From Human Rights to the EU, the Tide's Turning against the Liberal Thought Police; THE Melanie Phillips COLUMN

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Byline: Melanie Phillips

MIGHT the tectonic plates of British politics be beginning to shift just a fraction towards a state approximating to reality?

The Home Office is shortly to publish a discussion paper about rethinking one section of human rights legislation.

This is Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the 'right to family life'. Increasingly, it is being used by foreign criminals and illegal immigrants to dodge deportation by claiming they have the right to family life in the UK.

But other parts of human rights legislation cause just as much trouble -- such as Article 3, which bans inhuman treatment, and which has been similarly used to paralyse deportations of undesirables.

To bring to an end the grotesque carnival of injustice and erosion of Britain's security caused by human rights law, Britain would have to leave the Human Rights Convention altogether, or at the very least officially derogate from whole sections of the treaty.

But the Government has so far been extremely reluctant to embark on either course, due to the likely political and legal repercussions.

Human rights law is not the only issue on which it has …