Liberal elites have a fatal weakness. They seem sure the arc of history will bend toward them. Their innate distaste for nativist populism will automatically be shared by everyone, even the deprived and desperate, once the facts are set out in triplicate.
I am paraphrasing an old article from The Week, about the first administration of Donald Trump. It remains apposite. Kamala Harris’s privileged supporters suffered the same delusion as Hillary Clinton’s. This side of the Atlantic, the Brexit poll confounded a united front of the main parties.
Bear with me, you are not reading the wrong magazine. For I detect the same attitude over the UK’s continuing membership of the European Court of Human Rights and adherence to the convention. As the Gazette reported on Friday, Labour’s election win seems to have reassured many who feared the UK might be on an exit trajectory.
Sir Keir Starmer did, it is true, literally write the book on the Human Rights Act. The court is for the moment safe from ‘silly Tory MPs’, says Geoffrey Robertson. Robert Spano, former ECtHR president, is ‘confident’ the UK will have a ‘more balanced’ relationship with the court.
Reaching for the crude electoral calculus, however, I am less sanguine. Labour won its stonking majority on fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed in 2019 (the party’s ‘worst result ever’). It has since dipped below 30%. Together, the Conservatives and Reform are polling close to 50%.
We are probably years away from another general election. But many pundits – including, I note, the well-connected former Sky News editor Adam Boulton – consider a Conservative-Reform coalition ‘inevitable’. Nigel Farage, the most influential political operator of our age, demanded a referendum on leaving the European Court of Human Rights in his maiden Commons speech. Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick are kindred spirits. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is, at best, ambivalent.
Yes, there are formidable constitutional hurdles to clear. But is withdrawal really so inconceivable? Leaving the European Union was inconceivable, once.
As for the ‘arc of history’, we cannot ignore the wider European context either. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is only the latest populist leader to go to war with judges over immigration.
Can the centre hold?
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