THE Human Rights Act was “misnamed” and could instead have been called the “Criminal Rights Act”, the Home Secretary has said.
Speaking in the main hall of the Tory conference, Suella Braverman also quoted the poem which inspired the slogan used by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour to claim that the Conservatives represent the “many not the few”.
The Home Secretary’s speech dealt heavily with the issue of immigration, attacking international legal treaties – as she had done in an extremist speech in the US in September – as well as Labour.
Pledging to begin closing asylum hotels in the near future, Braverman said: “The biggest reason why Conservative governments have struggled to get illegal migration under control is because Labour governments passed laws that inhibit effective action.
“The truth is, we struggle to remove foreign criminals. We struggle to get accurate data on the ages of the asylum seekers. We struggle even to confiscate their phones when they arrive on our beaches.
“Our country has become enmeshed in a dense net of international rules that were designed for another era. And it is Labour that turbocharged their impact by passing the misnamed Human Rights Act. I’m surprised they didn’t call it the Criminal Rights Act.”
The 1998 Human Rights Act aimed to enshrine in UK domestic law the rights spelled out in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
While the Tories have binned plans to replace the Act through a “Bill of Rights Bill”, Braverman is one of the Conservatives who are continuing to tout leaving the European Court of Human Rights, which interprets the ECHR.
Braverman told Tory members at the party conference that people who dislike her hard-line immigration stance hold “luxury beliefs”, painting an image of a detached, privileged upper-class that oppose the Conservatives.
“The migrants that will be coming in won’t be taking their jobs. They’re more likely to have them mowing their lawns or cleaning their homes,” the Home Secretary said.
“They love soft sentences because the criminals who benefit from such ostentatious compassion won’t be terrorising their streets or grooming their children.
“They’re desperate to reverse Brexit. They think patriotism is embarrassing and have no use for their British passport unless it’s taking them to their second homes in Tuscany or the Dordogne.
“For these people I have a simple message, you are entitled to your luxury beliefs, but the British people will no longer pay for them.”
She further claimed that critics of Tory politicians were “all of them bleating the same incessant accusation: racist, racist, racist”. Braverman said the “smear” hadn’t worked on Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill, and that it wouldn’t work on her.
Claiming Jeremy Corbyn’s slogan
Closing her speech, Braverman quoted the poem which inspired Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour slogan: “For the many, not the few.”
She said: “I think we should adopt as our motto these lines from the poet [Percy Bysshe] Shelley, which I am shamelessly taking back from Labour.
“‘Rise like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number. Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep have fallen on you – You are many, they are few.’
“We stand with the many. The law-abiding, hard-working, common-sense majority, against the few. The privileged woke minority with their luxury beliefs who wield influence out of proportion to their numbers.”
Tory members gave the Home Secretary a standing ovation as she closed.
The poem The Masque of Anarchy was penned by Shelley, one of the most important romantic poets, in 1819 in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre.
