Let's Leave the ECHR

There’s a certain type of British slogan that sounds bold, decisive, and patriotic – until you think about it for longer than three seconds. You know the sort:

“Let’s take back control!”
“Let’s trade with the rest of the world!”

And now the latest steaming turd from the same rhetorical stable: “Let’s leave the ECHR!”

All three have the same DNA – vague enough to be catchy, confident enough to sound like a plan, and utterly detached from how the world actually works.

“Take back control!” we were told. Which we promptly did – by throwing ourselves out of the largest free market in history, erecting trade barriers with our neighbours, and turning passport queues into endurance events. We took back control and then had no bloody idea what to do with it.

Next up: “Let’s trade with the rest of the world!” As if we hadn’t been doing that already, and as if swapping frictionless lorry-loads of goods to Calais for a one-off crate of jam to New Zealand was a masterstroke of economic wizardry. All it’s really done is downgrade us from “leading global power” to “Tesco Value Singapore”.

And now – because no Brexit disaster is complete without a new scapegoat – we’re being told to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, a post-war British invention designed to stop governments from acting like, well, fascists. Apparently, human rights are now the problem. Not incompetent ministers, not a backlog the size of Birmingham, not Home Office cock-ups or the fact we can’t negotiate a readmission deal to save our lives – but rights. Imagine that.

The claim is that the ECHR stops us from deporting people. It doesn’t. It just stops us from deporting them into torture, death, or vanishing into a black site. In other words, it asks that we behave like human beings – a standard we used to be proud of. Now it’s painted as some foreign yoke imposed by sinister European judges (never mind that it’s based in Strasbourg and not Brussels, and we helped write the thing).

Even the idea that leaving it would fix anything is laughable. We’d still be bound by the Refugee Convention, the Convention Against Torture, and every basic principle of international law we haven’t yet torched. And we’d still need other countries to agree to take people back – which they won’t do if we’ve just torn up every treaty like a petulant child with a sticker book.

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is sounding tough. Like “take back control” and “global trade”, it’s a slogan for people who want a fight, not a solution. Something to scream on a panel show, tweet with a little Union Flag, or mutter darkly in the pub after four pints and a whiff of GB News.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world – the actual, functioning world – looks at us in baffled silence. The country that once helped write the rules is now threatening to burn them, and for what? Deportations we already do? Trade deals we already had? Control we never used properly?

So here it is: another empty slogan for the bonfire. “Let’s leave the ECHR” – the natural heir to “Let’s take back control”, the spiritual cousin of “Let’s trade with the rest of the world”, and just as damaging, deluded, and doomed.

You’d almost admire the consistency if it weren’t so catastrophically stupid – especially when no one mentions that deporting people still requires a country on the other end to actually accept them, which they tend not to do when you’ve just torn up your human rights treaties and shouted “foreign meddling” across the Channel like a drunk at a ferry port.