Dropping Bill to scrap Human Rights Act a step in the right direction

Notably absent from The Queen's Speech was the Bill to scrap the Human Rights Act and strengthen the role of the British courts against the European Court of Human Rights. Those in the Tory Party wanting this ill advised change are those obsessed with the way the European project has progressed from a 'common market' to a political union.

In some respects, their anger is well founded, unlike their xenophobia. Parliament and our courts have lost sovereignty to pan European bodies without the British people having given their consent. However, abandoning the Human Rights Act is hardly the way to redress the balance. The fierce desire of the rabid anti-Europe media (The Sun, Express and Mail were furious at the omission), and Tory and UKIP Europhobes to abolish the Human Right Act was trumped by the thin Tory majority in the Commons, a House of Lords which has an anti-government majority and a Scottish Nationalist Party which is very pro-EEC.

Despite their decade-long desire to get rid of the Human Rights Act, the anti-European Conservatives haven't been able to get agreement by all in their party let alone by the legal community. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, one of the Tory's top legal brains, has convincingly argued against a new law proposed by a group of Conservative lawyers which would make Parliament and not the European Court of Human Rights the supreme body.

Their report predicts that a British Bill of Rights would either force changes in the way the Strasbourg court works or trigger a crisis which could lead to the UK's expulsion from the Council of Europe, the body which set up the court and which Britain was instrumental in founding.

In Grieve's view, this plan was 'a legal car crash' as it was incoherent to say we will stay in the European Convention of Human Rights whilst refusing to recognise the court's rulings.

Politics is the art of the possible and Cameron decided it would be impossible to abolish the Human Rights Act. My colleague Lee Jasper has argued vehemently that scrapping the Act would be a reactionary, dangerous and racist piece of legislation. So it is good to see that common sense has prevailed, and that in many ways the Queen's Speech confirms the 'Cameronist' social cohesion and one nation philosophy which a growing - and for some a surprising - number of BME voters supported on 7 May.

The Prime Minister will also win support if the in/out EU referendum takes place in 2017 to give enough time for the many and complex arguments to be heard before we decide whether or not to leave the European Union.

Paul Hensby