This is a very good question, and it’s one of the points made in the Channel 4 skit starring Patrick Stewart ‘What Has the EU Ever Done For Us?’ The implications of this are extremely alarming, when you consider what the British public was not told about the war in Northern Ireland. Lobster has run several features over the years about collusion between the British armed forces and Loyalist paramilitaries to assassinate Irish Republicans. There is also evidence to suggest that SAS squaddies were also being implanted in regular army units to act as assassination teams. And the Tories would have liked to adopt some of the measures used by colonialist regimes to remove indigenous support for nationalist movements, like mass internment. The only reason they didn’t was because they feared that the great British public would be horrified to see other White Brits being treated like this.
None of this makes the IRA or the Republican terrorists any the less vile themselves. But the inclusion of the European Human Rights legislation in the Northern Ireland peace agreement does provide a check against state brutality, a check that has provided the agreement with much stability. Removing it threatens to plunge the Six Counties back into further sectarian violence.
Why has nobody in the UK mainstream press reported the fact that Tory plans to scrap the Human Rights Act would endanger the Good Friday Agreement and put at risk peace in Northern Ireland?
In May last year, the Irish government wrote a letter to the Justice Secretary Michael Gove to warn the Tories that scrapping the act may breach the Belfast Agreement terms and threaten hard-won peace and stability in the region.
Here’s the Irish Times from May 2015:
Government concern about UK plan to scrap Human Rights Act
But now the Tories have recently announced they are indeed to go ahead and scrap the act, the mainstream press in the UK hasn’t bothered to report this extremely important fact at all.
In case it harms the Tories chances at the ballot boxes tomorrow?
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