Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg warns Lord Cameron not to ignore public view on immigration

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg warns Lord Cameron not to ignore public view on immigration
Gabrielle Wilde

By Gabrielle Wilde


Published: 25/04/2024

- 11:43

Updated: 25/04/2024

- 11:52

Jacob Rees-Mogg shared his views on the ECHR

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that Lord Cameron has not learnt “the lesson of Brexit” amid reports that he could block a decision about a UK exit from the European Court on Human Rights.

Sir Jacob said on GB News: “When the Prime Minister made the surprising decision last year to bring David now Lord Cameron back into politics by appointing him as Foreign Secretary, David Cameron's old Chancellor and charm George Osborne chimed in and claimed leaving the European Court of Human Rights was off the table as long as he was the new Foreign Secretary…

“He really ought to have learned the lesson of Brexit by now. The British people do not like being told what to do by foreign unelected bureaucrats, especially ones that have become increasingly politicised, as in the case of the European Commission who are unelected bureaucrats and were unaccountable to the British people.

“We have no way of getting rid of the people who issued the rule 39 order that blocked the original Rwanda deportation flight two years ago. The judges that sit on the European Court human rights are political nominees in many cases.

“This means that at one point prior to Russia's expulsion from the Council of Europe, one of the judges who sat on this Court was nominated by none other than Vladimir Putin, and you had no means of ousting him.

“While the EU and the ECHR are separate and distinct institutions. The principle remains the same, sovereignty in this country belongs to the British people who delegate it to the King in Parliament for five years at a time.

“The laws passed by Parliament are the ultimate valid authority. In the case of the EU, David Cameron promised to reduce immigration down from the hundreds to the tens of thousands.

“This was in the Tory manifesto for 2010 but because we were part of an institution that disregarded the democratic will of the British people, there was no means of controlling mass migration from the bloc and his promise was never and still has not been met.

“The thing about the EU is that it is and always was an explicitly political project, whereas the ECHR operates on the pretence that it is merely a body that interprets the European Convention on Human Rights, but they've been going so much further.

“I've mentioned before the problem with its living instrument doctrine, the idea that it can invent new rights as it pleases as long as the rights are in its definition in the spirit of the original convention.

“The ramifications of this policy were on full display recently when it decided that Switzerland breached the rights of its citizens by not pursuing a radical green agenda. This brings the court directly into policy decisions and other similar cases are now expected to be heard by the court.

“The court is now as politicised as the EU, and although the EU was bad for this country, at least there was a thin veil of democracy in the European Parliament, in the case of the ECHR there's nothing you can do.

“There's no way of voting to change the law, which is exactly why it's time to leave it, as the real safeguard of human rights has long been Parliament via your votes and the sooner the noble lord Cameron understands this better.”

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