The Great Repeal, as an actual plan

"The Great Repeal" is a banner, not a plan, and no minister can act on a banner. Here it is as a sequence: what changes, in what order, what replaces it and the hard part each step runs into. The first question any serious reader asks is "so we have no rights at all?" It is answered at step one.

Two roads, stated plainly

There is a reform road and an exit road, and most of the argument on the right blurs them. The reform road keeps Britain inside the European Convention and changes how courts apply rights at home. The exit road leaves the Convention altogether. The reform road delivers most of the control the public wants. The exit road delivers more sovereignty but reopens the Union settlement. Pretending the choice is cost-free is why the last two attempts collapsed.

Replace the Human Rights Act with a domestic Bill of Rights

The Act folded the Convention into UK law and, through its interpretation duty, let courts in Lord Wolfson's phrase end up "effectively rewriting legislation." That duty is the target.

What replaces it: keep the Convention rights in domestic law, but narrow the interpretation duty so judges apply statutes rather than rewrite them, and leave the last word with Parliament through declarations of incompatibility. Add a parliamentary override on the Canadian model: a legislature can override a named right for a renewable five-year term, stated openly and on the record. Rights remain. Elected politicians get the final say, with a sunset and a signature.

The hard part: drawn too wide, the override hollows out the protection; drawn too narrow, it changes nothing. The 2022 Bill of Rights Bill is the nearest worked draft, and it stalled.

Decide the Convention question

Reform road: stay in the ECHR and curb how Strasbourg's Rule 39 injunctions bind domestic action. Exit road: leave the Convention and rely on the domestic Bill of Rights, the Starkey and Reform position.

The hard part: leaving is close to unprecedented among democracies. The only European states to have left were Greece's military junta in 1969 and Russia in 2022. And the Convention is stitched into the Good Friday Agreement, the devolution settlements and the EU trade deal, so exit reopens the Union itself. This is the single biggest deliverability problem, and any honest plan has to own it rather than wish it away.

Reform the Equality Act

Narrow or repeal the Public Sector Equality Duty, restore the market rate as a defence in equal-pay claims, and stop open-ended entitlements like SEND being created as legal rights with no budget attached.

What replaces it: a law that still bans discrimination, but returns spending trade-offs to ministers who have to balance a budget and answer for it.

The hard part: drawing the line between protection against real discrimination and open-ended liability is genuinely difficult, and gets the reformer accused of scrapping equality itself.

Put the quango state back under ministers

Not abolish everything. Restore the principle of experts on tap, not on top. Budget-setting and the big trade-offs (the net zero pathway, environment against infrastructure) sit with accountable ministers, with expert bodies advising rather than deciding.

The hard part: ministers may simply make worse calls than the experts. The claim is not that politicians are wiser, only that you can vote them out.

Restore the primacy of politics

The end state, and the whole point. Contested trade-offs decided by people you can vote out, in the open, reversible at the next election. Everything above is only the means to that.

Proven precedent, not a leap in the dark

The reform road already exists in the world. Canada's notwithstanding clause lets legislatures override rights for a renewable five-year term. Denmark runs one of Europe's strictest immigration regimes while remaining inside the Convention, which shows you do not have to leave to get control. Australia's real lesson is sharper still: what stopped the boats was turnbacks at sea, not offshore processing, and some turnbacks fall foul of the same rights law, which is exactly why the legal question is the one that matters.

For politicians of all colours

The idea that contested trade-offs should be settled by people you can vote out, not by judges, is not owned by the right. Its roots are on the left, in J.A.G. Griffith's argument that political accountability, not judicial review, is Britain's real constitution. A Labour reformer who wants to actually deliver a manifesto, a Liberal who worries about power without a democratic check, and a Conservative who wants to build should be able to meet on the reform road, even while disagreeing about the exit road. The reform road is the common ground. Naming it is how this stops being a factional cause and becomes a national one.