There is something particularly sickening about Keir Starmer’s call for European leaders to “urgently curb joint human rights laws” (Starmer urges Europe’s leaders to curb ECHR to halt rise of far right, 9 December).
It is not just that the human rights lawyer who wrote a key text on the Human Rights Act 1998 has become, as prime minister, an advocate of the act’s undoing, along with all the consequences for migrant families that will flow from that. It is that Starmer shows through this the complete dearth of ideas available to European social democracy.
Faced with the growth of Hayekian anti-state politics in the 1970s and 1980s, social democratic parties abandoned the idea of ameliorating the worst impacts of capitalism and became little more than a reserve managerial class occasionally allowed to manage. The problem is that they are now entirely devoid of coherent politics.
Europe’s ageing populations and stagflating economies desperately need immigrant labour. Facing a rightwing discourse that is as wrong on immigration as it is on the climate crisis, Starmer and co can’t mount an ideological retort, and instead bleat about “legitimate concerns”, falling into line with Donald Trump’s power play about the “stark prospect of civilisational erasure” (‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right, 5 December).
When John F Kennedy was killed, Malcolm X said the chickens were coming home to roost. Starmer’s attack on the European convention on human rights is more like turkeys dressing up to celebrate Christmas.
Nick Moss
London
Keir Starmer and Mette Frederiksen claim to be speaking for all citizens when they say want to amend the ECHR in order to “control our borders” (We must protect our borders to defend our democracies. Here’s how, 9 December). They don’t speak for me, and, I’d argue, a majority of citizens whose voices never get heard in the press or in government policy.
Migrants – whether refugees or “economic migrants” – have made this country better culturally and economically, bringing in new ideas, entrepreneurialism and some wonderful friends and neighbours.
Freedom of movement is a core part of the human experience throughout time, and the ECHR doesn’t just protect refugees, it defends the rights of all of us, so chipping away at it will impoverish our freedoms when we need them more than ever. Who knows when people in the UK might need to flee a natural or human-made disaster?
Starmer’s government is Blue Labour through and through, echoing many bot-inspired Maga talking points from migration to disability because they have little else to offer. It is not the Labour party I know and have voted for.
Dr Deborah Talbot
Harescombe, Gloucestershire
Let me get this straight. Donald Trump accuses Europe of being weak on immigration (Trump lambasts ‘weak’ and ‘decaying’ Europe and hints at walking away from Ukraine, 9 December), and hours later our leaders write that they want to take tougher action to protect our borders. I don’t think most Europeans want Europe to become Little America. We want to be a continent where human rights matter, and where our politicians, instead of scapegoating our migrant friends and neighbours, tackle the real crises we face: housing, wages, and public service cuts.
To defend our democracies, we need our leaders to address extreme wealth inequalities, not protect our borders from vulnerable people. The rise in popularity of green and truly progressive parties shows that if they are not willing to act for the many, we will replace their politics of fat cats and division with the politics of care and solidarity.
Dimitra Blana
Aberdeen
So, in order to halt the racist far right, you compete with them to abandon liberal democratic policies and beliefs? It hasn’t been a winning strategy so far, Keir – as I think you’ll discover at next May’s elections.
Mary Pimm
London
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