A senior Labour grandee has become the first on the left to suggest Britain should begin questioning its relationship with the European Court of Human Rights. Tony Blair’s Home Secretary Jack Straw has made a surprising intervention to urge Sir Keir Starmer to start distancing the UK from the foreign court, after years of criticism from the right. He wrote: “It is the success of the HRA that provides the Prime Minister with a way through the dilemma… about the difficulties to effective immigration control that the ECHR presents. These have been thrown up not by the convention itself but by expansive, and sometimes inconsistent or incoherent, interpretations of its articles by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. However, a number of recent cases involving asylum seekers have shone a brighter light on the inability of Britain to deport foreign criminals thanks to the ECHR.

Source: The Times March 16, 2025 19:45 UTC