And This Person is a Lawyer?

Schona Jolly.

She is peddling the usual remainer scaremongering that if it wasn’t for the EU we would have no rights – the satanic mills and all that. Yes right, except…

Many of those rights that we enjoy today are in very substantial measure the product of our membership of the European Union, underpinned and developed over 40 years through laws passed and case law developed with British input.

And some of those rights predate our membership. Which country was it that first introduced the concept of paid leave? Oh, that would be us in 1938… I use this as an example, for we are at the forefront of such developments and have been for a long time, yet Jolly and her remainer scaremongers are trying to sell the line that new Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab will don a top hat and cape and grow a moustache so that he can twirl it while stamping on the poor. Oh do fuck off already!

Okay, so I exaggerate, but that is nothing compared to the whining and complaining and gross exaggerations idiots such as Jolly are trying to peddle. Indeed, such a good lawyer is she that she contradicts her whole argument in her own text.

Once we leave the EU, any of those rights that originate with our EU membership, for example working time protections and the right to equal pay for work of equal value, are subject to potential removal or restriction by a future government so inclined.

Well, yes, potentially, but not necessarily and it will be a Westminster government, one we have elected and can unelect if we so choose who will decide, not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. Big difference. Huge fucking difference. No, we will not be returning to the nineteenth century and the sooner we leave, the better. And remind me never to hire Schona Jolly if I need a lawyer – I will be wanting one that is at least nominally capable of putting a coherent argument together without contradicting herself in the first couple of paragraphs.

 He has called for an end to obnoxious “feminist bigotry”, and thinks we’ve already sorted equality – for women anyway – so the real cause of advancement should be men’s rights. According to him, we shouldn’t be worried about the gender pay gap because “men work longer hours, die earlier but retire later than women.” In fact, it’s discrimination against men we should be getting exercised about: “from the cradle to the grave, men are getting a raw deal”.

I’m beginning to like him already.

Raab’s regressive views aren’t limited to gender. He has a long history of decrying the “excessive protections” of workers’ rights in favour of the rights of business. He has consistently made clear his contempt for regulation. Raab expressly compared Britain to the “rising” power of Singapore in a 2011 report called “Escaping the Straitjacket”. and argued that the “burden of employment regulation” was a “dragging anchor” on the British economy. He called for scrapping the requirement for small businesses to pay those aged under 21 the minimum wage, renegotiating the UK’s treaty obligations with the EU on workers’ rights, and securing a total opt out from European working time regulations.

Well, yes?

These positions, once considered extreme, now have a seat at the head of the table.

They are not extreme. They never were extreme and he has a point to make here. The minimum wage has the unintended consequence of pricing people out of work, for example and the working time directive actively works against both employer and employee who would prefer to make their own arrangements, so yes, these ideas should be open to challenge and other ideas tested and we are suffering from a preponderance of regulation. Unless you are some sort of authoritarian who wants unchallenged rule by unelected bureaucrat…

But isn’t Raab a champion of civil liberties, some might ask? It’s true that he’s been very critical both of New Labour’s track record on civil rights, and of Theresa May’s “snooper’s charter”. But that all sits in the context of a lawyer who has a fervent dislike of both the European court of human rights, and the Human Rights Act, which he has unsuccessfully sought to dismantle through the introduction of a British bill of rights. It’s a curious, cherrypicking approach: he seems to believe in an individual’s right to certain liberties, without recognising that they must sit within a wider, enforceable system of rights that provide remedy against state abuse of power.

Actually, it makes absolute sense to anyone outside of leftist groupthink. He dislikes the egregious idea of imposed rights as, indeed, I do. I’m not convinced that a Bill of Rights would be any improvement, but, that’s by the by. There is nothing inconsistent in his approach to individual liberty and an abhorrence of the imposition of rights from above. Makes perfect sense. The best prevention of abuse of power is not to allow the state too much power in the first place and to have a robust defence of individual liberty, which seems to be where Raab is coming from. Yes, I think I do like him already. Jolly is an idiot.

Despite some appearances to the contrary, Raab is, at heart, an ideologue with dangerous convictions.

If he is, you most certainly haven’t made a convincing case for it.