Utter scumbags

The intellectual and political problems with the Tory indictment of the Human Rights Act, the European Convention and the Court of Human Rights are legion. The idea of "Europe's war on British justice", and of a meddling Strasbourg Court, is blown to bits by the data. The UK lost eight cases in the European Court last year. Chris Grayling and Theresa May argue that losing 0.48% of the cases lodged against you represents an illegitimate and hyperactive form of judicial activism. 

I believe that the European Court's jurisdiction represents a modest check on the overwhelming powers of the state to crush the life, liberty and privacy of the individual. It is this government's overreaction to the modesty of the European Convention's protections which makes it so contemptible. The Lord Chancellor's dismal suggestion that only the popular and the agreeable parts of our community should have their qualified rights protected spectacularly misses the point. 

I can accept, politically and philosophically, that there is a serious debate to be had about the desirability of entrenching fundamental rights in law, how far you go, and the extent to which we empower (in our tradition, an unelected and socially and professionally narrow) judiciary to take important political decisions in the absence of a participative democratic process. Reasonable people, to my mind, can reasonably differ on these questions. 

What I cannot accept, however, is the properly grotesque argument which this contemptible, reckless, immoral and intellectually bust Conservative Party is running to justify and explain its human rights plans. In Grayling's thumping rhetoric to the grinning faithful in Birmingham, you do not see a meaningful and serious-minded parliamentary deliberation on the contested understandings of human rights, but an abject and irresponsible failure to engage in any intellectual or morally credible way with fundamental rights ideas.

Can it be right - can it ever be right - to deliver anybody over into circumstances where we reasonable expect they will be tortured, subject to inhuman and degrading treatment or the flagrant denial of justice? According to David Cameron and his party, this should be an option, and Jehovah rot them, those "unelected Euro judges" in Strasbourg are holding up the rendering flights. The interfering so-and-sos. Electric batteries are running down in dank cells, unused, somewhere in the world. The state torturer's rope hangs idle. All because some piffling jurist from Luxembourg believes that it can't be right to deport anyone - even your worst enemy - into the hands of humanity's darkest and most inhumane functionaries. Britain deserves better. We must scrap the Act. 

This isn't a civil and anxious debate about the proper scope of privacy rights, or the right to liberty, but a tantrum, impervious to the facts. It's the work of a smug toddler standing triumphant over a fly he's malevolently depinioned. "Aren't I a clever boy?" he gloats. The moral compass of this Conservative Party is a forgotten aftermath of shards and broken glass, arms bent and buckled. Theresa May tells cheap jokes about cats, glowing with the glib self-image of being the new deputy in town, tough on crime, tough on some undifferentiated, disagreeable them, animated only by brisk and matronly common sense. I can't begin to describe the malevolence, tawdriness and irresponsibility of this attitude.

The brutal reality of the Tories' human rights rhetoric is not that it aims to repatriate the human rights debate, but to liberate the government from elementary principles of fairness, humanity, compassion and justice. What they are proposing isn't just politically disagreeable: it is monstrous. See no evil, hear no evil cannot be a principle of British justice. 

Nobody with any moral sensibility could make the case for deporting folk to places where there is a real risk they will be tortured. Nobody with an ounce of responsible humanity could promote it. But this government, this shallow bunch of irresponsible, gut-gripped eejits don't care. It breaks my heart and burns my blood.

After all, how can the trivial matter of connecting one of your fellow, sentient creatures up to a car battery compare to the overwhelming importance of attracting a few extra UKIP votes in the debatable lands of Essex and Kent? How can the soles of feet, beaten black and blue, measure up to the significance of being able to give a sleek and populist address to your fellow Conservatives at Conference, who cheer like dunderheads, more than drowning out the distant screams? Who gives a damn if some villainous foreigner with disagreeable views finds himself suspended from the ceiling, arms half wrenched from their sockets? 

This is Britain. We have the right to live in freedom from such persons. I'm sure you'll find it in Magna Carta somewhere. Why should we care that we've pitched them into this disaster? After all, it isn't our police, our secret services who are sodomising them with truncheons or connecting up their genitalia to car batteries. Lie back and think of England. Rejoice in the liberties of a freeborn Briton: you've earned them. You're not a gypsy, or a criminal, or someone whose views the central government finds disagreeable. Your right not to be tortured isn't trivial.

Congratulations, comrades. We've finally uncovered Britain's moral mission in the world: to lend a helping political hand to tyrants and torturers in Europe, and the great wild world beyond. To excuse their torture chambers and their mistreatments of their citizens, to align ourselves with the Belarusian tyranny, and the persecutors of Kurds, and the Roma. To embolden, in short, everything most ghastly about illiberal state apparatuses. All for the sake of getting a modest electoral edge over Nigel Farage.

 

These people disgust me. 

We cannot deliver people up to torturers' chains and hooks and shrug, unmoved, and say "it is nothing to me guv'" over the anguished cries of the people - the fellow creatures - we make their victims. Yet this is precisely what David Cameron and his allies now propose, for the sake of a sympathetic response from the eurosceptic tabloids. They chafe against the modest restraints of the European Convention, flinging every cheap jibe and intellectually lazy epithet at the judges of the European Court. They want the liberty to do wrong - horrible, horrible wrong - for the sake of a human rights fairytale and good headlines in the Express. Nothing better expresses the festering rot which gnaws at British politics.

These people are scumbags. Utter, utter scumbags.