TORY plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are disingenuous, dishonest and downright dangerous. 

It is therefore good news that the Scottish National Party (SNP) is already sounding out potential rebels among the ranks of Tory MPs, who may defy the whips to defeat the Act.

Labour and the SNP can work together to head a cross-party alliance which sees off this particular menace. 

It is already obvious that the Conservative Party has hardly thought through its own proposals and that reckless authoritarians such as Theresa May have alarmed traditionalists within its own ranks. 

The government claims to want to repeal the Act in order to restore British sovereignty, but this is absurd.

"Britain's laws should be decided by Britain's Parliament and adjudicated by Britain's courts," huffs disgraced former defence secretary Liam Fox.

A shame, then, that his party is an enthusiastic backer of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being negotiated in secret between the United States and European Union.

TTIP will lower environmental and safety standards whatever the British Parliament - hardly any of whose members have even seen the treaty's details - has to say about it, open our health and education sectors to private-sector profiteering and allow foreign companies to sue our government if it enacts legislation they don't like.

Nor has Dr Fox proved an outspoken critic of the US blockade of socialist Cuba, even when British companies are fined by US courts for trading within Cuban enterprises.

But the United States trampling on our sovereignty is not a problem in Tory eyes. Neither is any abuse of power by the EU, even if Thatcherite fanatics like Fox claim to associate the European Convention with "the European Union in general."

The ECHR is wrongly tarred with the EU brush because of reams of deliberately misleading propaganda spewed out by xenophobic rabble-rousers like the Daily Mail. But the Convention has nothing to do with the Union and predates it.

The ECHR was drawn up by the Council of Europe, an institution designed to further co-operation and understanding between European countries after the defeat of nazi Germany.

All European countries except Belarus and the Vatican City are members of the Council, which does not seek to impose any particular economic model on its members and cannot make its rulings binding on elected governments.

The EU, by contrast, grew our of the European Coal and Steel Community. Its focus has always been on breaking down national borders in order to remove limits on corporate power. 

It too has a court, the European Court of Justice - better known for its union-busting judgements in the Viking and Laval cases than for protecting people's rights. 

The ECHR is another matter.

Not everything in the Convention is perfect, but citizens of all European countries benefit through participating in a treaty that bans torture, slavery, state persecution and a host of other crimes.

The fascist barbarism engulfing Ukraine - with the full and enthusiastic backing of the EU - suggests the principles of the Convention need defending more than ever.

Instead, David Cameron wishes to scrap them, depriving us of the right to appeal to the Court if the state abuses its powers. 

The British Establishment has been caught bang to rights in the last few years for blacklisting workers, letting police infiltrators start long-term sexual relationships with activists in order to spy on them and covering up atrocities from Hillsborough to Orgreave.

That's not even to mention the decades-long dirty war fought against republican and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland.

Our government thinks it should be less, not more, accountable. The Morning Star disagrees. The maximum mobilisation against all attempts to repeal the Human Rights Act must start now.