Jacob Rees-Mogg’s calls to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights have been spectacularly ratioed by European Chair Mike Galsworthy after he issued a stinging put-down.
In-fighting within the Tory Party continued this week as MPs grappled with the notion that their grand split from Europe is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Ahead of a crunch Commons vote on the Rwanda plan – which could take over 100 years to deport the 15,000 people who have arrived on small boats since they passed the last law – the prime minister has pleaded with his party members to “back the Bill”.
A revolt by 29 Conservative MPs could be enough to defeat the Safety of Rwanda Bill at its first Commons hurdle – something that has not happened to a piece of Government legislation since 1986.
And judging by the reaction so far, it’s looking pretty close.
Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Jacob Rees-Mogg, a member of the European Research Group, said the government must leave the ECHR to solve the “immigration problem”, a notion he also set out on his GB News show.
But a strong rebuttal from Mike Galsworthy has trumped the initial post, racking up hundreds more likes.
In it, he said:
“This is just pure rubbish on what ECHR is about – and it is bizarre that you would not know it.
“The whole master-slave framing you are painting is ridiculous and deliberately misleading. These are rights first proposed by Winston Churchill and the European Movement – later codified by the likes of Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (a Scots Conservative).
“It is an assertion of common values that we set forward and encouraged others to sign up to, alongside ourselves. Those rights are fundamental and you are suggesting we jeopardise them *without* sign-off from the public. So it is an undemocratic move you are trying to force without explicit public support for such a move. What you are trying to throw away here is the Rule of Law.
“You have no interest in the sovereignty of Parliament – because in 2019, you tried to suspend the sovereignty of Parliament – lying to the Queen in order to do so – and it was only our courts, ultimately in the form of a unanimous decision by our Supreme Court, that re-established the sovereignty of Parliament against your will. You therefore have no philosophical loyalty to the “sovereignty of Parliament” about which you now espouse and only deploy a confidence trickster’s faux loyalty to principles as and when they are expedient to your personal preferences and power.
“The ECHR is British in origin. It is our heritage and our standards. If you cannot operate by our British values, you should not be in our Parliament.”
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