We need a referendum on the European Court of Human Rights

“Stop the boats” is one of the five pledges designed to revive the Conservative Party under Rishi Sunak as we head towards the next general election. In electoral terms, this topic really matters, especially in Red Wall seats. Sunak seems to understand this. Yet with at least 45,000 people having crossed the English Channel illegally last year, and projections that 65,000 people may make the same journey this year, there is fury among those who voted Conservative in 2019 that this problem has not been gripped. I’m not so sure Sunak appreciates the depth of this feeling.

It’s not just the almost £7 million per day that these uninvited guests cost taxpayers; or the fact that over 200 hotels around the country have been used to house the entrants. There is a bigger, darker and far more ominous threat to the Conservative vote: national security.

A look across the North Sea to Sweden shows the appalling dangers of allowing vast numbers of young, single men from different cultures into your country. Residents of Stockholm, the so-called Venice of the North and a city I knew well in my business career 30 years ago as one of the most peaceful and beautiful in the world, are being terrorised by regular gun crime. To date, the British public has not made any link between those crossing the Channel and crime. But what if it did?

Over the last 20 years, the main body of Conservative voters has not been happy with levels of legal or illegal immigration into Britain. In recognition of this, successive Conservative manifestos since 2010 have promised to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands a year. These promises have been insultingly empty. For the fact is that, since David Cameron took office in 2010, legal net migration of non-British citizens has totalled nearly four million people, an average of 290,000 people per year. The pressure this has brought to all public services is plain to see.

All of this explains why yesterday the Conservatives dangled a carrot to their voters by letting it be suggested that the next manifesto may propose that Britain leaves the European Convention on Human Rights and its associated court.

It is with a heavy heart that I find myself urging nobody to be taken in by this nonsense. The Conservatives are simply preparing to deceive the electorate again. Even if Sunak desired to take Britain out of the ECHR, members of his own party will not allow him to do so. Within 24 hours of the policy being mooted, some Tory MPs poured cold water on such a move, which would require a parliamentary majority that Sunak knows will never be achieved. Charities and human rights lawyers would also challenge it.

Perhaps anticipating that the ECHR idea will not fly as a Conservative manifesto pledge given the split it would cause within the party, a new suggestion has been posed today in The Daily Telegraph. While judges are already not bound by European Court of Human Rights rulings, it is suggested that the bill will include “notwithstanding clauses”, explicitly stating that British courts can ignore them. But as with the present situation, that would rely on those judges making that choice and that decision. And when I look at the backgrounds and the political leanings of much of our judiciary, I think it's fair to say that this simply will not happen.

I know that in 2005, the Labour government ignored a ruling from the ECHR that prisoners should get the vote. Tony Blair’s administration, and then Gordon Brown’s, simply kicked the can down the road. But this situation is different. These would be individual deportation cases coming before a judge who would then be asked to overrule an international treaty. I think we know what the result would be.

Only a dramatic political insurgency will genuinely get the ECHR issue onto the front pages - and it needs to be there. Remember – last June it took just one ECHR judge to stop the inaugural flight from Britain to Rwanda. The fact the flight was temporarily blocked by a person operating in a foreign court is, in my view, proof that the Channel migrant crisis will never be solved while Britain takes into account ECHR rulings. 

Unfortunately, history tells us that, for all its promises, the Conservative Party is incapable of the sort of radical thinking required to extract us from this nightmare. For as long as the Tories are in power, therefore, tens of thousands of people will continue to cross the Channel each year. What is perhaps most disturbing of all is that no mainstream political party – least of all the Labour Party – will lift a finger to challenge this cataclysmic failing. However you spin it, the only way Britain will ever leave the ECHR is via a national referendum. And Richard Tice's Reform UK is the only political party that will guarantee UK citizens are given the right to sort out this mess.