Tory WhatsApps about Sunak’s ‘willy waving’ completely miss the point on the ECHR

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Will the government ever be able to “stop the crossings”, as the prime minister promises? It seems many of his own MPs think he hasn’t got a chance while the UK remains a member of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Leaked WhatsApp messages reveal, to no one’s great surprise, that some of the “Red Wall” Tory MPs (such as the arch-reactionary Lee Anderson, who thinks you can subsist on 30p a day), believe the government hasn’t a hope enacting its new legislation while lawyers (or “lefty activist lawyers” as they tend to get labelled) can run to the courts and use the ECHR to stop people being deported to Rwanda, or wherever.

It’s no great secret, either, that home secretary Suella Braverman would love to get rid of the ECHR. Even Rishi Sunak himself, according to some, is willing to threaten to quit the ECHR if the European Court of Human Rights dares to interfere with British policy and protect universal human rights (which is what it is there for) – for which he’s now been accused, according to the leaked messages, of “willy waving”.

Bob Neill went on the record, saying that it would be “unbelievable” for the UK to put itself “in the same company as Russia and Belarus” by leaving the ECHR. Robert Buckland also called it “an undesirable state of affairs.”

There is a certain logic in the WhatsApp group’s thinking, though. Without the ECHR and its counterpart UK law passed in 1998, people in Britain would find their rights to a fair trial – or freedom of religious expression – severely curtailed. It would also plonk the UK in the same category as Russia and Belarus as pariah states.

The government’s virtual abolition of the right to claim asylum is obviously a cruel policy – and a dangerous one. The main problem with it, however, from the point of view of Anderson, Simon Clarke (high priest of the cult of Truss), Marco Longhi and others is that it would simply make this irregular migration across the English Channel even worse.

The reappearance of Liz Truss at the weekend might be as welcome as rickets making a comeback, but it should remind Tory MPs about the importance of thinking a policy through properly. All that withdrawal from the ECHR will do is encourage the refugees and the economic migrants to evade detection.

Obviously, they’d no longer call up the coastguard and end up claiming asylum from border force or other officials on arrival in the UK. Instead, they would complete the journey across the Channel, make a clandestine landing and then melt away into the countryside, en route to some contact in the UK. That might be someone they already know, or someone provided by the people smugglers.

From there, they’d live their lives entirely in the “informal” economy, working and living outside the law, and forever subject to threat of betrayal and deportation. They’d be living in the kind of fear they tried to escape. Some would in effect be modern slaves. You can imagine what might befall the women in such circumstances.

Criminalising people – unjustly – is surely not the Conservative way of doing things. There are still a few sane Tory voices, such as Bob Neill, chair of the justice committee, who believe in the rule of law – but they’re being shouted down by the extremists.

The irony is that effectively abolishing asylum would mean turning a lawful and genuine refugee into an “illegal” economic immigrant, living outside the law and in fear. That might easily include family members and children making their way to the UK to be reunited with loved ones living here legally.

You could, theoretically, impose a structure of identity cards and random checks in workplaces or on the streets – “papers, please” – to find the illegal migrants, but that would have to be a universal system, and a violation of traditional British civil rights (another irony). That was an idea floated and eventually rejected by the last Labour government because of its deep unpopularity. And it wouldn’t work, either.

So even if you think Britain is “full”, and that refugees are usually bogus and you don’t care what the rest of the world thinks, you have to see that scrapping the ECHR would not “stop the boats” and might very easily make matters worse.

We’d have no idea at all about who was entering the country, or how many were doing so because of this new incentive to evade the authorities. There would be far fewer legal refugees, and far more illegal migrants.

As should be very clear by now, the English coastline, like the French one, is far too long to patrol and monitor effectively. Even a huge increase in dedicated multi-force resources to “stop the boats” would fail to detect more than a few. The rest would get through. They are prepared now to spend large sums of money and lose their lives to get to the UK, and quitting the ECHR and all it entails will make no difference to that.

Just like Trussonomics, getting out of the ECHR sounds like a good idea, until you actually examine it or try to make it work. The Tory MP WhatsApp group will need to have another chat about this one.