Sir John Major, the former prime minister who laid the groundwork for a peace deal in Northern Ireland, has warned the British government against leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, telling MPs that the move would leave the UK in “pretty rum company”.
During an appearance before the Northern Ireland Affairs select committee on Tuesday Major also criticised the so-called Northern Ireland protocol, which governs post-Brexit trade arrangements in the region, describing it as “a mess” and “poorly negotiated”.
The comments came two days after the Sunday Times reported that prime minister Rishi Sunak’s government could leave the convention to ensure the European Court of Human Rights could not block its proposed measures against illegal migration.
While some MPs in Sunak’s governing Conservative party support leaving the ECHR, opposition to the move is also widespread. Opponents point out that only Russia and Belarus have previously left the Council of Europe, the governing body for the convention, which the UK joined in 1949. Signatory governments are obliged to enforce rulings of the Strasbourg-based human rights court.
Sir Robert Buckland, the former Lord Chancellor who is fiercely opposed to leaving the body, pointed out that the UK’s membership of the convention and its governing Council of Europe were an important part of the underpinning for the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement that ended the Northern Irish troubles.
Major said he shared Buckland’s concern. “People think it’s a European Union body, so they dislike it,” he told the committee. “It isn’t. The founding father of it was Churchill and members of his government. It was a British invention and we would be in pretty rum company if we left.”
The government would do itself no favours if it left the convention, Major went on. “I profoundly hope it won’t,” he added.
Major was fiercely critical of the process that led to the signing of the Northern Ireland protocol by Boris Johnson’s government.
“It was very poorly negotiated,” the former prime minister said. “I think some of the promises made after the protocol — that there were going to be no checks on trade — how those came to be made I don’t know because they were patently wrong.”
Major, prime minister from 1990 until 1997, accepted that the protocol needed to change. But he stressed that both pro-British unionists and pro-Irish unification nationalists would have to show flexibility.
Both sides would need to be prepared to get a great deal of what they were asking for, “but not all of it,” he said.
Major, working with the Irish Taoiseach at the time Albert Reynolds, began the Northern Ireland peace process in the early 1990s and laid much of the groundwork for the Good Friday Agreement. The deal ended the three-decades long ‘troubles’ in the region after being negotiated by his Labour successor Tony Blair.
