There is something profoundly un-British about the current political and legal sojourn being embarked upon by sections of the UK right. Britain, the land of habeas corpus, the rule of law, and stiff-upper-lip proceduralism, is now flirting with the idea that international law is an optional extra—like heated seats in a base-model Ford Fiesta. Nice to have, but expendable when the mood turns xenophobic.
The campaign to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), its enforcement court in Strasbourg, and sundry other international conventions is sold as a necessary precondition for “getting tough” on immigrants. The argument runs thus: pesky lawyers, foreign judges, and universal human rights norms are tying the hands of a sovereign Parliament that simply wants to put migrants on a plane, a barge, or ideally a catapult aimed vaguely at Rwanda.
But this argument collapses under even light legal scrutiny. The defining feature of law—particularly human rights law—is universality. You do not get to draft it like a nightclub bouncer’s list: “You’re covered, you’re covered, you’re not.” Once you remove legal protections on the basis that they inconvenience the state, the dagger does not hover politely over “foreigners” alone. It swings—blindly and enthusiastically—towards citizens as well.
Today it is the asylum seeker whose protections are dispensable. Tomorrow it is the protester. Next week the journalist. Eventually, the accepted citizen discovers that “British values” were not, in fact, a shield—just a slogan.
This is not an abstract point. The ECHR was not imposed on Britain by some continental cabal armed with baguettes and EU directives. Britain helped draft it after the Second World War, precisely because it had seen what happens when states are allowed to define which humans deserve rights and which ones are administrative inconveniences. To now describe it as foreign interference is historical revisionism bordering on parody.
And even on its own narrow terms, the right-wing project fails. Leaving the ECHR will have no appreciable effect on immigration numbers. Migration is not a bug in the British system; it is a structural feature of the British state. Empire created pathways, obligations, and expectations that do not evaporate because a Home Secretary bangs a lectern. You cannot spend centuries colonising half the world and then act shocked when the world occasionally shows up in Croydon.
Britain is also, inconveniently, an island. It survives not by splendid isolation but by connection—legal, economic, diplomatic. Brexit already demonstrated what happens when ideology trumps geography: supply chains wobble, labour shortages bite, and “taking back control” turns out to mean filling out more forms. Meanwhile, the United States, once the assumed constant in British foreign policy, is proving itself an increasingly unreliable ally, oscillating between transactional indifference and outright hostility depending on the occupant of the White House.
In this context, torching international legal commitments is not sovereignty; it is strategic self-harm.
Most importantly, immigration is not the central problem facing the UK. It is a convenient distraction from the real crisis: a political economy incapable of delivering growth, productivity, or a tolerable cost of living. Wages stagnate, rents soar, public services creak—and instead of addressing these structural failures, politicians point at migrants and shout, “There! That’s the problem.”
It is easier to fight human rights lawyers than to fix housing policy. Easier to denounce Strasbourg than to confront underinvestment. Easier to sell culture war bravado than economic competence.
But Britain’s greatness—real or imagined—was never built on petulant withdrawal from law. It was built on institutions, predictability, and the quiet confidence that power should be constrained, even when it is our power.
Abandoning that tradition in pursuit of performative cruelty is not just shortsighted. It is a repudiation of the very thing the right claims to defend. And in the end, when the law no longer protects “them,” it will be too late to complain that it no longer protects us either.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 