MPs vote down Farage’s proposal for UK to leave ECHR – UK politics live

7 days ago7 min read

In a decisive parliamentary maneuver that underscores the enduring complexities of Britain's post-Brexit legal identity, MPs have resoundingly voted down Nigel Farage’s provocative proposal for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This was not merely a procedural skirmish; it was a battle over the very soul of British jurisprudence, pitting nationalist sovereignty against international legal obligations, a tension that has simmered since the landmark Human Rights Act of 1998 incorporated the convention into domestic law.The Liberal Democrats, emerging as staunch defenders of the status quo, articulated a powerful rebuttal, framing the ECHR not as a foreign imposition but as a fundamental bulwark protecting ‘our elderly and most vulnerable…the very people who need it most,’ a sentiment that echoes the foundational principles of the post-war order established to prevent the horrors of the 20th century from ever repeating. The debate, however, was illuminated by the sobering testimony of figures like Mark Sedwill, the former cabinet secretary and national security adviser, whose current role in the House of Lords grants him a unique, panoramic view of statecraft.His interrogation of the failed prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, referencing the 2017 Law Commission report that presciently flagged the term 'enemy' as 'deeply problematic,' serves as a stark historical parallel. It recalls the kind of legislative ambiguity that has historically plagued democracies in times of perceived threat, where the balance between security and liberty is perpetually recalibrated.Sedwill’s pointed question—whether the deputy national security adviser or the Crown Prosecution Service was correct in their assessment of the evidence—cuts to the heart of a Churchillian dilemma: how does a nation defend itself without undermining the very freedoms it seeks to protect? This single committee hearing, seemingly a narrow inquiry into a specific legal failure, in fact reveals the immense gravitational pull of the ECHR on the UK's constitutional ecosystem. To leave it, as Farage advocates, would not be a simple treaty withdrawal; it would be a seismic event, placing the UK in the company of Belarus as the only European nation outside the convention, potentially destabilizing the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland which is underpinned by its provisions, and triggering a diplomatic rupture with the European Union that would make the Brexit negotiations seem cordial by comparison. The vote, therefore, is less an endpoint and more a significant marker in an ongoing historical realignment, a reaffirmation—for now—of a British identity that, however uneasily, remains tethered to a continental system of human rights that it helped to create.

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#UK Parliament

#ECHR

#Nigel Farage

#human rights

#legislation vote

#government policy