After years of huffing and puffing about the Human Rights Act (HRA) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Tories have published their Bill to “repeal and replace’ the Human Rights Act. No one should be in any doubt that they intend to achieve a seismic shift in the way in which human rights are enforced across the UK.  The contents of the bill also mean major changes to the devolved settlement and will necessitate the amendment of the Scotland Act.

Notwithstanding the rejuvenation of the independence campaign by the Scottish Government, for me the highlight of the week was the success of the court action to stop the flight to Rwanda deporting asylum seekers.  The interim action taken to stop the flight on Tuesday evening was ultimately successful at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg which, it seems, attached greater weight to the concerns of the UN High Commission on Refugees than the English courts. That is not to say that the legal action in England did not meet with some degree of success. Clearly the threat of such action made the Home Office take some people off the flight and the arguments have yet to be heard in full at judicial review. 

As is so often the case, one of the most powerful indictments of Boris Johnson this week came from a former friend and ally, the well-respected Tory MP Jesse Norman. In an excoriating letter he set out the reasons he had no confidence in the Prime Minister. The Johnson government, he said, lacks a sense of mission; it has a majority but no long-term plan and, rather than governing, it prefers the easy road of constant campaign mode, replacing sensible planning with empty rhetoric.

I am writing this column in Oxford where I have spent the last two days attending the celebrations surrounding a dear friend’s inaugural professorial lecture. It has been challenging for me because she is a social scientist working in the field of public health, which is outside of my professional comfort zone, but that is no bad thing. In fact, it has been a salutary reminder of the need for politicians to be humble and listen to people who know what they are talking about.