Just as Brexit began with a few harmless-looking chips at what looked like an impregnable concrete wall, something similar may be happening with Britain’s attachment to the European Convention on Human Rights.

The latest episode was yesterday’s ten-minute rule bill from the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, Jonathan Gullis. His Asylum Seekers (Removal to Safe Countries) Bill was nothing if not direct. Put bluntly, his plan would seek to avoid a repeat of the Rwanda debacle earlier this year by allowing asylum seekers to be flown to Africa, despite any orders from Strasbourg to the contrary.

Like nearly all other ten-minute rule bills, everyone accepted this one was entirely quixotic. The debate on it lasted a mere 15 minutes, with much huffing and puffing from Gullis and from the opposition, before it was promptly voted down 188-69. It won’t be given government support or Parliamentary time. It is now therefore an ex-bill.

The PM’s most foolish response to this would be to say the ECHR is safe in Tory hands

Nevertheless, like a number of such bills, it was also a rather important straw in the wind. True, it did not call for the nuclear option of withdrawing the UK from the ECHR. Even if the bill passed, it would have allowed the government to keep up the official line it has maintained for the last 70 years or so, and carry on saying, entirely truthfully, that it had no plans to exit the Strasbourg regime.

What it did do though was make clear a sentiment that has been quietly bubbling beneath the surface for some time: a feeling that we cannot carry on giving an overseas court an open-ended veto over government policy. The implication of Gullis’s bill was clear: if it came to a showdown, the final result would be that Westminster would have the last word.

This vein of human rights scepticism which the bill taps into is growing. Tory grandees may regard ECHR scepticism with horror: others are not so sure. The backers of the Gullis bill included, unusually for a ten-minute-rule affair, some serious hard-hitters. The most high-profile was, of course, Boris Johnson; but Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries and Tim Loughton also hinted at their support for the measure, even if a few of these did not in the end vote.

The views of electors outside Parliament are also worth considering. Liberals will accuse Gullis of pandering to the right wing of the Tory party: but they should not underestimate him; what he says reflects the exasperation of numerous working-class people in Stoke. They have the (correct) idea that at least part of the reason why it is so tricky to deport those who arrive illegally is to do with human rights law on swift treatment and summary removal.

Nor is it only the Channel boats crisis at stake here. Take the difficulty in removing foreign criminals who plead family life, the apparent impossibility of simply removing Just Stop Oil or XR protesters, and the restrictions imposed in the name of privacy on what newspapers can report about celebrities. The realisation is growing that these things hint at the disproportionate influence of the human rights lobby and human rights law.

What should Rishi Sunak do about all this? Labour will present the Gullis bill as an existential threat to the PM’s authority coming from a desperate and rebellious Johnsonite rump determined to lay down a marker. But by interpreting it as such, it may be disappointed – at least if Sunak plays his cards right.

The PM’s most foolish response to this would be to say the ECHR is safe in Tory hands. This would convince no-one who needs convincing, and merely drive home the message of an anti-conservative Conservative party desperate to cull votes wherever it can. But there is a far more subtle line he can take. Sunak has already said – rightly – that something must be done, and done quickly, about the immigration crisis. The latest tragic events in the Channel prove his point that this is a crisis that cannot be allowed to continue.

Sunak should hammer home this point and make it clear that the loss of life that is occurring on his watch cannot go on. The PM must also say in this debate over the ECHR that the rights of the British people must not be forgotten. This would put Labour on the spot, by forcing it either to defend a human rights regime unpopular with many ordinary voters, or annoy its intellectual wing who see human rights as a ditch to die in.

Meanwhile the Tories would be where they want to be: the party of sweet reason and pragmatism. And who knows. This might even be the first concrete block knocked out of the human rights edifice. Watch this space in a few years’ time.

The post Could Britain pull out of Europe’s human rights treaty? appeared first on The Spectator.