Unbinding the State: On Suella Braverman’s Plan to Leave the ECHR

Braverman’s plan to leave the ECHR isn’t legal reform, it’s preparation for rule without restraint. Like the ERG before her, she wraps authoritarian ambition in the language of sovereignty. Strip away the rhetoric and what’s left is a state unbound, a state that punishes, not protects. If she jumps to Reform UK, this plan becomes reality.

There is a kind of politics that feeds on the residue of law. The law not as a structure to protect the weak, but as an obstacle to be overcome. Suella Braverman’s proposal to leave the European Convention on Human Rights is not a legal reform in any meaningful sense. It is the expression of a state preparing itself to rule without restraint.

The language she uses (“judicial imperialism”, “creeping remit”, “restore sovereignty”) does not describe any real condition, but evokes one: a Britain imagined to be under siege from foreign courts, illegal migrants, vexatious litigants, violent protesters, and ungrateful Irish republicans. This is the terrain of the reactionary imagination: everywhere, limits; everywhere, enemies.

It’s hard not to be reminded of the ERG. The same feverish language. The same fantasy of rupture. The same pathological belief that somewhere out there (Brussels then, Strasbourg now) is a malign foreign power restraining the will of the British people. For the ERG, Brexit was never about practical outcomes, but metaphysical release. For Braverman, leaving the ECHR plays the same role. It offers no solutions.

Just like the ERG, she has no interest in what comes after. What matters is the act of departure. The border drawn. The law broken. The gesture made. That it would undermine the Good Friday Agreement, provoke a constitutional crisis, and strip basic rights from the most vulnerable is not unfortunate collateral. It’s all part of the appeal. The state, in her telling, should not be fettered. Not by treaties. Not by judges. Not by the past.

It is no coincidence that the plan centres on Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement was always a fragile compromise, held together by shared institutions, mutual recognition, and a minimum floor of rights. To remove the ECHR from it is not to ‘modernise’ or ‘clarify’ the agreement, it is to tear at the stitching. Braverman knows this. That’s the point. The Agreement, in her formulation, has already been “torn up, amended, repurposed”. If so, why not again?

But this is not only about Northern Ireland. The proposal is more ambitious, and more dangerous. It seeks to remake the post-war British constitutional order. Not in a blaze of revolution, but in the name of restoration. Its claim is that rights come from Parliament, not people; that courts are subordinate to ministers; that legality is whatever the Home Office says it is.

This is the logic of the authoritarian turn. Not the grand seizure of power, but the slow unbinding of constraint. The repeal of the Human Rights Act. The withdrawal from Strasbourg. The shrinking of judicial review. One by one, the mediating layers between the citizen and the state are stripped back. What remains is direct rule by the executive.

Braverman’s vision is of a politics without friction: policy unhindered, deportations unchallenged, military action unscrutinised. She frames this as a return to a lost British tradition, but there is nothing traditional about it. The common law she invokes was always contested, by radicals, workers, women, colonised people. Its liberties were hard won, not handed down. And where they were absent, the ECHR became a vital tool of redress.

The contradiction here is worth naming. Braverman denounces the Strasbourg court for protecting those accused of crimes, yet praises the British legal tradition for its focus on individual liberty. But it was precisely because of that tradition, because of miscarriages of justice, internments without trial, the abuse of prisoners abroad, that the ECHR became necessary. The court’s ‘activism’ is often nothing more than the application of basic principles: the right not to be tortured, the right to a fair trial, the right not to be detained indefinitely without charge. If these are unacceptable burdens on the British state, then the problem is the state, not the law.

There is, in Braverman’s framing, a deep hostility to the very idea of mediation, whether by courts, agreements, or international institutions. The state is imagined as sovereign only when unencumbered. Parliament becomes a weapon, not a forum. Consent is nationalised, not negotiated. Democracy becomes majoritarian will, whatever its content. The irony is this: the more unbound the state becomes, the more powerless its people become.

What we are seeing is not just a policy proposal, but a constitutional moment. A recalibration of the relationship between power and legality. And the left cannot afford to treat it as a fringe demand or a culture war distraction. Because it speaks to something real: the state preparing itself for more aggressive management of its own contradictions. As the crisis deepens (economic, social, imperial) the dominat class looks to tear up what remains of the post-war compromise. Rights become conditional. Dissent becomes disorder. Borders become weapons.

The ECHR is not perfect. It reflects liberal assumptions. It protects property as well as people. But it is, in this moment, one of the few remaining formal limits on arbitrary power. Braverman wants it gone not because it is broken, but because it still works, just enough to be inconvenient. Her vision is one where there are no brakes left at all.

The task is not simply to defend the ECHR, as if it were sacred. It is to understand why it is under attack. To see, dialectically, how the language of rights can be co-opted by the powerful, and how its erosion marks a shift in the state’s orientation from welfare to punishment, from regulation to repression. To defend rights is not to cling to legalism, but to insist that law must remain a site of struggle, not a tool of domination.

Braverman’s project is not to restore liberty, but to centralise authority. To remake law in the image of power. To turn Parliament into an instrument of punishment, not protection. It is a vision in which legality is simply what the executive can get away with.

If Braverman jumps ship to Reform UK, as seems increasingly likely, then this is no longer a fringe proposition. It becomes the skeleton key of Britain’s reactionary bloc, a shared legal architecture of repression, ready to be enacted. Not just rhetoric, but a plan. Not a warning, but a threshold. Step over it, and we enter a world where the state is free to act, and the rest of us are simply expected to obey.



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