Human Rights and Wrongs

Has the Strasbourg Court moved irreversibly beyond its founding ideals?

Towering columns

In The Spectator, former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption says he has reluctantly concluded Britain must leave the ECHR to restore democratic policymaking:

One point should be made at the outset and never overlooked: we do not need the European Convention on Human Rights in order to protect human rights. 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. The real purpose of the convention is to make us accept rights which we may not want and for which there maybe no democratic mandate.

No responsible critic of modern international human rights law proposes to do away with fundamental rights. The case is that the convention should be replaced with a domestic code of basic rights which would look very like it, with one important exception: it would not be subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. That exception is important because the real problem is not the convention but the Strasbourg court. Under Article 32 of the convention, the ECHR is the sole judge of its own jurisdiction. It can and does help itself to whatever additional powers and jurisdictions it likes.

…Who is to judge what countervailing public interests are sufficiently important or what is necessary in a democratic society? Balancing competing public interests is the essence of democratic government and participatory politics. How much privacy are we prepared to sacrifice in the interests of efficient policing? How much liberty are we prepared to sacrifice in the interests of preventing the spread of disease? How much freedom of speech are we prepared to sacrifice in the interests of ethnic harmony or the protection of personal reputation? These are intensely political questions. Not every society will answer them in the same way. But the ECHR has classified them as questions of law for judges. It has arrogated to itself the right to decide between competing public interests, and to determine what is necessary in a democratic society, irrespective of the views of democratic electorates.

In The Times, Trevor Phillips says the reaction to the Home Secretary’s speech on multiculturalism has been both intemperate and misguided:

Braverman has every right to warn that ethnic harmony is not an automatic outcome of social diversity. Such liberal complacency allowed the racist British National party to amass a million votes in EU elections in 2009. Those whose enthusiasm for multiculturalism amounts to domestic tourism in London’s restaurants and the purchase of the odd book by a black author have turned a blind eye to ethnic clashes between minority groups in our cities. And the unprecedented number of senior minority figures in a Tory government masks rumbling discontent at lack of minority representation in our boardrooms.

We’ve been here before. Twenty years ago, at the start of my decade as the head of the UK’s equality bodies, I told The Times that I’d rather we stopped using the word multiculturalism. My point was that it had become code for the happy-clappy delusion that we were moving inexorably towards an integrated society, when we were becoming less united and less equal by the year. A Labour cabinet minister described my remarks as fatuous and privately advised me to stop talking about it.

But in recent years we’ve seen the outcome of this Barbieland thinking with the rise of far-right parties in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and France. And a Trump presidency is now a real possibility. As someone once said, if liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders — and make integration a condition of citizenship — then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do. Perhaps Braverman’s critics need to take a few steps in her shoes before they have a go.

Also in The Times, Juliet Samuel laments that Britain’s inability to build anything is driving us into economic decline:

The broader picture is that Britain is utterly failing to build enough stuff. To be fair to the current crop of politicians, this has been decades’ worth of failure. British investment in building so-called fixed capital, which means all long-term, non-financial assets, from new schools to trains to software, has languished at the bottom of the pack among advanced countries since the datasets began in 1970.

This is true of the private sector and, in particular, of government investment. Even since the Seventies the record has worsened. It hit rock bottom in the years after 2008 and, since 2013, has begun to creep up. But it’s not enough, not by a long shot. Failing to build things we need is a sure-fire way to get poorer. It gradually strangles an economy, making it harder and harder to live, work and innovate. Yet we seem to have become world leaders in how to not build things. The costs for our infrastructure projects are markedly above those of other countries. The planning and legal processes take longer. The outcomes are less certain.

There are plenty of technical reasons why this is happening, not least a lack of training to produce skilled planners or workers, and fiscal rules that push governments to plan in five-year cycles instead of the 10 to 20 years required. But there is a political and moral reason too. Governments have become incapable of accepting that serving the national interest sometimes involves doing things that are unfair — often deeply unfair — to certain, highly visible, organised groups.

On UnHerd, Tom McTague says Keir Starmer’s anticipated ‘grand plan’ will never be able to tackle Britain’s long-term challenges:

Yet even the most cursory glance at Britain’s long-term economic growth reveals how little things change. The trend is one of slow, gradual growth lacerated by a few big scratches which tend to come from abroad — the oil crisis of 1973, the global financial crisis of 2008 or the Covid pandemic of 2020. The great turning points we usually think of — joining the European Common Market in 1973 or Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 — are not nearly as radical as they seemed at the time. Very little is. All the while, the “declining industries and declining areas” that Wilson identified in 1963 keep on declining.

When we look at the big picture, then, what really jumps out is the continuity. Even Wilson’s great call for a socialist revolution in 1963 was quite conservative: to make Britain “once again one of the foremost industrial nations of the world”. This, in fact, has been the great goal of almost every government. What is “levelling up” if it is not the use of the state to halt the decline of Britain’s industries and regions? It is there, too, in George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse or Keir Starmer’s Green New Deal. And it is there in today’s anguish over HS2.

The irony in all of this, of course, is that when Wilson gave his speech lamenting Britain’s amateurish decline, the country was still one of the foremost industrial nations of the world — and the richest place in Europe. Indeed, even amid our own “orgy of self-criticism” today, Britain remains one of the foremost industrial nations in the world, overtaking France to become the eighth largest manufacturing nation in the world this year and the sixth largest economy.

In The Financial Times, Sarah O’Connor says the transition to Net Zero was always going to be painful for workers:

But in the real world, of course, people don’t “reallocate” as easily as swapping from one row on an economist’s spreadsheet to the next. First, there is the question of geography: so far, at least, work by the OECD shows green jobs are disproportionately to be found in capital regions, while brown jobs are disproportionately in regions with lower gross domestic product per capita. Then there is the question of retraining: the OECD found that only 12 per cent of people in brown jobs are participating in life-long learning or training, compared with 19 per cent of people in “neutral” and green jobs.

Drill down into sectors at the forefront of the transition and the challenges become clearer. From energy to cars to steel, the new green production processes are generally less labour-intensive — good for consumers, since this should eventually mean lower prices, but not so good for workers. In the UK this month, a deal to decarbonise the country’s biggest steelworks in Port Talbot in Wales demonstrated how easily the narrative about green jobs can turn sour. The UK government agreed to pay subsidies of up to £500mn to Tata Group to secure the future of the plant by replacing blast furnaces with an electric arc furnace, which requires less labour and will involve the loss of 3,000 jobs. Unions, who said they had been cut out of the discussions, had wanted a different plan involving hydrogen, which they said could have preserved jobs while expanding output, albeit with a higher price tag and slower timeline. The government said that was unrealistic, and pointed out the deal had secured the other 5,000 jobs.

Either way, the attack line was obvious, and Labour wasn’t afraid to use it. “Only the Tories could spend £500mn of taxpayers’ money to make thousands of British workers redundant,” quipped Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary. The government has promised £100mn for regeneration and retraining to “ensure that the transition is as appropriate as it can be”, but communities like Port Talbot have heard promises like these before. The steel jobs pay roughly £36,000 to £38,000 in a community where most other jobs aren’t much above minimum wage, according to Alun Davies, the national officer for steel at the Community Union. “The reports of 3,000 jobs lost is going to be more like 11,000 because of the downstream businesses, the contractors, the local shops . . . What are they going to do? Build another industrial estate there and fill it full of minimum-wage jobs?”

On ConservativeHome, pollster James Johnson says that in America a new but very different generation of young conservative men may be about to change the politics of the right:

This generation of young men looks up to Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Andrew Tate. It often pays to be sceptical about the influence of very-online influencers on usually not-very-online people. But nine in ten British young men told a recent YouGov poll they are aware of who Andrew Tate is, with one in three openly supportive of his – rampantly misogynist – views. That means there are five million men in the UK with a positive view of Tate, one million of whom are 18-29 years old.

Much of this is due to the role of social media, as young men turn to easy answers for rejection or loneliness. But elites who have overseen an education crisis for white working-class boys and a decimation of blue-collar jobs should take some blame too. This is no generation for the making of a Reagan or Thatcher revolution. This is a new cocktail: traditional values mixed with a near-performative patriotism, small-state capitalism blended with a distaste for democracy, the macho gym-goer and the spurned virgin rolled into one.

Conservatives cannot rely on them. The West can’t either. Think of the closest example of a Tate or a Lawrence Fox fan you know. If you don’t know any, think of the two of them. They might boast that they would in one of my polls, but would they really stand there and die for their nation?

Wonky thinking

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK tax burden is only set to rise during this Parliament. Yet Britain is not an international outlier, and may be playing catch-up after failure to raise taxes after 2008:

At the time of the last general election, UK tax revenues amounted to around 33% of national income. By the time of the next election in 2024, on current forecasts, taxes will amount to around 37% of national income – a level not sustained in the post-war period. Compared with a world in which taxes had stayed at 33% of national income, the UK government will be raising upwards of £100 billion more in tax revenues next year. This is equivalent to around £3,500 more per household, though of course the tax rise will not be shared equally.

The government may decide to announce tax cuts in the run-up to the next election. But there is no world in which this parliament – or indeed the period since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister – turns out to be anything other than a tax-raising one. In fact, it is currently on track to be the biggest tax-increasing parliament since comparable records began.

…There are three further things worth noting. First, the level of overall taxation in the UK – while high by historical standards – is fairly middling when compared with other developed countries. Given the scale of the tax rises announced in recent years, the UK may well climb some way up the rankings – though this of course also depends on what happens to tax revenues in other countries.

Second, where the UK is more of an outlier internationally is the extent to which taxes did not meaningfully increase between the financial crisis and the onset of the pandemic. The upper panel of Figure 4 shows that between 2008 and 2019, according to OECD data, tax revenues increased by 0.2% of national income (GDP) in the UK. That compares with an average increase of 1.2% across all developed (OECD) economies and an average increase of 1.5% across EU-15 (broadly speaking, Western European and Scandinavian) economies. Since 2019, on the OECD measure, taxes have risen more quickly in the UK (an increase of 1.3% of GDP between 2019 and 2021, versus an average 0.7% across the OECD and 0.5% across the EU-15). But this is, to some extent, just the UK playing ‘catch-up’ after having kept tax revenues relatively flat over the 2010s, in the face of demographic change and weak economic growth. That said, over the whole period between 2008 and 2021, the tax rise seen in the UK, while large, is still below the average increase seen across either the EU-15 or the OECD.

Third, forecasts for tax as a percentage of GDP are affected by forecasts for the latter. A bigger economy means a bigger denominator, and so a reduction in the tax–GDP ratio. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently revised upwards its estimates for UK GDP in the post-pandemic period. But these were primarily upwards revisions to real GDP (with a corresponding downwards revision to estimates for economy-wide inflation, as measured by the GDP deflator) in 2020 and 2021. When assessing the tax–GDP ratio in 2024–25, what matters is nominal GDP, for which we might expect less of an upwards revision. Nonetheless, suppose that the forecast for nominal GDP in 2024–25 is revised upwards by 2% (the upper end of what seems plausible) and forecasts for tax revenues remain unchanged. That would reduce the forecast for tax revenue from 37.3% of national income to around 36.6%. That would mean an increase in the level of taxation of around 3.5% of national income over the parliament, rather than 4.2%. That would still leave the UK with taxes at their highest level since the 1940s, and would still make this the biggest tax-raising parliament since records began. Similarly, an upwards revision to GDP would do nothing to change the fact that total government receipts are set to rise by more during this parliament than any other since Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government.

In any case, it is beyond the realms of plausibility that any change announced in either the autumn or the spring will undo the tax increases over the parliament. Taxes at the end of this parliament will be considerably higher than at the beginning.

Book of the week

We recommend Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Mazzucato says capitalism has become stuck, unable to deliver either growth or vital national objectives. Drawing on the ‘moonshot’ methods of the Space Race, she argues for a rethink in the role of the state, through collaboration with industry, in generating growth and achieving social goals.

Rather than having a sustainable growth path, capitalism has built economies that inflated speculative bubbles, enriched the already immensely wealthy 1 per cent and were destroying the planet. In many Western and Western-style capitalist economies, real earnings for all but a few have barely risen in more than a decade - in some cases, such as the USA, in several decades - exacerbating inequalities between groups and regions despite high levels of employment. The dynamics of inequality explain why the profits-to-wages ratio has reached record highs. Between 1995 and 2013, real median wages in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries grew at an annual average rate of 0.8 per cent versus 1.5 per cent growth in labour productivity. In the period 1979-2018, real wages for the 50th and 10th percentiles of the wage distribution stagnated: there was 6.1 per cent cumulative real wage change over the whole period for the 50th percentile, 1.6 for the 10th percentile - versus 37.6 per cent for the 90th percentile. In rich countries, private wealth-to-income ratios increases from 200-300 per cent in 1970 to 400-600 per cent in 2010.

These economies were also, after 2008, hooked on the drug of quantitative easing - central banks injecting massive amounts of liquidity into the system - although economic growth and productivity improvement remained weak. Personal debt was back to levels last seen in the early years of this century. By 2018, private debt to GDP reached 150 per cent in the USA, 170 per cent in the UK, 200 per cent in France and 207 per cent in China - all substantially higher than levels at the turn of the century.

And much of business has been plagued by a dangerous combination of low investment, short-term management and high rewards to shareholders and company bosses. In advanced economies, business investment has barely recovered to 2008 levels. In the UK in the 1980s, typical CEO pay was twenty times higher than that of the average worker. By 2016, the average FTSE 100 CEO’s pay was 129 times greater than that of the average employee. Since 1980, UK dividend pay-out ratios have remained constant, irrespective of profitability. Share buybacks have increased in importance, consistently exceeding UK share issuance over the past decade. In the USA, total pay-outs to shareholders have come to almost $1 trillion, equalling pre-crisis peaks, increasing from around 10 per cent of internal cash flow in the 1970s to 60 per cent by 2015.

And difficulties are also being experienced in authoritarian, state-capitalist societies. Today, China, the leading authoritarian economy, remains weighed down by inefficient and heavily indebted state industries, a banking system with huge ‘zombie’ loans, an ageing population, and the massive task of shifting the economy away from excessive export dependency and towards greater domestic consumption.

…To grasp the true scale of this challenge, it is important to understand that the issues described above are the consequences of deeper forces that together have led to a dysfunctional form of capitalism. There are (at least) four key sources of the problem: (1) the short-termism of the financial sector, (2) the financialisation of business, (3) the climate emergency, and (4) slow or absent governments. In each, the way that organisations are structured and how they relate to each other are part of the problem. Their restructuring must, therefore, be part of the solution.

Quick links

The Home Secretary gave a speech questioning British membership of the ECHR, ahead of a Strasbourg decision on the Rwanda migration plan.

Public concern about immigration is at its highest level in six years.

Germany has announced new border controls to combat a surge in illegal migration.

The European Court of Justice has ordered the UK to pay a 32 million euro fine for failing to impose EU rules on diesel in Northern Ireland.

The Prime Minister is expected to sign a free trade deal with India without securing commitments on workers’ rights or environmental standards.

Non-EU migrants who arrived more recently are likely to be higher earning.

A recent poll suggests just 1% of 18-24 year-olds intends to vote Conservative.

…But Labour’s overall lead has fallen to 14 points, a poll found.

Former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane said connecting UK cities with HS2 could bring a £100 billion per year return on investment.

Labour’s proposed plan to charge VAT on private school fees may only be possible because of Brexit.