IN RECENT years I’ve come to the view that we need a ‘factory reset’ in the UK.
Like a smartphone that’s become painfully slow, overloaded, unproductive, and is now a major source of stress, we need a factory reset that will remove the viruses, wipe the slate clean, and allow us to start again.
What do I mean by this?
I mean we need to radically reform the legal, judicial, political and social system that has built up in this country since the Blairite revolution began in 1997.
While started by New Labour, this revolution was mainstreamed by the hapless Tories between 2010 and 2024, and is now being turbo-charged by Keir Starmer’s authoritarian progressive government.
What would such a reset look like?
An immediate halt to the policy of mass uncontrolled immigration, which is making us poorer and less safe.
An end to the state-backed policy of multiculturalism, which is dividing our society and enabling sectarianism.
The abolition of unnecessary ‘hate laws’, non-crime hate incidents and speech codes that violate our long tradition of free speech and individual liberty.
The deconstruction of an amorphous and powerful ‘quangocracy’, which takes power away from taxpaying citizens below and puts it instead in the hands of an unelected, self-interested and left-leaning managerial elite.
The radical reform, if not removal, of the Equality Act, which has reshaped our public institutions around a divisive, unBritish, and deeply corrosive brand of woke identity politics and two-tier policies that fly in the face of equality before the law.
Just as important as all this is something else that for the first time is being seriously discussed by politicians on both the right and left in Westminster: leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR.
The blunt reality is this.
We can neither regain control of our broken borders nor deport the rising number of foreign criminals in our prisons and communities without fully leaving – not just reforming – the ECHR.
Enshrined into UK domestic law by Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, in 1998, which also needs to be radically reformed, the ECHR makes it impossible for us to return to being a self-governing, sovereign state that has full control over its borders and laws.
Contrary to what the elite class tell you, we do not need to belong to the ECHR. Though few of our politicians appear to be aware of this, the UK, or England more accurately, has one of the longest traditions of protecting fundamental rights, going back one thousand years to Magna Carta and running through the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights, and Common Law tradition.
Unlike other nations that do not have this long and continuous tradition of protecting rights, and which have often seen their legal systems overthrown by authoritarian regimes, the British and the English never needed some strange, foreign, regional court and supra-national convention to protect our freedoms and rights.
As Lord Sumption points out: ‘Many of the rights which the convention proclaims were part of British law long before the convention was conceived. There is nothing in it that we cannot enact by ordinary domestic legislation. We can have whatever rights we want if there is a sufficient democratic mandate for them.’
Increasingly, however, the ECHR appears more interested in forcing us to accept its interpretations of ‘rights’ that we do not agree with while usurping our democratic institutions that would otherwise be entirely capable of defending our rights.
Though you won’t hear this in Westminster, Oxford or Cambridge, the reality is we could live perfectly happily and more securely without the ECHR – as many other Anglosphere and Commonwealth nations do today.
While members of the status-obsessed elite class routinely warn that Britain would join the likes of Russia and Belarus if it left the ECHR, reflecting a class of people who are much more concerned with how they are seen by other members of the global elite class than what is actually in the best interests of their country, the reality is that lots of states around the world neither belong to the ECHR nor have any problem at all protecting basic rights for their citizens.
Much like the European Union, furthermore, which continues to push and force its members toward ‘ever closer union’ irrespective of what its individual member-states and citizens want, the ECHR is not static – far from it.
By remaining in the ECHR, we remain firmly locked into something that genuinely thinks of itself as a ‘living instrument’, as something that changes and expands over time, irrespective of what people think and which is now utterly different from what its original creators and supporters envisaged.
As Martin Howe KC points out, the Strasbourg Court consistently interprets the ECHR by creating ever more rules and doctrines that are not founded on the actual ECHR text, and which often run counter to what its creators envisaged.
In everything from climate change to immigration, the ECHR and the judges who preside over it have not only massively expanded the definition of ‘rights’ but have done so in ways that are deeply political, not just judicial.
On one level, this has led to the many, many absurd decisions that we’ve tracked in this newsletter and which make a total mockery of our claim to be an independent, sovereign, self-governing nation-state that prioritises the security of its own people.
The Albanian drug-dealer who entered Britain illegally, set up a drugs factory and then avoided deportation by appealing to the ECHR.
The Pakistani paedophile who the ECHR ruled could not be deported because it would be ‘unduly harsh’ on his children.
The Zimbabwean paedophile who similarly escaped deportation because the ECHR ruled it would result in him ‘facing hostility’ in Zimbabwe.
Many of these cases saw asylum-seekers, illegal migrants, and/or criminals use Article 3 or Article 8 of the ECHR to avoid deportation (which is why Keir Starmer’s and Yvette Cooper’s vague talk about only reforming Article 8 of the ECHR is insufficient).
And on a deeper level this reflects a more fundamental problem with the European Convention on Human Rights, which nobody in Westminster wants you to think about.
Many of the decisions that are now flowing out of the ECHR should simply not be taking place within a supranational convention that is unaccountable to the people below, adrift from national debates, and dominated by distant, technocratic elites who, like the elite class more widely, lean strongly to the cultural left.
As Lord Sumption notes, while those beholden to the ECHR and its judgements are democracies none of them has any input whatsoever into the court’s decision-making process.
‘The states agreed on the original text. But the ECHR has emancipated itself from the text and allowed itself to wander freely over the whole realm of social policy. The expanding range of matters which it treats as concerning human rights means that an ever larger number of contentious issues will be resolved by an international body standing outside the constitutional order of the UK.’
Instead of taking place within some distant court, these debates and decisions should instead be taking place within our national, representative democracy, where they will be much closer to the people, those who ultimately have to live with the consequences of these decisions.
Ultimately, this is about how we think about political power, authority and legitimacy.
Either you believe, like me, that the true source of power, authority, and legitimacy should be the people, and that the main relationship in politics should be vertical with power running from the people to those who they elect to represent them.
Or you believe, like the elite class, that the true source of power, authority, and legitimacy lies with elites and this relationship runs horizontally, from one group of elites in Davos, to another in Westminster, to another in Washington, to another in Brussels, and so on, excluding the people entirely.
By leaving the ECHR, by returning these debates and decisions to the realm of our national representative democracy, we will strengthen our democratic institutions, restore and revive public trust, and repair a visibly fraying social contract, which risks spiralling into conflict if people continue to believe that their leaders are simply incapable of undertaking what is a core function of the state —controlling our borders.
And what about those who say Winston Churchill was an early champion of the ECHR and so by leaving we betray what it means to be British?
Well, they’re gaslighting you, too.
While Churchill certainly played a central role in drafting the original ECHR text, there’s no evidence at all that he wanted it to be directly enforceable in British courts, not least because at the time Britain’s leaders were fully aware that our country already had sufficient rights protections through the Common Law tradition and national parliament. Unlike our leaders today, in other words, they believed in this remarkable and unique inheritance and saw no need to repudiate it.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on June 20, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
