IT was always obvious that the Conservatives were not hell-bent on taking us all out of the EU and into the hardest possible Brexit in order to strengthen the human, employment, consumer and environmental rights of ordinary citizens. When Gove and Johnson mouthed their platitudes about taking back control, it wasn't the ability of ordinary working people to have more control over their own lives that they had in mind.

What they meant was the removal of any checks and balances over the powers of the Westminster Parliament, and given the way in which Westminster has been progressively reduced to a body which rubber stamps the decisions of the leader of the party commanding a majority, this effectively meant giving the Prime Minister the ability to do pretty much as he or she pleases without any meaningful constraints.

That means that there is little standing in the way of the final transformation of the UK into a low wage and low tax economy, with public services stripped to the bone and an economy which is powered by laundering dirty money for dictators, autocrats and oligarchs. It's a UK in which a small minority - the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world - will be able to become extremely wealthy while the rest of us labour away for a pittance in zero-hours contracts jobs without employment rights, while an increasingly authoritarian government trashes what remains of our democracy.

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Although the UK has now left the European Union and seeks to lower environmental and animal welfare standards in the supposed name of abolishing "red tape". The UK remains a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which compels the British Government to respect certain standards of common decency in its adoption of legislation that might impact upon our human rights.

This is anathema to sections of the Conservative party, especially the swivel-eyed Brextremists who have taken over the party and who drove the UK out of the European Single Market and Customs Union despite the assurances of Leave campaigners prior to and during the EU referendum that they had no intentions of doing so.

The right of the party, which is now mainstream Conservatism, hates the ECHR because it prevents the British Government from being as cruel and unpleasant towards migrants as Priti Patel would like.

This week in the Commons, arch-Brextremist Tory MP Andrew Rosindell urged the PM to take the UK out of the ECHR, claiming that this was the only way to let the UK pass the laws which he felt necessary "to stop the endless waves of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel". He also asked the PM to get rid of the Human Rights Act and bring in a British Bill of Rights.

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A British Bill of Rights would doubtless strip citizens of the right to protest and demonstrate and replace it with compulsory poppy wearing and a six-hour-long sycophantothon on TV every time someone distantly related to the royal family came down with a slight head cold. It would also confine migrants to unheated tents surrounded by barbed wire in a field in a Labour constituency before they could be sent back across the Channel on a pedalo.

There are widespread concerns that the UK Government's upcoming review of the Human Rights Act (HRA) may extend to replacing it altogether and withdrawing the UK from the ECHR. The Justice Minister Dominic Raab is well known for his dislike of the HRA which he recently described as being "fundamentally at odds with the British legacy of liberty going back hundreds of years". He would like to end the jurisdiction of the ECHR in the UK and claims to be working on a "mechanism" for bringing this about.

The HRA is an integral part of the devolution settlement, amending it would require the consent of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. That consent is highly unlikely to be forthcoming, but that won't stop the Conservatives. They will simply overrule Holyrood and do it anyway. It's not just the devolution settlement which is in danger with this Conservative government. It is also our fundamental human rights, and that is a very alarming prospect indeed.