THE BIG READ: The annihilation of this generation of Tory MPs is not an outcome to be dreaded.
Rishi Sunak's party must lose the election catastrophically if it is ever to be of service to the British people again
SOMETIMES moments of clarity arrive in the middle of the night.
As a columnist for newspapers and websites, I cannot afford to risk forgetting what strikes me as an interesting insight that has occurred during the hours of darkness. Spending half the next morning asking yourself “what was that good thought I had during the night?” is pretty frustrating when you have a deadline to meet. So I have taken to sending myself an immediate e-mail, to be pondered next morning.
Today I woke up with the following aide-memoire in my in-box, sent from me to me: “The Conservative party absolutely has to lose the next general election catastrophically if it is ever to be of service to the British people again.”
I had this thought off the back of hapless flailing around by the Tories as regards the UK’s membership of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. A couple of weeks back, Rishi Sunak dropped a heavy hint that he might come round to supporting withdrawing from the ECHR. He told The Sun that national sovereignty over borders was ultimately more important than membership of a foreign court.
Since then, the Telegraph has revealed that at least a dozen Cabinet ministers are firmly opposed to leaving the ECHR. As I have covered before, there are also at least 100 members of the One Nation caucus of Tory MPs that takes a similar view. So Sunak’s Tories could not take us out of the ECHR even if he wanted them to. Which he almost certainly doesn’t.
Also since then, the ECHR has delivered perhaps its most ludicrous ruling ever: that a member nation (Switzerland on this occasion but the judgment constrains the future freedom of action of all members) is breaking the convention rights of its citizens by not going faster on the journey towards net zero carbon emissions.
The ECHR has, in effect, sought to outlaw democratic decision-making in a massive and hugely expensive policy area that is now central to European politics. Its increasingly activist stretching of the sparingly written European Convention on Human Rights is turning it into a democracy-destroying monster.
The Sunak-loyalist Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho was quick to voice her disquiet, tweeting: “I’m concerned by the Strasbourg Court decision. How we tackle climate change affects our economic, energy, and national security. Elected politicians are best placed to make those decisions.”
One could, of course, say the same about how we tackle illegal immigration in terms of our economic and national security and protection of the welfare state against dishonest foreign freeloaders.
But Coutinho’s tweet contained no suggested remedy to the assault on democracy that she had correctly identified. As such, it was an exercise in insincerity. And useless insincerity at that.
There are some suggestions floating around that the Tories could go into the next
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