Queen’s Speech

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson (Lab)]

My Lords, for some years now I have felt a sense of pride in being able to represent this House as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. However, in recent years that pride has given way to a combination of sorrow and anger at the increasingly strident way in which the British Government have sought to criticise both the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998.

Let us be absolutely clear from the outset: the European Court of Human Rights is not a European construct. It comes as a logical progression from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the determination at the end of the Second World War that the horrors that man had inflicted on his fellow man should never happen again. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came the European convention.

We now call for a Bill of Rights, but in fact we have one: it is the Human Rights Act, which was legislated for by the last Labour Government. What irony there is in the fact that at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of the signing of Magna Carta we are almost simultaneously seeking to strike down the Human Rights Act.

I think we should remind ourselves of what the 2015 Conservative Party manifesto said. It stated quite clearly:

“The next Conservative Government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights. This will break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights, and make our own Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK”.

The party has also said that it would:

“Limit the use of human rights to the most serious cases”.

However, by the time we came to the Queen’s Speech, that clear manifesto promise had been reduced, and the pledge boiled down, to 12 words:

“My Government will bring forward proposals for a British Bill of Rights”.

I did not agree with one part of the speech made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. The rest of it was admirable, but I do not think that this is a time just to reflect. There has been plenty of time for reflection. It is nine years since David Cameron, although he was not Prime Minister at the time, established a panel of legal experts. Despite the passage of those nine years, the manifesto pledge that we were given proposed a law of constitutional standing with no knowledge of the content and no clarity as to its compatibility with our international and treaty obligations, especially to the devolved parts of the United Kingdom. The jingoistic claims about the Human Rights Act undermining British sovereignty do not stand up to examination. In fact, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, showed us, the reverse is the case. Before there was a remedy under British law in British courts, there was only one course of redress: to take your case to Strasbourg. It was not a case of increasing the powers of British courts.

Government policy is very confused at present, as the house magazine of the Conservative Party this morning shows us very clearly in its graphic headline, “May and Gove split with PM in human rights row”. It is not a question of further consultation or further clarification, it is that despite the last decade of deliberations there is still an overwhelming need to patch up the divisions inside the Conservative Party and the splits that so clearly exist there.

As we appear weak in our defence of human rights, we are doing two things simultaneously. We are, I believe, weakening our moral authority and giving comfort and succour to those who are poor in their application of the convention. That will be a disservice to mankind and a disservice to human rights, and it is a course that we should resist entirely when the legislation comes before us.