The government wants to have its cake and eat it with the Human Rights Act

Cakeism” is a disease that has suffused the entire apparatus of the Johnson administration, and contributed greatly to its routine confusions and frequent blunders.

From Brexit, to fiscal policy, to levelling up – the government has tried, and failed, to defy logic and have things both ways. Now it is the turn of the Human Rights Act to be subjected to some wishful thinking and impractical reform.

In its consultation paper, the government sets out its ambitions to reform the 1998 legislation. The justice secretary Dominic Raab, himself a lawyer, has long-disliked the Blair-era legislation, and sought to replace with it with a more “British” Bill of Rights, drawing on centuries of precedent.

The Supreme Court, it is suggested, should be the final arbiter of human rights in the UK. Parliament should be able to alter and amend rights, as circumstances evolve. Human rights ought not be abused, it’s argued, for example by the stereotypical vicious foreign criminal using bogus grounds of the right to a family life to evade deportation.

What this means in reality, of course, is that the government wishes to pick and choose which universal human rights it wants to honour, and in what circumstances – and does not want ministers and officials being inconvenienced by judges, be they in the UK or at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

Successive home secretaries in particular have been infuriated by the intervention of human rights judgments that they regard as impertinent. That is a politically natural impulse by those in power, and with a solid majority in parliament Mr Raab will no doubt get most, if not all, of what he has in mind made into law.

It might be inimical to protecting human rights, in much the same way as the Nationality and Borders Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill both are, but that should be that – so far as the law is concerned.

Except of course, that the government wants to have its cake and eat it. There is, in reality, no point in passing any number of new Human Rights laws in the UK and pretending that they and the UK courts reign supreme, if the UK remains a full signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, which entails abiding by decisions made by the ECHR.

But the government does not want to be the only nation in Europe, besides Belarus, not to be member of the ECHR. Hence the cakeism and the inevitable muddles that will ensue if this reform ever takes place. A vicious criminal defeated in the UK courts system under new and stricter human rights laws still has a perfect right to argue the points over in Strasbourg.

If the ECHR agrees, then it will petition the UK courts to ensure the vicious prisoner’s human rights are protected (because even vicious criminals have human rights). Domestic law and international law (as with aspects of Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol) will be in conflict.

The aim of the 1998 legislation was to smooth out these inconsistencies and ensure that a British court had a say on human rights cases. So it “brought human rights home” in the slogan of the time. It incorporated the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, but did not attempt to alter them.

As with so many international institutions, Britain is a member of the European Convention – and the court of human rights requires a surrender of some sovereignty for a greater good. This is also true, in varying ways, for all the many agencies of the United Nations and – involving matters of life and death – Nato.

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There is only a partial and imperfect British say in the running and decision-making of all these bodies, which is a drawback, but the same is true of the European human rights regime.

It might be more honest for Mr Raab to simply chalk one up to cakeism and declare that the UK no longer has any use for the European Convention – and will instead write its own superior set of rights, as it has done before.

That would not, though, mean the end of justiciable rights and judicial review (though the government wishes to limit those things as well). Nor would it mean that the human rights of the British people were safer, because they were more directly under the direct control of Mr Raab, Boris Johnson and their colleagues.

Rights and freedoms have been well protected by the international treaty the UK helped to frame after the end of the Second World War. There has never been any good reason to change it – still less to just pretend to change it.