This month the co-founder of the Just Stop Oil movement, Roger Hallam, was jailed for five years. Four others received four-year sentences after they were also found guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. During four days in November 2022, the group disrupted the M25 when more than 45 protesters climbed gantries, forcing the police to stop traffic.

The judge said he was handing out exemplary sentences because of the seriousness of these offences and the risk that they would further escalate. The resulting delays caused by the M25 action caused people to miss funerals, flights, medical appointments and exams. The Judge found that the ultimate aim of the action was to produce gridlock throughout southern England, threatening food supplies and the maintenance of law and order.

Hallam however believes that his cause is above the law because the world is about to be ended by climate change, which spells “billions of deaths and ecological collapse”.  But none of the scientific reports on climate change say that planetary apocalypse will ensue.

For Hallam, however, there is literally nothing that should be ruled out to prevent climate change from happening, because nothing else can compete in importance. He actually believes that the government is planning “the death of its citizens” through its climate change policies.

You might have thought that such unhinged fanaticism would be obvious to everyone. But no. More than 1,000 celebrities, lawyers and academics (including a former Archbishop of Canterbury) signed a letter in which the five jailed activists were said to be “fulfilling a necessary service by alerting the nation to the grave risk we all face”.

The signatories described the sentences passed on the “whole truth five” as “one of the greatest injustices in a British court in modern history”. Really? Have they read the judge's sentencing remarks? Have they missed the sub-postmasters scandal?

Hallam’s is a totalitarian perspective that he shares with the great tyrants of history. For them, their (subjective) views always reflect dogmatic certainty about some aspect of the world, whether ours or the world to come.

In the past, it helped justify Stalin’s gulags, the French revolutionary terror and the mass murder of heretics by medieval Christians who believed that only ridding the world of such people would enable the second coming of Christ. And now it drives Islamic extremism.

Despite the promises by the Taliban, when they took over Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the Americans, that they would be a new, friendly Taliban version 2.0 and look after their citizens accordingly, they have shown themselves to be incapable of curbing their certainty. They will still not allow others to have other views on the dress code or whether women should be educated.

Such certainty is also present in Iran. The morality police there have in these last years become even more unpopular with their attempts to crack down on breaches of their version of Islamic fashion, involving the deaths of what one might call 'fashion victims'.

But in the recent presidential elections a so-called reformer was allowed to be elected. He is of course a reformer approved by the Ayatollah and so it is perhaps a relative term. Obviously, however, the people voting – and there was a very low turnout – decided that they wanted rather less fanaticism and more emphasis on good governance and, in particular, sorting out the economic mess the country is in.

Closer to home, we too have false certainties, those which depend upon subjective evaluations and not objectively determined reference points.

A current example is that of the two-child benefits policy. We have been reminded of it by the rebellion by some (now ex-) Labour MPs. The Conservatives had decided that it was ‘the right thing to do’ to limit benefit payments rather than increase tax – hence their two-child policy for the poorer members of society.

The moral outrage expressed by the Labour MPs was because, despite the cap, many poorer families continue to have more than two children, and because of the benefits cap they have less money per child to feed and clothe them.

So then although It discourages some from having more children, it penalises the children of those not discouraged, as well as their parents.

The alleviation of child poverty was used to justify the abolition of the cap, but the parents are, of course, the ones directly responsible both for having children and then looking after them. And we all know that child poverty, relative poverty, is something of an arbitrary concept, based on a percentage of median income. So then as incomes rise, so does the income level below which there is deemed to be poverty. Poverty in the UK is by no means the grinding absolute poverty witnessed by Dickens and has on all definitions actually decreased as time has gone on.

Against what ‘objective’ criteria therefore does the state have an obligation to intervene? When do the rest of us have an obligation to support those with 3 or more children? Is our obligation unlimited?

There is though a wholly different reason to consider the abolition or modification of the benefits cap which no-one seems to have mentioned. Children are at the centre of an even more intractable problem.

We are currently in a period in which the replenishment rate of our stock of children has fallen below what is required to maintain our current population level - 2.1 children per couple. It is now only 1.49 and in areas where there is a higher concentration of women with a tertiary education the rate is as low as 1.2.

Without immigration the UK’s population would drop by about 25-30 per cent over a generation or so. So then, this would mean accepting either more immigration, higher taxes, worse public services or a higher retirement age - and house prices falling and not rising!! None of which would be exactly popular.

So, to the extent that the two-child benefits cap works as intended, it puts further pressure on the other, extremely unpopular, side of the equation. Policies helping parents stay at work, such as accessible childcare, can support birth rates, but are very expensive.

After all the populist talk about immigration at the last election, to make decisions about population growth or its reduction seems to me to be beyond our capability as a nation. We don’t seem to know or to be able to agree what we want and so it’s not obvious how to make a rational decision.

Seemingly, the European Convention on Human Rights will define the Conservative party for years to come. All the leadership candidates have expressed their willingness to remove us from its aegis in order to enable us to ‘take control of our borders’. Apparently Brexit didn’t do the trick after all.

Actually finding a justification for the existence of the ECHR, however, is not easy. Sir Hersch Lauterpacht QC, a leading figure in the drive to create a post-war charter of human rights, based them on ‘natural law’. He wrote: “...The binding force… of international law… is based on the law of nature as expressive of the social nature of man.”

Yes, we have social customs, but they change as the years go by. And the appalling conduct in Nazi Germany, which had driven the call to codify a set of human rights is, ironically, just as expressive of ‘the social nature of man’ – but one feeding off hatred and resentment.

So ‘natural law’ cannot be a justification for human rights. Which means that I cannot provide a solid justification for the Convention. It is in my view, however, rather like democracy. It’s the least worst of the options available to us.

The Human Rights Act 1988 mirrors the Convention and so, having left the Convention, our own law would itself presumably have to be changed. What rights would we have to lose or would be downgraded in order to ‘gain control’? Would they be held to apply only to those entitled to live here, leaving us to act as we wished towards those who came here ‘illegally’?

If we think that we are ‘entitled’ to the rights set out in the Act, on what moral basis can we decide that others are not entitled to them? And for how long would that distinction last before a right-wing government decided that they shouldn’t apply to other groups of people either – for example, perhaps to those on benefits?

28 July 2024

Paul Buckingham