We need a “factory reset” in Britain —which includes leaving the ECHR

My thoughts on the emerging debate in Westminster

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In recent years, I’ve come to the view that we need a “factory reset” in the UK.

Like a broken smartphone that’s become painfully slow, overloaded, unproductive, and is now a major source of stress, we need a factory reset that will remove the viruses, wipe the slate clean, and allow us to start again.

What do I mean by this?

I mean we need to radically reform the legal, judicial, political, and social system that has built up in this country ever since the Blairite revolution began, in 1997.

While started by New Labour, this revolution was then mainstreamed by the hapless Tories, between 2010 and 2024, and is now being turbo-charged by Keir Starmer’s authoritarian progressive government.

And what would such a reset look like?

An immediate halt to the policy of mass uncontrolled immigration, which is making us poorer and less safe. An end to the state-backed policy of multiculturalism, which is dividing our society and enabling sectarianism.

The abolition of unnecessary ‘hate laws’, non-crime hate incidents and speech codes that violate our long long tradition of free speech and individual liberty.

The deconstruction of an amorphous and powerful ‘Quangocracy’, which takes power away from taxpaying citizens below and puts it instead in the hands of an unelected, self-interested and left-leaning managerial elite.

The radical reform, if not removal, of the Equality Act, which has reshaped our public institutions around a divisive, unBritish, and deeply corrosive brand of woke identity politics and two-tier policies that fly in the face of equality before the law.

And, just as important as all this, something else that for the very first time is now being seriously discussed by politicians on both the right and left in Westminster —leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR.

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The blunt reality is this.

We can neither regain control of our broken borders nor deport the rising number of foreign criminals in our prisons and communities without fully leaving --not just reforming-- the ECHR.

Enshrined into UK domestic law by Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, in 1998, which also needs to be radically reformed, the ECHR makes it impossible for us to return to a self-governing, sovereign state that has full control over its borders and laws.

Contrary to what the elite class tell you, we do not need to belong to the ECHR. Though few of our politicians appear to be aware of this anymore, the UK, or England more accurately, has one of the longest traditions of protecting fundamental rights, going back one thousand years to Magna Carta and running through the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights, and Common Law tradition.

Unlike other nations that do not have this long and continuous tradition of protecting rights, and which have often seen their legal systems overthrown by authoritarian regimes, the British and the English never needed some strange, foreign, regional court and supra-national convention to protect our freedoms and rights.

As Lord Sumption points out:

“Many of the rights which the convention proclaims were part of British law long before the convention was conceived. There is nothing in it that we cannot enact by ordinary domestic legislation. We can have whatever rights we want if there is a sufficient democratic mandate for them”.

Increasingly, however, the ECHR appears more interested in forcing us to accept its interpretations of “rights” that we do not agree with while usurping our democratic institutions that would otherwise be entirely capable of defending our rights.

Though you won’t hear this in Westminster, Oxford, or Cambridge …

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