Reform has long been very clear on one of its core policy commitments – to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court whose judgments are legally binding on its members.
Its manifesto for the 2024 general election stated, “We will leave the European Convention on Human Rights” – a move that would leave the UK alongside Russia and Belarus. And few are as enthusiastic about it as its self-styled “shadow chancellor”, Robert Jenrick.
Jenrick made leaving the ECHR a core tenet of his failed bid for the Conservative leadership in 2024, saying any attempts to reform it were “doomed to fail”. In May this year, he was posting on X: “We don’t just need to free ourselves from the ECHR and activist judges abroad. We need to end judicial activism and politicisation here in the UK too.”
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Unless, of course, those activist judges might prove to be useful to Reform.
Responding to comments from housing secretary Angela Rayner suggesting the government might change the law on donations retrospectively, potentially forcing Reform to hand back the whopping £72m in bungs the party received from two crypto billionaires over the weekend, Jenrick said it might make an appeal… to the ECHR.
Jenrick accused Rayner of a “deranged rant” and said Reform was prepared to go “all the way to the Supreme Court” or even the European Court of Human Rights to fight any move to bring in retrospective legislation. Would that be the same European Court of Human Rights from which Britain needs to free itself? It just might!
Jenrick used the same interview, on Sky News, to say Rayner was “basically insulting millions of people, working people, in this country who vote Reform. I mean, on some polls earlier in this year the majority of union workers are voting for Reform at the moment, including in many of the professions that she claims to care about, like care workers and NHS workers and firefighters and so on”.
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Which is a curious poll for Jenrick to want to draw attention to – the poll claiming unionised workers now back Reform, splashed across the front page of the Times in June, was one of those commissioned by the party from JL Partners and paid for by an “American financier” who turned out to be an actor employed by Channel 4 News, sparking the scandal now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.
Anybody wishing to check Jenrick’s claims about care workers, NHS workers and firefighters flocking to his party can’t do so, as the Times has removed it from its website. The paper says it did not know who had commissioned and paid for the poll.
Finally, one of the things that Reform is expected to spend its new-found fortune on is apparently launching its own TV channel. That will come as a surprise to those who thought it already had one – GB News, on which the party’s leader Nigel Farage has a well-remunerated slot to hold court at 7pm every night.
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