Politics: in other news…

By Richard North - October 14, 2025

Comment from me on the Gaza hostage release and the Trump-inspired peace deal would be superfluous, so I won’t even attempt it. The absence, though, does not mean that I’m not aware of the developments or that I don’t have my own views on them. When (or if ever) I feel I can add a useful comment, I will.

In the meantime, with the legacy media swamped the coverage, there is very little bandwidth left for other matters which means that any serious discussion on them is hardly going to register – as with my analysis of the current round of hostilities between Afghanistan and Pakistan – coverage of which seems to have disappeared without trace from the legacy media.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that there is no other news that might be of interest, and it’s worth registering the Telegraph piece which records an interview with the oaf Johnson, the tenor of which is summed up by headline, “Johnson: Don’t blame me for Boriswave, I took back control of borders”, with the sub-head expanding on this, telling us: “Former PM denies migrant influx was his fault and claims Rwanda plan would have stopped the boats”.

There’s not any great need to review this piece – when Johnson opens his mouth to discuss immigration these days, we get the lies that we’ve come to expect from the man as he attempts to exculpate himself from the catastrophic mess he made with the so-called “Boriswave”.

Essentially, I stand by the piece that Pete wrote on this blog in May 2002, under the title “Boris Johnson: the greatest wastrel of all time”, a sentiment on which it would be hard to improve.

My piece in December 2023 is also relevant, as it explores the essential failure of the Johnson shambles in introducing the so-called Australian “points-based system”, while apparently not realising that the central feature of the system was an annual cap on the number of immigrants admitted.

Without realising that, the fool initiated an open-ended system which opened the floodgates to a torrent of immigrants who were able to select from a menu of “skills” so broad that we ended up with 1,294,000 migrants entering the country in 2022 and 1,326,000 the following year – over 2.6 million in two years – the highest inflow ever recorded in the history of the United Kingdom.

The fact that this tarnished man still dares show himself in public, attempting to defend his own incompetence, says a great deal about someone who is so far gone that the word “disgrace” has no meaning to him.

Far more interesting is a piece in The Times which informs us that “More than a dozen countries back UK on reforming ECHR to ease deportations”, with a sub-head declaring: “Several countries have come together in support of amending parts of the convention to help curb illegal migration”.

This picks up on the article raised by The Times on 10 October which told us that the attorney general Lord Hermer was looking at the issue of ECHR reform (and going further).

That, I briefly discussed in my post of the following day, observing that seeking reform as a prelude to taking unilateral action – if necessary – acting in concert with other countries made for good strategy.

Pete has followed up on the latest Times piece, in his Substack blog, with his headline stating: “the wheels of reform are starting to turn”.

He takes the view that it’s good that the Conservative Party and Reform have committed to leaving the ECHR in that it does put the “international community” on notice that it’s reform or die for the ECHR.

It never hurts, he says, to have leverage. Labour can say, in all sincerity, that they won’t be in power forever, and if the ECHR cannot be reformed then Britain will call time on it.

However, if the UK’s initiative is successful it may take a little wind out of Reform’s sails – but it may also give Reform a much-needed get-out clause. There’s a reason politicians keep threatening to leave the ECHR then changing their minds. It’s a fine idea in theory, but less so in practice, Pete says.

For my part I’m not so sure about the Conservative Party. We’re quite familiar with the idea of Reform UK producing crap policy ideas, so having this party committing to leaving the ECHR is only to be expected, even as the evidence mounts that this is not a terribly good idea in the short-term and will have little impact on deportations, which denouncement is intended to address.

For Badenough, however, this was her opportunity to come up with a considered policy, more likely to succeed than Farage’s populism, which might have entailed a range of measures falling short of denouncing the convention. Instead, she blew it, following in Farage’s wake.

Not forgetting that the Starmer Regime still has nearly four years before it must go to the polls, Lord Hermer has enough time to show some progress on the reform front, robbing Badenough of any electoral gain that she might have achieved from her stance on the convention.

As to Pete’s views on the ECHR – where he has very much made the running in calling for a more measured approach – he gets to argue his case, and much more, on the Restorationist blog, where he calls for the Right to commit to producing joined-up solutions based on an established set of agreed principles to resolve the many problems that affect contemporary Britain.

Lacking this, we risk ending up with the same unholy mess into which Brexit degenerated after Farage failed to produce an exit plan and Vote Leave, on the advice if Dominc Cummings, “swerved” the idea on the basis that it would be too contentious and end up in internecine squabbling.

Central to the failings of the British Right, Pete laments – which takes in Restore, Advance, the Tories and Reform – is that they have fallen into the trap of believing everything is too broken to fix.

They believe this about the ECHR, the police, the courts, the civil service, the NHS, and parliament itself, he says. Rather than attempting to fix them, they propose sweeping reforms. But there’s a problem with that. If all of these things are “fundamentally broken” then some of them are going to have to stay broken.

Pete thus develops the point made by Margaret Beckett, which I explored, noting that, with the practical and political constraints on any government, you only get to pick one or two of these things to focus on in your first term.

Policy fantasists, he says, can sit and scribble down their wet dreams of how the perfect system would work, but no government will ever have the kind of mandate and political capital to take it all on at once. Just ECHR exit requires an unprecedented constitutional overhaul that will chew up most of parliament’s time. Most things, he believes (as do I) can be fixed with better leadership and greater accountability and transparency.

Yet, fantasists there are a plenty, with this one wanting to tear things down, without the first idea of how this scheme would impact on the governance of the nation, while we have the hardy annual of the Great Reform Bill, looking for radical change rather than the less disruptive evolutionary process.

Pete sums up my view, rejecting the “burn everything down to the ground” mentality as neither productive nor useful. We need to act with precision and care. Top-down grand designs can end up being as bad as that which they replace, or even worse.