s continent slips deeper into economic crisis, there are better ways to spend our money than on burgeoning rights industry
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Judges in the European court of human rights. Photograph: Vincent Kessler/REUTERS
Future historians of the decline of Europe may ponder the events of the past week with astonishment. As the continent slipped further towards poverty – relative in some cases, absolute in others – it quarrelled over votes for British prisoners and the pension accrual rate of officials in Brussels.
Closer to home a vocal minority within the Anglican church explicitly wrecked a long-sought goal of the majority to permit the ordination of women bishops – and did so, they solemnly declared, to prevent a schism within the same worldwide communion. In the background, government ministers promised an early vote on gay marriage with an explicit promise that churches which do not wish to perform them will not be forced to do so.
What do all these issues have in common? They are about rights and the determination of assorted minorities – the British government is a minority at this weekend's Brussels summit – to assert them, sometimes in defiance of the wider common good. Indeed there are anxieties that the gay marriage vote is being hurried before Tory resistance has time to get organised and that whatever the law says about churches, the case will end up at the European court of human rights (ECHR).
ECHR? Isn't this where we started in the matter of prisoners' voting rights? Simon Jenkins rightly asserts that this is a "constitutional detail" which is for Britain alone to decide with regard to British prisoners. Personally, he thinks prisoners should be given the vote as part of their rehabilitation into wider society.
A good point, I agree. Doing a turn on Radio Scotland this week, I heard a woman eloquently making the same case and agreed with it. Then a man whose son had been stabbed to death – by five wounds to his body – argued that the man who committed this foul crime did not deserve any civic rights. I agreed with him as well.
In other words, it is an issue, one of many, on which decent people can disagree. It is not like murder, paedophile abuse, bank robbery or the mass exterminations in concentration camps – Stalin's as well as Hitler's – which formed the backdrop to the creation of the ECHR (long before the quite separate EU, I stress again) after the horrors of the second world war.
Prisoners' votes is more like aggressive-but-legal tax avoidance or maintaining/abolishing the distinction between civil partnership and gay marriage (as distinct from equal legal rights which already exist), more of a matter of morality and values. It's OK for investment bankers and gay people to disagree with each other – as it is for the rest of us.
While I assume ambulance-chasing lawyers are the main drivers behind prisoners' votes – only a couple of hundred took up their new right in Ireland – it's good to see a few prisoners wanting to vote in a week when the vast majority of Brits (85% to be precise) entitled to vote for police and crime commissioners did not do so. One could make the same paradoxical point about gay marriage, sought by those who feel deprived at a time when more and more straight people don't bother.
But the prisoners' votes issue is important for quite different reasons. It is because the court and officials who man its commission have long been engaged in mission creep, poking their noses and those of their largely undistinguished panel of judges (some of them not judges in real life) into areas of national life in which they have no business. No wonder the backlog of cases piles up.
The parallel with the EU – quite separate – is striking. Some on the right would say the same of the nation state, that it tries to do too much and does it badly; that it should do less and do it better. But at least that debate is within our own competence and capacity. We can vote out our governments and legislators, the men and women who make our laws, but not the ECHR or the European commission.
Where I disagree with Simon Jenkins and with Dominic Grieve, the coalition's fastidious and admirable attorney general, is with their assertion that, as we signed the European Convention on Human Rights in 1951 – having largely drafted it – we must now obey its rulings once all avenues of appeal have been exhausted. Parliament remains sovereign but it has voted to accept the ECHR's decisions, said Grieve.
Even Chris Grayling, the justice secretary, a much craftier character, seemed to agree that Britain should do so when he set out the three options ministers have put into a draft bill — you can read his Commons statement from Thursday here – which ministers clearly plan to kick into the elephant grass for as long as possible.
Note in passing Grayling's Labour shadow, Sadiq Khan, pointing out that his government had staved off the looming capitulation until the election of 2010, soon after which coalition ministers announced that prisoners serving under four years – some 30,000 in our bloated prison system – would get the vote, including burglars. They then changed their minds, though a four-year option is now back in play.
Contrary to the dire warnings of that aptly named barrister, Lord Pannick, I would gently point out that any of us – including governments – have the right to defy or break the law if we are prepared to take the consequences of our actions. Good men and women down the ages have gone to prison and worse because of their beliefs and often been vindicated by posterity. We can each draw up a list.
The fact is that a majority of MPs, peers too, so I expect, think the ECHR is wrong here, both in particular and in exceeding its remit on many other issues to no one's benefit. Where was the ECHR the day 9,000 Europeans died at Srebrenica, I might add. That's when its thundering majesty was needed, not to decide whether Lightfingers Thompson, a much-loved safe cracker, can vote Green or BNP in the local council elections.
If Britain decides not to oblige here – I feel sure our French comrades do not always embrace ECHR's Strasbourg law any more than they do Brussels' and Luxembourg's – we may face fines. We will certainly see the ambulance-chasing wing of the legal profession demanding compensation for Lightfingers Thompson's hurt feelings – £1,000 a pop is one figure I have seen quoted.
There are far better ways to spend our money and use our time in this great economic crisis, but this is not a fight of our making. The ECHR needs to reform its way. The burgeoning rights industry – it has lately won a Lancashire teacher £800,000 after she tripped nastily in school – needs to get a grip or have one taken by others.
Why not take a stand in the name of the law? The ECHR has no army, no policemen. It might do everyone a bit of good. Rights, blame, cash compensation awards, all manifestations of late financial capitalism in big trouble, they cannot go on like this if we don't want those future Edward Gibbons to blame rampant individualism in pursuit of rights for our decline – as they once blamed hot baths for Rome's.