Conservative lawyers 25 years before UK even joined the EU and has nothing to do with EU membership. In the same vein, the right wing editors want us to abandon the Health and Safety laws which have prevented thousands from death and serious injury from unscrupulous employers.
The Conservatives have joined in the mythmaking and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, even made a speech citing a criminal who was protected from deportation because his ownership of a cat constituted “family life’. “I’m not making this up,” she trilled. Beware any politician who says that.
In popular consciousness ‘human rights’ is now shorthand for something foul and underhand rather than a source of reassurance. This is because the wholesale misrepresentation means people often don’t think of human rights applying to them but somebody else; a benefits scrounger, a foreigner or criminal.
The beating heart of the Conservative Party membership is encapsulated by the Daily Mail newspaper who yesterday proclaimed it was, “A Great Day for British Justice”. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “Churchill must be spinning in his grave as modern Tory Cabinet ministers trash his post-war legacy.”
The Conservative Party is full of intelligent people but they would obviously rather perpetuate this dangerous illusion for the sake of popularity and another crack at Government. But it is far from clear this retreat to a pre-Victorian regime will garner any significant numbers of votes.
The policy of abolishing human rights confirms the familiar characteristic of the current Prime Minister; all tactics, little strategy.
