This weekend Robert Jenrick is hoping to become leader of His Majesty’s Opposition. I’m rather hoping he doesn’t.
Jenrick is the sort of politician who sees the world through the wrong end of a telescope. He doesn’t so much have a vision as tunnel vision.
The former immigration minister, current MP for Newark, Bobby J to his fan club, used the failure to deport an Indian paedophile and a Syrian bank robber as yet another reason to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
This spectacularly missed the point. While the judicial decisions might be right or wrong – and here I agree with Jenrick that they were probably wrong – they were made under British not European law, Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act.
It’s true this piece of New Labour legislation incorporates much of the European Convention, but if Jenrick wants to repeal it, I wonder which bits he thinks we can do without? The right to life? The right to free speech? The right to a fair trial?
I quite like having the right not to be tortured, the grounds the Syrian bank heist enthusiast was citing to stay in this country.
The European Convention is important as the bedrock on which Northern Ireland peace stands. It is the UK’s passport to international recognition in the civilised world.
Without it European enforcement agencies may be reluctant to catch our criminals if there’s nothing in writing to stop them being thrown into dungeons.
And we would join Russia and Belarus as a pariah state. Which, I fancy, is not the sort of company most Brits would care to keep.
Jenrick fails to grasp that Britain cannot be governed in isolation. We are globally connected. And those connections need to be protected by international law to avoid a free-for-all. There are bound to be laws some countries like which others don’t.
The UK’s Armed Forces bigwigs didn’t like it very much when the ECHR ruled in 2000 that they could no longer jail, or dishonourably discharge, gay service men and women and do so in humiliating shaming ceremonies.
It now seems astonishing they thought they still could so long after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised consensual same sex relationships. But it took an international court to force top brass to see sense.
Our government can’t apologise enough for the disgraceful treatment they suffered and gay service personnel now march openly with pride.
Holland ended its gay ban in 1974, Sweden around the same time, and even communist East Germany, a country not renowned for its liberalism, allowed openly gay people to serve from 1988.
LATEST OPINION FROM MEMBERSHIP:
What happens elsewhere in the world affects us here – wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are prime examples. But this is not a modern phenomenon.
As Remembrance Sunday approaches we should reflect on what happened 110 years ago – how it took just 37 days from a relatively minor terrorist incident in far away Sarajevo to plunge the world into total war.
The centenary of the beginning of this cataclysmic event was marked by an outpouring of books and TV documentaries to remind us just how short the timeline was between peace and the slaughter of up to 40 million people.
Perhaps all that focus was uppermost in the minds of Western leaders when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 – and might explain why they went so easy on Vladimir Putin then, suddenly made mindful of how quickly things got out of hand a century earlier.
Our leaders in 1914 didn’t sufficiently appreciate just how much Europe had become like a playground full of school bullies.
The Turks beat up the Italians. Then the Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians beat up the Turks. Bulgarians beat up the Serbs and Greeks and the Romanians and Turks piled into the Bulgarians. Picking a side was pick ‘n mix. There were bloody noses all round.
Against that backdrop of fisticuffs, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy squared up to Britain, France and Russia, the superpower equivalent of “come on then if you think you’re hard enough.”
The rest, as they say, is history. We need political leaders up to the task of avoiding the mistakes of the past. Robert Jenrick does not feel like one of those. But then, nor does Kemi Badenoch.
Which means the choice for Conservative Party members is between a rock and a hard place.
Tory leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick, hits back at Kemi Badenoch’s recent jab in the Telegraph after stating that she has “never been sacked”.
Tory leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick, hits back at Kemi Badenoch’s recent jab …
