Many laws and conventions eventually exhaust their usefulness. Times change, and with them the relevance and practicality of the laws devised for those times.
Take, for example, the Geneva Convention on Refugees. It was agreed in 1951 and was primarily designed to prevent any repetition of the appalling situation which developed in Europe as a result of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. We were all guilty. Britain, for example, took children in the Kindertransport but refused to take the adults.
Anyone who has watched Voyage of the Damned will wonder at the refusal of free countries to accept those fleeing blatant and undisputed persecution.
The world in 1951, however, was a very different place from the one we know now. In poor countries, most people did not know how those in the rich West lived, but now the images are beamed into their daily lives through television. They do not need to watch Dallas or Downton Abbey: any old programme will casually show food on the table, roofs which don’t leak, hospitals dispensing medical aid, pure water on tap. Naturally, they want it for themselves and their families.
Furthermore, in 1951, international travel was limited, civilian airflight not widely available, and a lot of the world was colonised and run peaceably without the trauma and upheaval of civil war.
Calls to sack Lord Hermer over 'Nazi jibe' are wrongheaded - he's helping Reform win power - Ann Widdecombe
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The theory of the convention is still morally compelling, but the definition of a refugee and the abuse thereof haverendered laws based on it unworkable.
Ditto the ECHR. It was conceived in 1950 and has, over time, morphed into a body seen as frustrating individual governments in the valid execution of policies devised by democratically elected administrations and sanctioned by their national courts.
The will to withdraw from ECHR is the product of a desire for a sovereign country to be just that and to decide its own laws. In 1998, the then-Blair government decided to incorporate the rights defined in the ECHR into British domestic law. I was shadow Home Secretary at the time and said that we would watch carefully how it worked and repeal the Act if it was abused or resulted in nonsense. It was and it did, although even I would not have predicted an ECHR judge overturning British law in the middle of the night!
For Lord Hermer to compare leaving the ECHR to Hitler’s rule by dictat was ludicrous. Nobody is proposing to abandon international law but merely insisting on the right to interpret it proportionately and not to allow it to wrest from Britain control of its own borders.
It was, however, not only a silly comparison but an inflammatory one as well. If you want to light the blue touch paper and send a shower of fireworks into public discourse, then make a comparison with Hitler. It never fails to ignite.
That much said, there were ways he could have done it without causing a furore. He could have said, “Of course, the worst example was Hitler, but we are not talking on that scale here”, but he didn’t for the simple reason that he really did see a direct comparison. That alone calls his judgement into question.
There are those who call for him to be sacked. Yet the longer he stays in office, the clearer he makes it that Labour is not serious about the proper – and lawful – control of immigration.
Let them defend their position on ECHR interference and let Britain understand that we have a government which will never put Britain first.
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