Cameron’s Bill of Rights may be meaningless, even mendacious and certainly legally incoherent but it is outstanding politics. Proper agenda-grabbing spin. A policy so insubstantial as to be practically invisible married to a clever expression of middle-British distrust of soft European ‘human rights’ nonsense. I can almost see the roomful of rosy-faced twenty-somethings who came up with it now, having their Gillette moment, back slapping and high-fiving their way round to the pub. Still, it might backfire yet. Cameron obviously can’t enact this wafer-thin pseudo-policy. He can’t even turn it into a manifesto committment. There’s nothing there – a rhetorical vacuum. It’ll just hang there until, hopefully, it’s forgotten and quietly dropped.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.