Keir Starmer defends Human Rights Act in maiden Commons speech
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Version 0 of 1. The “put upon and the bullied” in society will suffer if the Tories press ahead with their manifesto pledge to scrap the Human Rights Act, former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer has said. As the justice secretary Michael Gove insisted that the government was determined to reform Britain’s human rights laws, Starmer used his House of Commons maiden speech to issue an impassioned defence of the Human Rights Act. Starmer, who was elected as the Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras on 7 May, told MPs: “The Human Rights Act has heralded a new approach for the protection of the most vulnerable in our society, including those in care homes, child victims of abuse and of trafficking, women subjected to domestic and sexual violence, those with disabilities and victims of crime. “It will be those in low pay, those in poor housing, those with physical and mental health needs, the vulnerable, the put upon and the bullied in St Pancras and Somers Town, Regent’s Park, in Gospel Oak, in Haverstock and across my constituency who will be the losers if we abandon the guarantee of equal rights for all.” The justice secretary has been forced to delay his plans after senior Tories warned that they would rebel if Gove pressed ahead with a threat by his predecessor Chris Grayling to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. Grayling said in a Tory document last October that Britain would “be left with no alternative but to withdraw” from the convention if reforms to Britain’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights were rejected. Gove congratulated Starmer on giving his maiden speech but insisted that it was right to reform the Human Rights Act. “It has been the case that distinguished supreme court justices have expressed concerns about the way in which the HRA, the ECHR and so on have an interaction. It has also been the case that as a result of comments [by senior judges] that we have to look again. But it is important that we do so in a spirit which is open-minded and without seeking to prejudge things.” Gove regards the Grayling document as a starting point though he is making clear he is not bound by its findings. But he says that he is bound by the Conservative manifesto pledge to “scrap Labour’s Human Rights Act and introduce a British bill of rights”. The manifesto makes no mention of withdrawing from the ECHR. The justice secretary’s task has been complicated by the warning from Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, that she will not sign a legislative consent motion approving the legislation. The UK government can technically press ahead with repealing the act without the agreement of Holyrood though this would create a fresh constitutional clash because Scotland has a separate legal system. In his speech to MPs, Gove was scathing about the Labour defence of the Human Rights Act. He said: “We heard rhetoric on human rights which was ever slightly overblown. In Dickens’s Pickwick Papers there is a character called the Fat Boy who wants to make your flesh creep. I did think there was an element of the lurid in the description of what would happen if we were to tamper in any way with the Human Rights Act of 1998. “To listen to Labour members at some points you would have thought that prior to 1998 this country was a lawless wasteland in which the innocent were put to the sword and no one had any recourse to justice and that after 1998 we entered a land where the rule of law was at last respected after decades, if not centuries, of arbitrary rule. Now I have to say that while that depiction might go down well at a Labour constituency fundraising function or indeed on the leadership hustings of that party it is not appropriate, when discussing important issues like the balance between liberty and parliamentary sovereignty to indulge in that sort of rhetoric.” |