By transferring sovereignty from our People’s Parliament to Brussels and transforming our constitution, the last Labor government handed power over to unelected bodies. Even more damaging, it has established a legal straitjacket around our politics, taking the power to determine what we say, do, and even dare to think.
While the architect of these reforms, Tony Blair, is now powerless, the changes he imposed continue to permeate politics. In fact, in many ways we continue to live in Blair’s Britain.
New Labor’s constitutional vandalism has created a wedge in British society.
While this is most evident in Scottish devolution – which weakened the Union and trapped the Scottish people in a never-ending debate over independence – the effects of Human Rights Act and the Human Rights Act equality were even more harmful.
Passed in the last days of the Labor government, the Equality Act, rather than being concerned with genuine equality of opportunity, lays the groundwork for legal discrimination by establishing a privileged position for “protected groups”.
In determining who deserves “protection,” under the Act, we are now all categorized exclusively according to our ethnicity and gender, in checkboxes on every official form.
Advancing the status of “protected groups” means a growing equality industry, with “equality impact assessments” on every aspect of policy.
The object is not to ensure opportunity but to reshape the world in terms of race and gender, empowering movements such as Black Lives Matter.
In this brave new world, what matters is not what you do or how well you do it, but who you are – identity has become everything.
Because it is so prevalent, discrimination is enshrined in our law in a way that most people would rightly see as abhorrent.
This system is based on the assumption that important decisions cannot be left to the people or, by extension, to those whom they choose to speak on their behalf.
Human Rights Law, which Blair personally championed as Prime Minister, has empowered unelected judges, both at home and abroad.
He ensured that Britain remained linked to a foreign court via the European Convention on Human Rights.
As former Supreme Court justice and historian Lord Sumption concluded, the European Convention is an example of a “dynamic treaty”, which allows the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to change our law as good. seems to him, even if it means flouting our constitution.
The court can best be seen as a parliament beyond our jurisdiction.
Over the past 20 years, it has extended the meaning of the European Convention far beyond its original intent.
In particular, the Court used the “right to privacy” – enshrined in the convention with the original intention of preventing totalitarian interference in our personal lives – to rule on everything from immigration to asylum in parliamentary procedure.
This has shifted the balance between the political and judicial spheres in favor of the latter.
The liberal establishment reacted to Brexit with outrage because the people’s decision to leave contradicted all their assumptions.
The intellectual foundation of Blair’s project has been removed.
It was the height of intellectual fad to believe in a progressive liberal majority, eager to embrace the continental tenets of abstract rights and written constitutions.
Anyone who questioned ideas such as incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into our law has been dismissed as an islander.
The European referendum and the 2019 general elections demonstrated that the “progressive majority” that Blair so loved to quote does not and never did.
Yet progressives retain control over much of public life. The concepts of identity and natural rights are still not to be called into question.
Exacerbated by judicial activists, the government’s ability to conduct its business is reduced.
The Minister of the Interior has been a particular target. Is it any wonder that the conservatives of the “red wall” are taking up arms?
Brexit shouldn’t be seen as the conclusion of a journey, but it can mark the beginning of the end for the liberal elite.
With a large majority and Brexiteers in charge, the time has come for the government to finally end Blairism by repealing human rights law.
