Starmer’s ECHR Excuses Start To Fall Apart

Keir Starmer is willing to pretend he is interested in reforming the European Convention on Human Rights in order to quieten voters concerned about how the Strasbourg-based court meddles with Britain’s attempts to control its borders.

But he has long insisted that leaving the ECHR altogether is not the right approach, claiming it would place the UK in the same “camp” as Russia and Belarus.

That claim has now been challenged head-on by a new paper backed by senior political figures—including members of Starmer’s own Labour party—and prominent legal figures.

Former Labour home secretary Jack Straw dismissed the argument as “devoid of serious meaning,” saying supporters of the ECHR “must do better than trot out tired, indeed nonsensical” lines.

Straw has written a foreword to a new report by the Policy Exchange think tank, which describes Starmer’s comparison as “absurd” and argues:

Outside the ECHR, the UK would be comparable not to Belarus and Russia (or North Korea or Eritrea, to name two other states that are not party to the ECHR) but to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which are common law states that share a constitutional tradition with the UK.

In his own foreword, former Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove also asked:

Is New Zealand a dictatorship because it does not subscribe to Strasbourg jurisprudence? Is Mark Carney another Lukashenko because Ottawa has not allowed Canada’s legal order to be overruled by judges from Serbia and San Marino?

Starmer is unlikely to address these questions—though he should.

Nor is he likely to engage with one of the paper’s most serious contributors, former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption, who warned that Britain’s membership of the ECHR is “an important issue which deserves to be taken seriously, and not trivialised by resort to cheap rhetorical slogans.” 

Unfortunately, Starmer and his team—and much of Britain’s political establishment—know little more than cheap slogans.