2.4.2 – Relations Between Branches
Last week Kemi Badenoch announced that, should the Conservatives win the next general election, they will withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Badenoch said that withdrawal from the ECHR is necessary to “protect our borders, our veterans, and our citizens”.
The ECHR was drafted in 1950 and came into force in 1953. It codifies multiple human rights into a single document. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was established in 1959 and is based in Strasbourg, France. It has jurisdiction for adjudicating on any application by a citizen that a signatory state has infringed their rights.
In recent years, the previous Conservative government found its policy plans, particularly regarding immigration, challenged by the ECtHR. Most prominently, in June 2022, in a case called K.N. v. the United Kingdom, the ECtHR put an injunction on asylum seekers to the UK being relocated to Rwanda to have their asylum claim.
As Parliament is sovereign, legally, the UK does not have to follow ECtHR rulings. Famously, David Cameron’s government refused to reverse the blanket ban on prisoners voting despite an ECtHR judgement. Yet, the UK agreed voluntarily to sign the ECHR. Failing to follow ECtHR judgements, therefore, puts Britain in breach of an international treaty. As a prominent liberal democracy and member of the UN Security Council, there is an expectation that the UK does not deliberately breach international law. Doing so strains Britain’s international relations but also creates domestic tension as the ECHR is deeply engrained into the Good Friday Agreement that aims to keep peace and stability in Northern Ireland. Thus, given the increasing prominence of immigration as a political issue in the UK, withdrawing from the ECHR has become a mainstream political view.
Withdrawing from the ECHR is not a policy that Labour is going to adopt. As such, it creates a clear dividing line between the Conservatives and Labour on an issue likely to have centrality at the next election. The problem for the Conservatives, however, is the perception that they are simply mimicking a policy that Reform UK have already set out. Reform pledged to leave the ECHR in their 2019 and 2024 manifestos.
Whilst the Conservative change of stance on the ECHR may be popular with right-of-centre voters, there remains the question of why, if immigration is a central campaign issue, voters will revert to what they may see as a ‘Reform-light’ option in the Conservatives. This highlights the challenge that Badenoch faces in this Parliament. It feels hard to imagine that the most electorally successful party in British history may be facing an existential crisis, but to many, that is where the Conservatives are at. With pressure from Reform UK on the right, and careful Liberal Democrat targeting of seats on the left (similar to the 2024 General Election), the electoral future of the Conservative Party currently looks inherently bleak