Asylum: taking back control?
News & Social Media / Post
The human rights blob is the enemy of democracy
Steve Laws, veteran reporter on the dinghy crisis, observes that our own laws blocked the majority of illegals from leaving. The ECHR blocked only seven. “The headlines will be on the ECHR but let’s not forget our legal system is to blame as well”.
I very much doubt Johnson will pull out of the ECHR but if he does, like Brexit, it’s not going to be enough to get a grip on the problem. And, like Brexit, if we do quit the ECHR, the government can then pretend they’ve got the job done and continue to neglect the issue.
What’s needed is a fundamental reform of the system. The Nationality and Borders Act was never going to solve the problem without a rethink of the entire human rights apparatus. Dominic Raab has floated the idea of a British bill of rights, but it’s not on this government’s legislative agenda.
The one thing they could do, virtually overnight, is cut off funding the the NGOcracy. Most of the refugee advocacy groups rely almost entirely on grants and state funding. It’s not right that illegal immigrants get Rolls Royce representation when most citizens would struggle to get legal aid. But again, it’s too much to expect from this government.
As to the furore over the Rwanda deal, this is something of a red herring. The deal was never designed to remove large numbers of illegals. They have only ever talked about hundred, and Britain could end up a net recipient of refugees under the deal. It is therefore unlikely the plan was ever going to act as a deterrent. Between the NGOcracy and the human rights lawyers, the chances of being deported are still slim. The Rwanda plan is really just an expensive decoy.
The anger, though, is very real. Though the number of passengers on last night’s flight was whittled down to single digits, this was a test of wills, and once again the government finds itself hobbled. This problem is no closer to a solution. Yesterday, a further 444 migrants on 11 boats reached the UK. A plane load. And we’re not even at peak summer yet.
At the core of all this, though, is the prevailing mentality at the heart of the establishment. You can take the technocrat out of Brussels but you can’t take the Brussels out of the technocrat. The doctrine of human rights is deeply embedded and courts have subordinated the ballot box – which is just how they like it.
The whole conception of “human” rights is the problem. Rights are civic, not human. Without a liberal democracy to underwrite rights, human rights aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Plenty of countries are fully signed up to human rights conventions but very few of observe them to the fullest. Pakistan is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The notion that rights are universal is a sick joke.
“Human rights” are an arbitrary list of lofty goals for humanity but unless rights are built into law and are actionable – in other words, civic – they’re just noise. But for those rights to enjoy legitimacy, they have to reflect the values of the people who live under them. That is not the case with human rights as we now know them, as legal activism has expanded them beyond their original intent. The machinery of human rights has been weaponised to undermine the laws derived from the values of the majority.
In this instance, we have a class of wealthy liberals, citizens of nowhere, who essentially don’t believe in borders or nationality, believing themselves to be more enlightened, with the right to issue moral correction to the public will. They’re accountable to nobody and their power is unchecked. The transgender lobby is one such example, pushing for the “right” of minors to take puberty blockers without parental knowledge or consent. They might actually win.
You can bleat about human rights til the cows come home, but if they subordinate the fundamental right to self-determination, they are self-cancelling. For civic rights to be upheld, the power must be legitimate. Moreover, there is no civic contract if citizenship itself is meaningless. If Britain is to be a borderless landing strip where citizenship infers no more rights than someone who rocks up on a dinghy, there is no coherent national demos, no legitimate power, and consequently, no civic rights.
It’s going to take more than just tinkering with immigration rules. Britain has forgotten what it means to be a democracy. Arguably it has never been a democracy. Those with the fattest wallets are still calling the shots, but they make the laws through the courts instead of buying off politicians. Pulling out of the ECHR would only be a token gesture without fundamental constitutional reform.
Fundamentally, Brexit was a question of where the power resides. We repatriated powers from Brussels, but the real power is still in the hands of the few, and in the democracy stakes Brexit has made very little difference. The British establishment has been reborn in the image of Brussels where “civil society” lobbying and the rule of human rights has displaced democratic power. Until we “take back control”, the dinghy crisis, along with much else, will go unresolved.
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