Today is the start of the Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester and the Home Secretary and Minister of State at the Equalities Office, Theresa May, hasn't wasted the chance to say something controversial and of great concern. In the BBC's article Home Secretary Theresa May wants Human Rights Act axed, she says that she wants the existing Human Rights Act 1998 (which puts the protections in the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law) scrapped and replaced with a Bill of Rights. Why?I'd personally like to see the Human Rights Act go because I think we have had some problems with it.
I see it, here in the Home Office, particularly, the sort of problems we have in being unable to deport people who perhaps are terrorist suspects.
Obviously we've seen it with some foreign criminals who are in the UK.
Trying hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that this is a blatant and shameful attempt to institutionalise and legitimise racism and xenophobia by the state, I have to ask if we're seriously expected to believe we don't already have legislation in place to permit deportation under such circumstances? And that such laws are so lax the only solution is to scrap the HRA?
I can't help but feel that the current administration's continuing swing to the extreme right of the political spectrum is epitomised by this suggestion and I do start to wonder how much the proposal is actually driven by the 'middle England' section of the population who voted for Prime Minister David Cameron and Mrs May in the first place. Certainly, it's difficult not to draw that conclusion when the tabloid newspapers read by middle Englanders - for example, the Daily Mail - routinely publish such scare stories under garish headlines like Terror suspect allowed to stay in Britain 'because deporting him would be unfair on his children' and Sex attacker we can’t deport gets £1,000 a month in handouts (... and, guess what, the father of two says it's his human right to live in Britain). Meanwhile, migrant women continue to be incarcerated in the Yarl's Wood immigration prison - and the ending of child detention has, as UK Indymedia points out, been "skillfully employed by the coalition government to avoid talking about the brutal and inhumane detention regime in general" [via].
Mr Cameron, interviewed on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, continued this avoidance of talking about these breaches of human rights when he said he wanted to change the "chilling culture" created by the HRA.
He cited an example of a prison van being driven nearly 100 miles to be used to transport a prisoner 200 yards "when he was perfectly happy to walk".
"The Human Rights Act doesn't say that's what you have to do. It's the sort of chilling effect of people thinking 'I will be found guilty under it'."
"The government can do a huge amount to communicate to institutions and individuals let's have some commonsense, let's have some judgment, let's have that applying rather than this over-interpretation of what's there."
This is a variation on the obnoxious "political correctness gone mad" smokescreen so beloved of reactionaries everywhere as an all-purpose way of denying everyone else their fundamental human rights.
Kai Chang deconstructed that particular meme in an essay called The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness" (link here) - and it still holds true five years later.
Simply put, the great "PC" cliché, as commonly deployed in mainstream discourse, is cultural propaganda designed to befuddle and misdirect while defending the current power structure. All politics deal with power relations, and [...] there’s a stark asymmetry of power between the defiant megaphone-wielders who complain of being constrained by humorless hypersensitivity from below, and the under-represented people of color, women, LGBT, disabled, poor, and otherwise marginalized or dispossessed people who have no choice but to absorb the linguistic, cultural, and physical barbs of the ruling class.
Mrs May's announcement might seem to be almost cynical in its timing. As Liberty, the organisation campaigning for human rights in the UK, notes, the Bill of Rights Commission public consultation is nearing its closing date.
This consultation asks ‘do we need a UK Bill of Rights?’ - we might be missing something here, but haven’t we already got a modern day Bill of Rights in this country? Yes we have; it’s called the Human Rights Act (and to the consternation of its critics it protects everyone in our country regardless of nationality, race, sex, wealth or the preferences of the powerful).
The public consultation is open until Friday 11th November 2011 so please get writing now. Why not encourage a friend or colleague to respond and double your efforts? To get you started read our six reasons why we don't need a replacement Bill of Rights. [via]
In the words of Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti:
Modern Conservatives should think again about human rights values that were truly Churchill's legacy.
Only a pretty 'nasty party' would promote human rights in the Middle East whilst scrapping them at home. [via]
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Image via the UK Human Rights Blog
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Cross-posted at Bird of Paradox
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