SADIQ KHAN’S pitch to Telegraph readers yesterday encouraging British judges not to adhere to European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rulings suggests Labour is learning all the wrong lessons from the local and European election results.

Mr Khan is technically correct that while the European Convention on Human Rights, which the court was set up to enforce, is enshrined in British law through the Human Rights Act, our judges have the right to interpret it themselves, which makes his pledge to change the law rather moot.

Tories have repeatedly suggested scrapping the Human Rights Act entirely in the event of winning the 2015 general election, presumably because a court which highlights Britain’s far from admirable record on human rights is an embarrassment.

The entire subject of our relationship with the ECHR is mired in confusion — a muddle exemplified by Home Secretary Theresa May’s absurd suggestion last year that Britain could withdraw from the convention temporarily in order to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan, where it was feared he might be convicted on evidence based on torture, only to rejoin once our commitments had been successfully flouted.

ECHR rulings affecting Britain have included insisting on councils observing safeguards during evictions, bringing in guidelines on the treatment of vulnerable prisoners and bringing the age of consent for homosexuals into line with that of heterosexual people.

This may be the stuff of Tory nightmares, but it is hardly evidence of a foreign elite imposing stifling restrictions on our ancient freedoms.

The strong showing for Eurosceptic parties in the May 22 elections reflects anger at the anti-democratic, pro-austerity European Union, which has imposed sweeping spending cuts across the continent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

As yesterday’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) report on world social protection reveals, this has forced a shocking 123 million people — a quarter of the EU’s population — into poverty and eroded the social safety net won by working people in the aftermath of the second world war.

The ILO is right to highlight the disastrous impact of EU policy, although the report’s concern that the “European social model” is being undermined by “short-term adjustment reforms” indicates a failure to recognise the deliberate transfer of wealth from rich to poor which so-called “austerity” represents.

The EU enshrines the privatisation and outsourcing of public services in law in the name of “competition.” 

Any British government seeking to end austerity, bring our railways back into public ownership, renationalise our Royal Mail or kick the privateer parasites out of our NHS will run up against its unelected institutions and could be taken to court — not in the ECHR, which has nothing to do with the EU, but in the mis-named European Court of Justice.

Indeed, in Ireland the government was warned only this week by the European Commission to ignore voters’ opposition to austerity and press ahead with €2 billion (£1.6bn) in spending cuts and tax rises.

Not a squeak from the Labour Party over here about that, which would call into question its commitment to ending austerity if its own array of uninspiring half-policies didn’t do so already.

If much of the British labour movement has yet to wake up to the iron-cast neoliberal nature of the EU, the Labour Party itself still fails to see any problem with the supranational bloc at all.

Taking a pop at human rights is not evidence of “standing up to Europe.” 

Until Labour takes on the EU and pledges to restore our sovereign right to public ownership it will continue to haemorrhage votes.