Brexit holds little good news for human rights. They were hardly mentioned in the referendum campaigns—not even to gloat that leaving the EU would let the UK remove itself from the Charter of Fundamental Rights. For the Leave campaigners this was doubtless because human rights are low down (but still on) the list of things they love to hate. For Remain, one assumes, it was tactics (rather than indifference). Human rights are not a vote winner—they rank with immigration, EU bureaucrats and climate change science among the things Leavers see as a threat to the British way of life. Raise human rights and petty nationalist Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP), would refer you to rapists who get to vote and terrorists who cannot be deported. The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Express, media geysers spouting hate, would amplify that message far and wide.
This doesn’t mean that rights aren’t talked about. The Tories—who want to scrap the UK’s 1998 Human Rights Act and (some say) withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) entirely—make the claim that they are true champions of fundamental rights. And even that repealing the Human Rights Act will be a net gain for human rights. But what they have in mind are citizen-first rights, British birthrights, rights that do not extend to those—criminals, refugees—who are not regarded as full members of the sovereign community. In other words, these aren’t human rights at all, they’re national rights. The revolutionary thrust of human rights—to protect those without the right to have rights—is lost. Abandoned, desperate people are seen as the major threat to human rights. The strong support for Brexit among many Labour voters, and the lukewarm support for Remain shown by the embattled Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a sign that any achievements the EU has made on workers’ rights or disability rights do not counterbalance a loss of control over the levers of the UK economy.
The class upholding these rights was heavily pro Remain and they lost.
