Things are getting a bit desperate here, reader; it’s been eight posts and almost a month of on-off blogging, yet there’s still not a journalistic job-offer in sight. Is something wrong with my writing-style? Is something wrong with me?! Or is it because I don’t have a LinkedIn account, despite the suffocating nagging of family, friends, acquaintances and total strangers? Il est un mystère, I suppose; nevertheless, clearly change is needed.
Since I’d have to be an emaciated vagrant before I would even consider heeding the demands of LinkedIn’s grasping minions (or ‘people concerned for my wellbeing’, depending on perspective) and since my own person is incapable of alteration, the necessary change shall have to come from my writing. So far, it’s all been a bit measured, level-headed and factually accurate; it has been restricted to the limits of the reasonable. As I learnt from Friday’s Daily Mail, this need not be the case.
Said edition of the Mail went with the headline: ‘End Human Rights Farce’. For those of you who don’t read the nation’s most popular newspaper, the ‘farce’ that should apparently be ended is Britain’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), an act – adhered to by all European countries, EU and non-EU, bar Belarus (see human rights record) – which protects an individual’s rights to life, humane treatment, physical freedom, legal representation, privacy, family, political liberty, equality, education, property and more. Now I may be mistaken here, but I’m pretty sure that a farce is meant to be at least a little humorous; issues such as torture, slavery and discrimination (all covered by the ECHR) might actually be considered quite grave and hence non-farcical. Whatever the exact meaning of ‘farce’, I’m happy to take the Mail’s lead in terms of sentiment if it’ll further my career prospects. Indeed, I’ve already concocted some comparable headlines just to show my commitment to varied journalism: ‘Ditch Maternity Leave Joke’, ‘Stop Heating for Pensioners Lark’ and ‘Bin Palliative Care Hilarity’ (something for the NHS agenda) all fit the bill.
Writing such headlines is only the start of my liberation from the confines of reason; as it turns out, it’s acceptable to fill the article below the headline with totally misleading information. The Mail’s (and, perhaps more significantly, the Conservatives’) purported problem with the ECHR is that it impinges on parliamentary ‘sovereignty’ (a word that appears six times in a relatively short piece). Well, it doesn’t. Parliament could vote on Britain ending its membership of ECHR at any time; Parliament is the ultimate legal authority in this country, Parliament is ‘sovereign’, and it’s as simple as that. The Mail claims that the Conservative’s proposed alternative, the ‘British Bill of Rights’ (yes, that is an Orwellian ringing in your ears), will end abuses of the ECHR by ‘foreign criminals’ and terrorists. Well, it won’t. Veteran lawyer Carl Gardner analyses the Conservative proposals with a legal literacy that I entirely lack (see his full critique for more details), but his overview is this: ‘the noise and drama of the policy isn’t backed up by its substance… if the acid test is whether the plan would prevent another Abu Qatada or prison votes row – then it fails’. QCs Tim Owen and Alex Bailin assess the proposals as ‘wholly unworkable, legally contradictory and inherently inconsistent’ in their appraisal. The legal battering of the ‘British Bill of Rights’ goes on, but I’ll leave it to you to explore further (follow @JackofKent on Twitter should you wish to); it appears the experts would put the Mail’s promises of a legislative utopia down to overactive imagination.
Were I interested in catching a glimpse of the true issue that the Mail and the Conservatives have with the ECHR, I might look to the words of Nicky Morgan, current Secretary of State for Education as well as Minister for Women and Equalities (incoming irony alert!): ‘people get very frustrated with human rights’. Whoever ‘people’ (or the supporters of ‘people’) are, they find due procedure and individual rights pretty inconvenient; thus they would prefer a human rights tragedy to a human rights farce.
Thankfully though, I’m not interested; my writing has turned a new leaf and shall surely benefit from it. My next post, ‘Thwart Personal Dignity Sham’, should be up tomorrow.
Sources:
‘End Human Rights Farce’ by James Slack: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2778720/End-human-rights-farce-In-triumphant-week-British-values-Tories-unveil-plans-Parliament-judges-power-ignore-European-Court-crazy-decision-making.html
Human Rights Watch on Belarus’ human rights record: http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/belarus
Carl Gardner’s critique: http://www.headoflegal.com/2014/10/03/full-of-sound-and-fury-on-human-rights/
The legal opinion of Tim Owen QC and Alex Bailin QC: https://www.scribd.com/doc/241813468/Opinion-on-HRA-Repeal
Jack of Kent’s further reading: http://jackofkent.com/2014/10/what-to-read-on-the-tory-proposals-for-a-bill-of-rights/
The Ironical Mutineer 