THE Tories are trying to pull a fast one. That hardly seems news, I suppose, so let me be more specific.

They are seeking to overturn the only piece of legislation that offers comprehensive protection for our rights in a country which lacks the normal instrument for doing so, a codified constitution.

And they are trying to ensure that this will be accepted, even supported, by a population to whom the word “European” has come to mean quite the opposite of anything which protects rights, unless you mean the rights of employers to exploit workers in a way unrestrained by effective law.

In doing so, they are expecting to rely on the fact that most people don’t know much about the European Union, except that they don’t like it.

Just as David Cameron is planning a referendum on continued EU membership, the Tories are planning to bring forward a Bill repealing the Human Rights Act, which ties Britain up with “European” courts.

Notwithstanding Tory denials, this represents a step to repudiating Britain’s membership of the Council of Europe and the access British citizens enjoy to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

What must be emphasised here is that the Council of Europe and its court, the ECHR, have nothing whatsoever to do with the EU.

In fact, the Council of Europe predates the EU.

The EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community was established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome.

The Treaty of London, which was the founding document of the Council of Europe, was ratified in 1949.

The EU has 28 members, the Council of Europe 47, including every state in Europe except Belarus and the Vatican.

The only formal link between the two is that in order to be in the EU you have to be in the Council of Europe.

As the reverse doesn’t apply, the question of EU membership is absolutely unrelated to Tory plans to repeal the measures that protect our rights.

In any case, the membership requirement would almost certainly be ignored if Britain was still in the EU when the crunch came and, unable to resolve an impasse over respecting ECHR decisions, was kicked out of the Council of Europe.

The rights in question are quite limited and their interpretation flexible, two features of international treaties of which, as an opponent of the European Union, I heartily approve.

They include the rights to life, freedom of expression, assembly and association, the right to a fair trial and free elections and freedom from torture and forced labour.

In fact, explicitly stating that British courts could ignore ECHR judgements is pure propaganda, a major part of the Tories’ plans to establish a class dictatorship.

Helped by an electoral system which makes Turkey’s look fair, and the expropriation of the Labour Party by sections of the ruling elite, the Tories want to make it impossible to organise for meaningful change or even defend what remains of our social-democratic welfare state.

Cashing in on widespread, but somewhat uninformed Euroscepticism, the Tories say they simply want to ensure that the ECHR is “no longer able to order a change in UK law.”

It is, however, unable to do so now.

Our courts are not bound by ECHR rulings, merely required to “take (them) into account.”

The Strasbourg court can state that a person’s rights have been breached and request a change in the law when it believes one is necessary.

It cannot order the British government or any other government to do anything at all.

This is because the Council of Europe’s fundamental principles, in contrast to those of the EU, include a proper respect for national sovereignty.

To take a concrete example, the ECHR ruled over a decade ago that banning prisoners from voting was a violation of their rights.

And yet prisoners still can’t vote, as Parliament ruled against any change.

What the Tories want is to remove any obligation to take ECHR rulings into account at all.

They say they don’t want to withdraw from the ECHR, but this is dishonest.

The court is unlikely to accept a role as an explicitly advisory body and this will create huge problems if, as the government claims, they have no intention of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.

Last year I was asked by Pernille Frahm, a Danish member of the United Left group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, to look into whether a country could justly reject ECHR rulings on the grounds that its own courts should be supreme.

It didn’t take long to establish that this was nonsense.

Nobody forces countries to join the Council of Europe and thus come under the ECHR’s jurisdiction.

The enquiry came in relation to alleged human rights abuses in Russia and the Russian government’s claim that they were within their rights to ignore ECHR rulings.

The fact is that if either President Vladimir Putin or Prime Minister Cameron want to ignore ECHR judgements, their countries are perfectly within their rights to withdraw from the Council of Europe and that will be that. Otherwise, each will have to abide by the terms of the freely ratified treaty.

This does not require every dotted i and crossed t of every ruling to be followed, but it does mean that governments are expected to stop short of declaring that they will only follow judgements with which they agree.

The Tories’ plans are part of their goal of establishing an unrestrained class dictatorship.

They are in reality indifferent to whether this will be best achieved inside or outside of the EU.

Hence the existence of pro-EU and Eurosceptic elements within the party.

Getting rid of the Human Rights Act is a far less difficult trick to pull off than EU withdrawal — and one which would have their ranks of Daily Mail-reading, xenophobic backwoodsmen braying with content in the erroneous belief that they have struck a blow against “Europe.”