Back in 1999, as a rising lawyer, Keir Starmer wrote a 938-page book on European human rights law. There aren’t many people who are likely to have curled up with that on the beach this summer, but it does tell us something important about the Prime Minister. A leader often accused of lacking core beliefs has an enduring commitment to human rights. As he told his biographer Tom Baldwin: “There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer”.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer was mostly a model of political restraint. But one of the notable exceptions came in 2009 when he assailed the Conservatives’ plan to replace the Human Rights Act with a British bill of rights. “It would be to this country’s shame if we lost the clear and basic statements of our citizens’ human rights provided by the Human Rights Act on the basis of a fundamentally flawed analysis of their origin and relevance to our society,” he declared in the annual lecture of the Crown Prosecution Service. “The idea that these human rights should somehow stop in the English Channel is odd and, frankly, impossible to defend.”
It is Starmer’s misfortune, then, to be Prime Minister at a time when human rights have never been less politically fashionable. This week started with Nigel Farage vowing to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (which the Human Rights Act incorporated into British law). Kemi Badenoch has signalled that she is likely to make the same pledge at this autumn’s Conservative Party conference.
Labour MPs, still scarred by the Brexit years, fear the party being left as the odd one out. And it isn’t only Starmer’s opponents who are revolting against the status quo. This summer has seen Labour grandees – Gordon Brown, Neil Kinnock – attempt to write Rachel Reeves’ next Budget in advance. Now Yvette Cooper has got a sense of how the Chancellor must feel. Two former home secretaries – David Blunkett and Jack Straw – have inveighed against the ECHR.
Blunkett has called for the UK to suspend parts of the convention in order to accelerate the deportation of failed asylum seekers; Straw has urged the government to “decouple” from the ECHR, warning that “the convention – and crucially, its interpretation – is now being used in ways which were never, ever intended when it was drafted”.
Starmer would agree with that broad sentiment. He was privately exasperated by the “chicken nugget case” which saw a judge allow an Albanian criminal to remain in the UK after lawyers warned that his 10-year-old son “will not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad”. In another instance, a woman’s deportation to Grenada was delayed after she warned that her husband disliked spicy Caribbean food and the heat.
Cooper is reviewing the use of Article 8, which guarantees “the right to respect for private and family life”, and is often blamed for such cases. To complaints of slowness from some inside government – the review was first announced at the end of March – an ally of the Home Secretary emphasises that it will be part of a “much more ambitious programme of [asylum] reform”, which will be published in October.
But a Downing Street accused of going soft on Farage’s deportation plan has been clear about where the limits lie. It endorsed a warning by Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, that leaving the ECHR would “put us in a club with Russia and Belarus” and stated that suspension is “not something we are looking at”.
Many in government argue, as one official puts it, that “the problem is largely in the English courts where our judges are overapplying the ECHR”. They added: “If you can deal with that through legislating on guidance that has obvious benefits and doesn’t undermine the Good Friday Agreement” (which withdrawal from the ECHR would breach).
Yet an increasing number believe that, for reasons of both politics and principle, suspension should not be ruled out. “It illustrates the fundamental Keir dilemma,” an MP says. “Is he a traditional liberal or a changemaker who understands the new world?”
Labour critics often accuse the Attorney General, Richard Hermer, of acting as a progressive brake on the government. But in the case of the ECHR, insiders emphasise, it is Starmer who is the defining actor. “I don’t think anyone knows what Keir is willing to do. Perhaps even Keir himself,” concludes one Starmer ally.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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