Leaving the ECHR is anti-Conservative

Originally posted in The Telegraph - 6th October 2025.

Finally! We are to leave the ECHR!

How many illegal migrants has it taken for the penny to drop? At last, we are told, there will be no “woke excuses” stopping deportations.

British politics was once an exemplar on the world stage.

Today, public expectations are fed by populist soundbites - crafted more to win short-term advantage than to solve long-term problems. Let’s not allow our politics to become a shallow theatre where performance eclipses principle.

If only it were that simple. I’d wager few have read all 18 articles of the Convention. Yet when elected leaders reduce complex challenges to sensationalist soundbites: Stop the Boats, Take Back Control and Leave the ECHR  - they gain traction as quick fixes, packaged as cure-alls, with little debate over the detail. A sad reflection of where our politics has descended.

When “Leave the ECHR” becomes conditional to becoming a Tory candidate, the Party has moved into a dark place. The Party is united by shared values - a strong Britain that leads, built on a free market liberal economy, personal responsibility, and national pride. Our broad-church appeal and openness to internal debate is what sits behind our long electoral success.

Dare to unpick the policy itself and the folly of presenting it as a silver bullet to our migration challenges is easily exposed. Yes, the ECHR is dated. Leaving may well remove some UK red tape and cut down last-minute legal challenges. But then comes the harder part: convincing governments like Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, and many others - to accept returnees. That is the real bottleneck. Sign as many deportation orders as you like: if the receiving country says no, the plane never leaves. Ironically, this is where Britain’s soft power matters most - working abroad to reduce instability so fewer leave and strengthening agreements so those who do can be returned. Yet the Tory plan is to cut our aid budget even further.

Back to the ECHR. It wasn’t dreamed up by “woke lawyers in Strasbourg,” but born of the Cold War - a bulwark against Stalinist repression and a response to fascism. Britain, Churchill above all, was at its heart. The Convention was our idea of how Europe should unite around liberty, democracy, and the rule of law.

Today, authoritarianism is on the rise again. Abandoning the Convention is not leadership. Fixing it is. In particular, Article 3: preventing deportations to unsafe countries. And Article 8: protecting family life from arbitrary disruption - frustrate governments across Europe, not just the UK. But is it in our national character to run from conventions we helped create, or to lead their modernisation - joining forces with France, Germany, Italy, and others?

Punch through the soundbite and you see how the ECHR is woven into the Good Friday Agreement and underpins our Brexit deal, responsible for around a third of our GDP. Walk away, and we risk destabilising peace in Northern Ireland and throwing sand into the gears of our economy.

The ECHR is not alone in requiring an upgrade. The UN Security Council is paralysed. The WTO is gridlocked. The IMF and World Bank are struggling to keep pace with our modern world. Do we abandon these institutions too - or show the statecraft to reform them before our global order begins to unravel?

Illegal migration now tops the economy in public concern. It must be gripped. The ECHR is part of the problem – but ‘leaving it’ is not the solution. It’s a slogan that insults the complexity of the challenge and risks much more than it solves. And as a policy - it should never be a prerequisite to candidacy.

Sadly, British politics has lost its sense of purpose and direction - a shallow theatre of outrage where performance too often replaces principle.

Mimicking Reform in a war of slogans will not widen the Conservative appeal - just the opposite. Are we to be driven by short-term populism that plays well on social media?

Or are we better than this ? Able to summon the courage and vision to craft long-term policies that put country above party?