This is an important debate and the Government has lodged a substantive motion. I very much hope that the minister will accept that there is a great deal with which we agree—in her opening comments, at least—in both the sentiment and substance of what she had to say. However, it is no secret that there are nuances between us, and an open debate is taking place within the Conservative Party—in the wider community, too—about the settlement of current legislation and how that might be revisited in the event of a Conservative majority Government after the general election in barely six months. I will return to that as I proceed.
I was born in the shadow of the second world war, in which millions died, including 6 million Jews and others who were murdered by the Nazis. My childhood was spent growing up in a world that was dominated by the cold war and by a Soviet Union that had murdered millions more in gulag camps across Siberia. My early teenage years witnessed the dismaying excess of the United States in its desperate struggle to secure progress in Vietnam, while in adjacent Cambodia, Pol Pot and his henchmen murdered another 5 million people. In the years since, whether in the Balkans and Kosovo, in China or across the middle east, we have all borne witness to the very worst of the world in which we live.
I have heard one Republican US President justify the detention without charge or trial of individuals at Guantanamo Bay; I heard another Democrat US presidential candidate condemn Guantanamo Bay when campaigning for office—yet, six years into his presidency, he has failed to keep any promise that he made to close it down.
My family’s business was based just 100 yards or so from the worst of Glasgow’s long-since demolished Gorbals community. As a child, and admittedly from the warmth and privilege of a comfortable motor car that my middle-class upbringing provided, I saw the squalor and poverty in that community without ever experiencing it. However, I knew that what I saw was wrong.
When I fought my first council by-election in the North Kelvin and Park ward of Strathclyde region more than 30 years ago and saw behind the newly cleaned stone façades of the Great Western Road tenements to find many with nothing but shared outdoor sanitation, I knew that that was wrong, too. I am not talking about the communities—they were proud and resilient. Rather, what was wrong was what they were expected to endure. In many cases they were expected to do so for too long and without hope, whatever the colour of Government, for all colours and combinations of Government have, undeniably, had their turn in office both nationally and locally. There has been progress, but at times the progress in human rights here at home has been painfully cautious. Politicians of all colours have succeeded and disappointed in turn.
I do not look at any other politician and imagine or expect them to care nothing for values or human rights; nor do I find any productive mileage in accusing others of indifference. Invective, insults and polemics that are rooted in spite and bile rarely move hearts, minds or policy. We all have ideals, even if we are not all idealists. I suppose that I hope to be an idealistic pragmatist: I seek progress for humankind and I will settle for half a glass of progress now rather than none at all.
Although Scotland joined the UK in the 17th and 18th centuries, I celebrate the UK’s wider heritage of the Magna Carta—its 800th anniversary falls next year—and the bill of rights and the claim of right. I celebrate the European convention on human rights, which was signed in Rome in 1950, and the fact that the UK was the first nation to ratify it.
The ECHR was drafted in the post-war period largely by David Maxwell Fyfe. He later became a Scottish Conservative MP, but was then the man who at Nuremberg eviscerated the evidence and theatrical bombast and cunning of Hermann Göring. The convention was born of a determination to ensure that the horrors that had been perpetrated by Hitler, and even then those of Stalin as he sent his citizens to gulag camps without trial, could never be repeated.
Irrespective of the dismay that many people feel about how the European Court of Human Rights has sought to develop and reinterpret, with all its creativity, the terms of that historic convention, I am in no doubt that it stands well the test of more than half a century, and that it demonstrates in its fundamental text absolute rights that should never be set aside: the right not to be tortured, the right not to be enslaved, the right to a fair trial and, as defined, the right to life and to liberty.
The Prime Minister has made it plain that a future UK Conservative Government is resolved to review legislation, and that it will work with all to establish a new British bill of rights and responsibilities, at the heart of which will be the original text of the European convention on human rights, which would be a laudable statement of principles for any modern nation.
I accept totally that, as we debate these matters, the terms and detail of any alternative are far from clear. I note freely, as well as the words of the minister, the many worries that have been expressed by organisations that have prepared briefings ahead of the debate. I acknowledge, too, that those concerns exist in the Conservative Party, so we are far from knowing what it is that we may be asked to form a judgment about.
However, we will be seeking, in any process, to step back from the European Court of Human Rights’ increasingly unsupportable interpretation of the convention as a “living instrument”, and its so-called mission creep, particularly to reinterpret article 8 of the convention—the “Right to respect for private and family life.” It says:
“There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
I find the European Court of Human Rights’ rulings that prisoners should be allowed to undergo artificial insemination or that, despite having committed the most serious of crimes, they should be allowed to remain in the UK, incompatible with the qualifications that are set out in the convention. Nor can I support the court’s view that murderers cannot be sentenced to prison for life because its interpretation of such a sentence is, since 2013, that that constitutes a breach of article 3 and that those are, in its opinion,
“torture or ... inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
It is for others to explain why that is acceptable; I look forward to hearing them try to do so.
It is not the wish of the people of Scotland, any more than it is the wish of people elsewhere in the UK, that prisoners should be free to vote in national elections. The Deputy First Minister’s remarks in that regard have been touched on.
This, then, is a key principle for Conservatives. After all the talk of the sovereign will of the Scottish people, how hollow it is rendered if the interpretation of law is subject not to those who are elected by us, or to the courts of our own land, but to others who feel free to impose their interpretation of our laws on us.
The Prime Minister has therefore concluded that a future Conservative Government will repeal Labour’s Human Rights Act 1998, and will, by so doing, restore the UK to the position of other European nations—Germany, for example, where the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that if there is a conflict between the German basic law and the European convention on human rights, the basic law prevails. It was Labour’s 1998 act that, in its detail, set that consideration aside for this country, where we believe—as people in Germany do of theirs—that our laws should prevail.
For the avoidance of doubt, we intend to enshrine the text of the original human rights convention in primary legislation in a British bill of rights and responsibilities. We will clarify the interpretation of convention rights to reflect a proper balance between rights and responsibilities, and to ensure that they are applied in accordance with the original intentions for the convention, and the wider mainstream understanding of those rights by the public.
We will break the formal link between the British courts and the European Court of Human Rights and end the ability of that court to force the UK to change the law. We will prevent our laws from being, in effect, rewritten through interpretation.
Scottish Conservatives recognise entirely the issues that arise with regard to schedule 4 to the Scotland Act 1998. We believe that, if the European convention on human rights is enshrined in primary legislation, such a change would not undermine the existing devolution settlement. However, I note what the minister has said today and in response to questions, and I do not seek to minimise in any way the varied potential scenarios that may arise, and which would create complication and confusion.
We recognise that debating the matter in the months leading up to a UK election will ensure that the atmosphere in which we do so will be febrile, hot-housed and regrettably, if inevitably, hyperbolic. In the event of a Conservative Government being elected, measured and sincere arguments will be tested and any arrangements will be achieved only through good will and mature determination.
I do not despair even now, and not naively, of having a measured and sensible discussion between Governments in the UK that would secure a UK bill of rights and responsibilities in which we could all have confidence and a stake, and in which common sense will ensure that all Scots can have confidence, too.
I do not expect such an approach to carry the support or reflect the will of Parliament this afternoon, although Murdo Fraser and I will listen with ears open to intelligent, constructive and thoughtful comments from colleagues.
As I said when I began my speech, Scottish Conservatives, on this most fundamental of subjects, make no claim to a monopoly of truth or what is right, but neither can anyone else in the chamber. In that spirit, I move amendment S4M-11484.1, to leave out from “expresses its confidence” to end and insert:
“believes that human rights must be protected in a manner that promotes public confidence and remains fitting to the spirit of the convention and other international statements of rights; recalls the UK’s role in composing the convention and its status as the first nation to ratify it; acknowledges the work of David Maxwell Fyfe in the drafting of the convention, and welcomes the position of the UK as a prominent supporter of democracy, human rights and the rule of law internationally, taking real steps to end abuses of human rights around the globe.”
15:17