What’s so confusing about human rights is working out to whom they apply. After all, “human” could mean anyone. This is not just a matter of those endlessly rehearsed questions about what “family life” means, or how the rights of irregular migrants intersect with the need to have control of our borders. This week, a much more pressing, and distressing, iteration of this issue has been brought to light. In selfless service to the public good, Reform UK have exposed what they fear is a grave injustice: that the government has breached human rights of extremely rich expatriates who wish to donate to political parties. Such as the businessman Christopher Harborne, who last year kindly gave Reform £12 million, and who happens to live in Thailand, to have dual citizenship, and to be known also as Chakrit Sakunkrit.
Monstrously, the Starmer regime has decreed that gifts from expatriates to Britain’s political parties must not exceed a meagre £100,000 per annum. Supposedly the justification for this is that while most expat donations are “entirely unproblematic”, the permissibility of such donations poses “an additional risk of foreign money leaching into British politics”, and that investigating suspected malfeasance is “more complex” for the UK authorities. The review in question also objects, in an unmistakable echo of Stalin’s Great Terror, that “wealthy individuals” who have chosen “to minimise their contribution to the UK Exchequer” are still allowed “to make potentially game-changing donations into British politics.”
The Daily Telegraph reports that the Reform party treasurer, Charlton Edwards, has duly written to the Secretary of State for Housing, Steve Reed, to protest that the Starmerite stricture constitutes “retrospective interference with vested financial rights”. It falls foul of the European Convention on Human Rights in two places: Article 1 of Protocol 1, concerning the protection of property, and Article 6 of the main Convention – the right to a fair trial. Edwards charges that the cap also raises a “direct issue” under Article 7, which rules that no one shall be found guilty for an act which has become a crime since they enacted it.
The government claims the changes are compliant with the ECHR. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? If an expatriate wants to donate money to a party that wants to abolish the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, is it not his human right to do so? The Convention, after all, was drawn up in the late 1940s, in the dawn after the darkest hour, to ensure that never again would people be subjected to the horrors of totalitarianism. And what could be more illiberal and undemocratic than trying to stop a British citizen – or indeed a British-Thai citizen – from generously contributing millions and millions of pounds to a British political party?
This does however raise an intriguing question. Were this heart-rending case to go to court, and were it still to be in process when Reform UK won an election – would high principle force the new government regretfully to pause their pledge to leave the ECHR immediately, until their case was won? Perhaps the way to untangle our conundrum is to seek the guidance of a place which Reform’s leaders have hailed as a model for our benighted island: the United Arab Emirates. Reform’s Richard Tice, a frequent visitor, told the BBC last year that Britain should learn from the UAE. As he put it: “if you’re at a coffee shop, and as a lady you leave your handbag and your phone on the table, you go to the loo, then you come back a few minutes later – guess what? Your handbag’s still there, your phone’s still there. And that is the sort of society we should aspire to.” Likewise, this January, Farage counselled that Britain has “a lot to learn” from the UAE.
And no wonder. That beautifully lit desert utopia is not only the haven that takes in many refugees from Britain’s ever-darkening dystopia, driven from their native land by its relentless tsunami of coffee shop handbag theft and indifferent weather, and the fact it has a tax system. Fittingly, Farage made his observation at a party to celebrate half a decade of GB News, in the most natural setting to cheer Britain’s one truly patriotic news channel: the Palm Tower, Dubai.
He also praised the UAE’s attractive mix of low crime, entrepreneurship and “sensible” taxes. Admittedly, it’s not immediately obvious how a state can achieve a low crime rate with even lower taxes. Perhaps it has something to do with human rights. But alas, on closer inspection, it transpires that the UAE is an absolute monarchy with a human rights record that warrants a Wikipedia entry, entitled “Human rights in the United Arab Emirates”, of over 13,000 words. And not, sadly, in a good way.
Indeed, this week allegations emerged in the Times that British expats in the UAE had had their human rights violated for taking photos of the Iranian missile strikes on the emirate, on the grounds that it is forbidden to take photographs which might “disturb public security”. There are claims of sleep deprivation, denial of medication, coercion to sign documents in Arabic, even beatings. Any such treatment is abhorrent, and should never happen. There can be no justification for it. If only there had been some indication of the UAE’s human rights record.
So what should we infer from all this? The only sensible conclusion is to follow Reform’s wise advice that Britain should strive to be more like a country that doesn’t have much in the way of human rights, because these rights are so important and should not be infringed by the government, and the European Convention and the act of parliament enshrining those rights in UK law should be abolished as soon as possible.
For the UK has clearly been doing human rights all wrong. The plight of the generosity of expatriate donors is not the first time that the human rights of some of our most vulnerable citizens appear to have been breached. Consider the freehold investors, for instance, who challenged the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. This, among other horrors, tramples on their right to charge leaseholders professional and legal fees for lease extensions. The Act, the freeholders pointed out, breached their human right to private property under Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention. Yet the High Court had the impertinence to dismiss their cries for justice.
So what we really need is some sort of rule to help us make sure that billionaire expats can exercise their human right to spend as much money as they like funding parties that want to abolish the Human Rights Act. And that the human rights of other expats living in countries with little respect for human rights are respected – albeit without accidentally extending those rights to the point where their cleaners, say, could form a trade union. That, God forbid, would make Dubai a bit too much like Britain. It will not be easy, but it is now past time to ensure that human rights are reserved for the right humans.
[Further reading: Reform UK is too weird to win]
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