Editorial: There is time for unionists to make the case for a UK-wide exit from the European Convention of Human Rights, with no new Irish Sea border

​The Northern Ireland Secretary is scathing about the Tory pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

​Hilary Benn has pointed out that to take such a course would leave the UK in the company of Belarus and Russia, and would undermine the Belfast Agreement.

The former point is increasingly made by critics of a departure from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court. But it is misleading.

In the same way that the United Kingdom pioneered a departure from the European Union, something that only a major EU state could undertake with relative ease (emphasis on the word ‘relative', because Brexit has clearly been by no means easy) it is a major state that will have to take the lead on the ECHR.

It is absurd to say that a nation state of 70 million people, which is a permanent member of the UN security council, a respected military power and the fifth largest economy on earth with one of the finest legal systems in history needs to be part of such a court, particularly when Strasbourg is now so discredited. One of the scandals in this process is that Conservative Party politicians and sensible Labour Party ones (ie non human rights extremists in the latter) took so long to see the way in which the ECHR and activist judges made key policy making almost impossible.

Trevor Ringland, that brave and consistent critic of the legacy scandal, writes opposite about how the past has been turned on its head to exonerate terrorists and blame the UK security forces, who prevented civil war in the Troubles. The ECHR is deeply complicit in this outrage.

It is several years before Britain will take such a step, if it ever does. Unionists have time to get their arguments straight as they so badly failed to do after Britain quit the EU: that there will be no new Irish Sea border and that we will all – across the UK – leave this grossly out-of-date treaty together.