Why the Push To Leave the ECHR Is Built on Racial Illiteracy and a Deep Misunderstanding of Rights: A Narrative Audit
- leena569
- Nov 20
- 6 min read
Public debate on the European Convention on Human Rights has been shaped by a very specific narrative. Reform UK, segments of the Conservative Party and several media outlets have positioned the ECHR as an external obstruction that stops Britain from controlling its borders, removes government authority and gives endless privileges to asylum seekers and foreign criminals. This narrative has been repeated so frequently that many people now treat it as established truth. This narrative audit exposes how this storyline works, what it hides and what it relies on.
The story being sold to the public claims that leaving the ECHR will fix asylum numbers, restore sovereignty and free the government from unreasonable constraints. None of this is true. The evidence shows that the ECHR is a British invention. The postwar government helped draft it. Winston Churchill publicly championed it. It is not part of the European Union and never was. It applies equally to every member state of the Council of Europe. It is a framework that protects British citizens from abuses of power by their own state. The narrative that Britain is held captive by a foreign court collapses once the history is examined.
The call to leave the ECHR only makes sense inside a racialised frame. The public is encouraged to imagine that human rights are a luxury that belong mainly to migrants, refugees and minorities. The campaign encourages people to believe that white British citizens would never need these protections, that the state will always treat them fairly and that legal safeguards matter only for ‘Other People.’ This belief is widespread, well documented in voting analysis and reflected in the demographics of white-nationalist aligned political groups. It is racial hostility expressed through policy rather than slurs. It is the assumption that the state sees white citizens as the natural default and everyone else as conditional.
A narrative audit must test the claims behind the political slogans. If leaving the ECHR is truly about protecting Britain, there must be evidence that the ECHR is responsible for the asylum backlog. No such evidence exists. The backlog is an administrative failure inside the Home Office. Independent reporting has repeatedly shown that the majority of delays stem from missing caseworkers, unprocessed files and incomplete decision making. The ECHR does not dictate how quickly the UK processes asylum claims. The Convention only intervenes when the government intends to remove a person to treatment that meets the legal threshold of inhuman or degrading. That threshold is extremely high. Courts do not apply it lightly.
Opponents of the ECHR often insist that the Convention blocks deportations and lets criminals stay in the UK. A review of case law shows that this category of cases accounts for a very small proportion of overall applications. The vast majority of UK cases relate to British citizens. These include wrongful convictions, discrimination, unlawful detention, failures in policing, rights over property and repeated state failures that harmed ordinary people. Hillsborough families used human rights law. So did victims of domestic surveillance programmes. So did families affected by failures in state care. These were not asylum seekers. They were white working class families, elderly citizens, disabled residents and people who lacked the power to oppose state decisions without legal support. The narrative that the ECHR only protects outsiders collapses on contact with the evidence.
Another story pushed by white-identity aligned political blocs suggests that Britain can replace the ECHR with a domestic Bill of Rights. Several governments tried to do this. Each attempt collapsed. The proposals could not meet international treaty obligations, including the Belfast and Good Friday Agreements that rely on the ECHR as an accountable standard. The Home Office’s own lawyers warned that removing the Convention would damage extradition agreements and cooperation between UK and European law enforcement. Numerous parliamentary committees identified the same risks. A British Bill of Rights was eventually dropped because it would have weakened legal safeguards for citizens and concentrated too much unchecked power in ministers’ hands. None of these facts appear in the political slogans.
Opponents also claim that Britain needs to leave the ECHR to revive the Rwanda scheme. This argument is not legally or practically sustainable. The UK Supreme Court’s judgment on Rwanda was based on factual assessment of the risk of refoulement, supported by evidence from The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and past conduct. This was not an ideological judgment. It was a risk judgment based on conditions. Leaving the ECHR does not alter the factual reality in Rwanda. A policy cannot become lawful by removing the referee. The underlying risk would remain the same because the Convention is not the source of the risk. Reality is.
At this point in the audit, the narrative starts to unravel. None of the major claims made by ECHR opponents are supported by evidence. None of the suggested benefits would materialise. The asylum backlog cannot be solved by leaving an international treaty. Rwanda cannot be made safe through political will. A domestic Bill of Rights cannot stabilise a system that is already overloaded and mistrusted. When a political narrative falls apart this completely, we must examine the emotional frame that sustains it.
The core emotional frame is the belief that human rights are protections for other people. Many white British voters assume that the state will always treat them reasonably. They picture the removal of rights frameworks as something that will target migrants and minorities only. This confidence comes from racial privilege, whereas minorities know and defend their rights because the racial hierarchy has forced them to. History shows the opposite. Every documented case of state overreach in this country has involved white British citizens harmed by their own government. The miners at Orgreave, the families at Hillsborough, the victims of forced adoption, the students surveyed in secret, the residents abused in children’s homes and secure institutions. These people needed human rights laws. Without them, they had nothing.
The refusal to recognise this is racial illiteracy. It is the belief that the government’s power will always be used in a controlled and targeted way against those who are not white and not British. It is also the belief that the state will never apply the same powers to the majority. This belief is not new. It is the same logic that has underpinned every drift toward authoritarianism: the state should have stronger powers, and those powers will only ever be used on the people who deserve it. History never supports this idea. The state always widens the definition of who deserves it.
A narrative audit must conclude by identifying what is at stake. Leaving the ECHR does not restore sovereignty. It removes a system of accountability that protects everyone in the country. It does not solve the asylum backlog. It leaves the same administrative chaos in place. It does not fix deportations. It risks legal isolation and treaty breaches. It does not solve public frustration. It removes the last remaining safeguard for citizens who lack money and influence.
Anti-rights political actors and others rely on the public not knowing any of this. They rely on the average person never having read the Convention and never having examined their own rights. They rely on a belief that human rights are for other people and that white British citizens will never be the ones who need legal protection from their own state. This belief has no evidence behind it. It is a fantasy built on racial hierarchy.
The ECHR is not a barrier. It is a mirror. It reflects how a government treats the people it has power over. If Britain leaves it, the first people to lose protection will not be asylum seekers. It will be the ordinary citizens who have already been harmed by state failure in the past and who will have no pathway to justice in the future.
References
1. Council of Europe, “Drafting of the Convention.”
2. Council of Europe and ECHR, “Frequently Asked Questions.”
3. European Court of Human Rights, Annual Reports and UK Country Profiles.
4. National Audit Office, “Investigation into the asylum decision making system.”
Institute for Government, “Why the UK asylum backlog has grown.”
Refugee Council, “The Truth About the UK Asylum Backlog.”
5. UK Supreme Court, “AAA and Others v SSHD [2023] UKSC 42.”
6. UNHCR submissions in AAA v SSHD.
7. Northern Ireland Office, “The Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.”
8. Joint Committee on Human Rights, “The Government’s Human Rights Reforms.”
9. Law Society, “Analysis of the Bill of Rights Bill.”
10. The Guardian, “Hillsborough families use human rights law.”
11. BBC News, “Orgreave: Human rights and policing failures.”
12. Investigatory Powers Tribunal, “Liberty v GCHQ.”
13. ECHR cases “P, C and S v United Kingdom” and “Z v United Kingdom.”
14. YouGov, “Who are Reform UK voters.”
15. British Social Attitudes Survey 39, “Immigration and cultural threat perception.”
16. House of Lords EU Committee, “Brexit: Judicial Oversight and the ECHR.”
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