A Celtic rebellion?: newspaper coverage of the UK’s Human Rights Act in the devolved nations

ABSTRACT

Ever since its incorporation in UK law, the European Convention on Human Rights has attracted hostile press reporting. This study examines how the Human Rights Act, the Convention’s UK domestic equivalent, is represented in newspapers in the devolved nations. Its main finding is that, over time, the press there has become more supportive of the Act, deviating from the editorial line adopted by many English national titles. European human rights act as a conduit of the devolved nations’ belonging as European nations, making it a potentially important issue in the re-imagining of national identity in the era of devolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• Human Rights Act
• devolution
• national identity
• Europeanisation

Introduction

Brexit has exposed some significant divisions between the UK’s four constituent nations: while England and Wales voted to leave the EU, Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain. This has seen Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon make the case for a second independence referendum in the wake of the Brexit referendum. The unique position of Northern Ireland, meanwhile, has given rise to concerns about the impact of Brexit on securing a peaceful future, something that proved a major stumbling block in the Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU (de Mars et al., 2018). The focus of this article is on ‘the other Europe’ embodied by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Ever since its incorporation through the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), the ECHR has been an indirect target of hostile reporting in the English national press. The European Convention, through its domestic equivalent that is the HRA, has become a convenient scapegoat, even when there is at best only a tenuous link with the HRA and the ECHR more generally. This makes the HRA a high-profile target of Euroscepticism which can be blamed for all manners of social ills, irrespective of whether there is a factual basis for such claims.¹

Most of the research in this area has involved the England-based national press, notwithstanding important differences between the media landscapes of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Taking such differences into account, this article examines how European human rights are represented in newspapers in the devolved nations. Despite the fact that the overall volume of coverage is limited, an alternative narrative about human rights has started to emerge in the press in the devolved territories: over the course of time, newspapers there have become more supportive of the HRA, deviating from the editorial line taken by many English national titles, which is to portray the Act as a ‘villain’s charter’ (Gies, 2015). European human rights are claimed in newspapers in the devolved territories as an integral part of national identity and an emblem of the devolved nations’ belonging as European nations. The coverage suggests that European human rights play a potentially important role in the re-imagining of national identity in the era of devolution. A recurrent frame in newspapers in the devolved territories is that any move by the UK government towards a repeal of the HRA and its possible replacement by the ‘home grown’ bill of rights constitutes an assault on devolved government itself. If Brexit has put a strain on the Union, tensions concerning the future of the UK’s membership of the ECHR evidently increase the centrifugal pull, widening already existing cleavages between Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, on the one hand, and England/the UK on the other.

This article has four main sections: the first section discusses some of the key features of the press in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The second section reviews key research on media representations of Europe, highlighting the paucity of research into the local press. It also gives an overview of how devolution arrangements in each of these countries dovetail with the HRA and the ECHR. The third section details the study’s methodology and analyses the general features of newspaper coverage of the HRA in the devolved nations over a 17-year period. The fourth section elaborates on the linkage between European human rights and post-devolution national identity and discusses how this enables nationalist aspirations to be interwoven with a cosmopolitan, outward-looking collective sense of self for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Press landscapes in the devolved nations

The press in the devolved nations has been in decline for several years. The reason why London-based national newspaper titles such as the Daily Mail and the Sun have become market leaders in the other parts of the UK is because of their strategy to ‘editionise’, or ‘produce multiple editions of a national title, tailored to the particular characteristics of populations in different parts of the country’ (McNair, 2009, p. 173). Devolution, -interestingly, a development that more or less coincided with the ‘bringing home’ of human rights in the form of the HRA 1998-, has provided a powerful argument for preserving a vibrant press in the devolved territories: ensuring that devolved matters are covered in sufficient detail and with a sufficient level of attention is vital for holding the devolved administrations to account (McLaughlin & Baker, 2012).

Starting with the Welsh press, the picture is not very encouraging in this regard. The market is dominated by English titles which traditionally pay scant regard to Welsh public affairs (Thomas et al., 2004). Fragmentation caused by geography and language, combined with the strong influence of major neighbouring English cities, have been cited as factors that account for Wales’ weak press landscape. The Daily Post and the Western Mail, the main Welsh newspapers, serve the North and the South respectively, leaving Wales without its own ‘national’ press capable of creating a sense of nationhood (Cushion et al., 2009). Circulation figures have fallen substantially in recent times and many local newspapers have closed down, while English titles have reduced their staff in Wales, prompting McElroy et al. (2017, p. 381) to conclude that ‘[t]here is worrying evidence of serious contraction in the media serving Wales. (…) these changes potentially threaten the capacity of citizens to remain informed, educated and entertained about the nation in which they live, vote and work’.

Scotland was once described as having a ‘public sphere of exceptional richness’ (McNair, 2006 quoted in Cushion et al., 2009, p. 656) with a history that goes back all the way to the Acts of Union 1707 when Great Britain was formed. Some of Scotland’s publications occupy a proud place in the Union’s history: for example, The Herald newspaper, which also features in this study, dates back to the eighteenth century, making it one of the oldest newspapers in the world (McNair, 2008, p. 228). In contrast with Wales, the press landscape in Scotland has made it historically possible to foster a sense of national identity (Douglas, 2009; Schlesinger, 2008). It was thought that devolution would boost political journalism in Scotland, giving both broadcast and print media a considerable amount of ‘home grown’ politics to cover (McNair, 2008). However, it should be emphasised that the Scottish press too is in strong decline because of the competition from English titles but also from online news and freesheets (McNair, 2009).

Finally, as far as Northern Ireland is concerned, it comes as no surprise that the press landscape is again a reflection of the country’s own unique politics, which has involved a prolonged period of violent conflict. The three main newspapers featured in this study each serve their own segments of the community. The Belfast Telegraph has been described as ‘moderately unionist’, the Irish News as ‘nationalist (McLaughlin & Baker, 2012, p. 296) and the Belfast News Letter (also known as the Ulster News Letter or simply as News Letter) as ‘strongly unionist’ (Armoudian, 2016, p. 140). The Northern Irish press has been credited for playing a crucial role in the peace process which eventually resulted in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 (Wolfsfeld, 2004). Since the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Irish press too has suffered a significant decline, something that is once again attributable to the inroads made by the editionised English tabloid press (McLaughlin & Baker, 2010).

As we will see, newspapers in the devolved nations can be best characterised as displaying a moderate level of interest in the ECHR, albeit that this interest mainly has a domestic focus in the shape of the HRA. To some extent, the controversy surrounding the legislation in the national press resonates with parts of the press in the devolved territories, making European human rights a talking point up and down the country. Indeed, some of the press coverage in the devolved territories rehearses frames that are overtly sceptical about human rights. In recent years, there has been a shift towards a more positive interpretation of the HRA as a guarantor of devolution. The net result in the press context of the devolved territories is that sceptical frames sit alongside more forgiving frames about European human rights: the issue of human rights reform has the potential to help galvanise nationalism in the era of devolution. Given the perceived threat to devolution associated with a potential repeal of the HRA, it is, if anything, somewhat surprising that the issue is not more dominant in the press in the devolved territories. This relative under-reporting could be down to the fact that, politically speaking, the HRA is not as salient as are other issues, while yet another explanation is that a struggling press in the devolved territories may not have the capacity to mount a comprehensive campaign against the scaling back of domestic human rights protections. A further consideration is that, in their competition with national redtops, newspapers in the devolved territories may be reluctant to be seen to be championing a piece of legislation that is often comprehensively demonised in the national press.

Devolution and media representations of ‘Europe’

The extent to which media content has been ‘Europeanised’ through increased coverage of the workings of European institutions and the public affairs of other European states, -respectively referred to as ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ Europeanisation-, has been the subject of a sizeable body of research (e.g. Brosius et al., 2019; Brüggemann & Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2009; de Vreese, 2003; Kleinnijenhuis & van Atteveldt, 2016; Machill et al., 2006; van Noije, 2010). However, little is known about any differences in representations of the EU and other European institutions between national and local newspapers. The national media in the UK have been noted for devoting little attention to EU-related issues overall (at least before Brexit), but also for being much more political in their coverage of the EU (Machill et al., 2006). Reporting of the EU also tends to be comparatively much more sensationalised, especially but not just in the tabloids (Daddow, 2012). A hard-line Eurosceptic discourse, espoused by the media but also by political elites, eventually culminated in the historic Brexit referendum, with a majority of voters voting to leave the EU.

When it comes Brexit, there were some important differences between the national press and the press in the devolved territories. It is especially striking that there was a significant gap between Scotland and the rest of the UK: the Scottish press, in stark contrast with large swathes of the English national press, promoted a ‘remain’ discourse. The majority of voters in Northern Ireland also voted to remain, while the pro-Brexit referendum result in Wales closely mirrored that of England. The explanation for the Welsh referendum result can once again be found in the England-dominated media landscape of Wales (Roberts, 2018). While the public debate about the merits of EU membership in England was very intense and antagonistic in the run-up to the referendum, in Scotland it has been described as ‘comparatively courteous and mild-mannered’ because political parties were broadly in agreement that the UK should remain in the EU (Higgins, 2016, p. 24). The Brexit debate in Northern Ireland was also distinct in that ‘immigration was not a major issue of debate, and the public discourse was dominated by the impact of Brexit on the peace process; the economic impact of withdrawal from the single market; the feasibility of continuing a common travel area; and the implications for social policy and the protection of human rights’ (Doyle & Connolly, 2017, p. 143).

The EU is just one embodiment of ‘Europe’. Its pre-eminence nevertheless means that its representation in European news media has been studied the most extensively. By contrast, there is no research into the way in which local newspapers represent the ECHR, just as there is very limited research into national press portrayals. As far as the UK is concerned, there is some analysis available documenting the sceptical and frequently hostile attitudes displayed by the national press towards the HRA (e.g. Farrell et al., 2019; Gies, 2015). How the HRA is represented in the press in the devolved nations, on the other hand, has not yet been studied. The starting point for the present study is the integral role of human rights and the ECHR more particularly in the devolution process. Northern Ireland and Scotland have their own distinct legal traditions which have been further enhanced by the devolution of powers from the Westminster Parliament to the Stormont Assembly and Holyrood Parliament. Northern Ireland has been described as a ‘semi-autonomous nation’ with, uniquely, its own written constitution (Weiden, 2009). With human rights violations rife on all sides during the ‘Troubles’, the Good Friday Agreement ensured that a respect for human rights became an integral part of the post-conflict settlement through the incorporation of the ECHR as well as other measures, such as the creation of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. As a result, ‘Northern Ireland has woven human rights into its vocabulary of conflict and post-conflict peace-building. It is a core yet contested feature of the cultural landscape of discussions about peace and conflict.’ (Pierson & Bloomer, 2017, p. 177). Devolution is inextricably linked with human rights and the HRA: the latter is part and parcel of the Good Friday Agreement. Any repeal of the HRA would therefore have far-reaching consequences for the settlement reached with various parties, including with the Republic of Ireland (Bell, 2015).

In Scotland, human rights are a partially devolved matter, resulting, among other things, in the creation of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. A repeal of the HRA would in all likelihood require the consent of the Scottish Parliament under the so-called Sewel Convention, a constitutional convention stipulating that the Westminster Parliament will not legislate on devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament (Bell, 2015). The same convention applies to the Welsh Assembly, in spite of the very different architecture of devolution in Wales. Moreover, the Scotland Act 1998, the Government of Wales Act 1998 and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 all stipulate that any laws violating the ECHR made by a devolved legislature are ‘not law’. In other words, the European Convention applies directly to devolved matters, which in the case of Northern Ireland and Scotland includes criminal justice. The Devolution Acts afford a protection of human rights that is more robust than that offered through the HRA alone because the ECHR is entrenched in devolution legislation in ways in which it is not in the HRA: the HRA stops short of allowing courts to strike down incompatible primary legislation in favour of a fast-track procedure through which a sovereign UK Parliament can choose, but is not obliged, to amend offending legislation (Webber, 2016). A repeal of the HRA alone is unlikely to satisfy the desire of UK human rights sceptics to put an end to the influence exercised by the European Court of Human Rights. For this reason, repeal of the HRA would need to be accompanied by the UK’s withdrawal from the ECHR, which, in turn, would drastically impact on devolution itself and require amendments to the devolution legislation. There is a clear and symbiotic relationship between the HRA, the ECHR and devolution, which, for example, means that there is no easy answer to the question of whether human rights legislation is a reserved or, by contrast, a devolved matter (Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, 2016).

General features of the coverage

Underpinning this study is a content analysis of newspaper coverage in the three devolved nations with a focus on the indigenous press to the exclusion of the editionised English press. The content analysis sought to examine common patterns and general features, including volume of coverage, prominence of relevant news stories within publications, authorship, tone and trends in the reporting. Articles featuring either the term ‘Human Rights Act’ or the term ‘European Convention on Human Rights’ published in the period 1 January 2000–1 February 2017 (period covered by the research funding) were retrieved from the NEXIS database. The search results showed that the HRA is more widely covered in the press in the devolved territories, with the notable exception of the Northern Irish press where the ECHR attracts comparatively higher volumes of coverage. In other words, there are far more Scottish and Welsh newspaper articles in the corpus that mention the HRA than there are articles that mention the ECHR, bearing in mind that the two search terms often overlap as a proportion of articles will mention both (see Table 1).

Table 1. Volume of coverage.

	ECHR (number of articles)	HRA (number of articles)	Number of articles coded (HRA only)
Scotland:
Aberdeen Press	79	177	15
Daily Record	91	202	9
The Herald	224	455	58
The Scotsman	254	447	52
Northern Ireland
Belfast Telegraph	417	263	16
Irish News	471	266	26
News Letter	202	58	13
Wales:
Daily Post	235	319	29
South Wales Echo	39	122	13
Western Mail	282	377	34

The significance of this finding is that it is a potential indicator of whether the coverage is predominantly ‘cosmopolitan’ as opposed to ‘parochial’. In the words of Brüggemann and Kleinen-von Königslöw (2013, p. 362): ‘Cosmopolitanism comprises awareness of global interconnectedness, appreciation of cultural diversity (…) and openness to engage with the culturally different Other in an open transnational dialogue (…)’ (references omitted). Parochialism, by contrast, involves ‘ignoring and rejecting other cultures and rejecting the idea of belonging to communities beyond one’s own nation’ (ibid). Cosmopolitanism means that newspapers show an interest in events and debates from the international sphere, that is, beyond their national borders, while ‘parochial’ coverage is insular by being predominantly focused on issues that are local or domestic to newspapers’ own markets. However, caution is needed: while articles that reference the ECHR, a major supra-national charter, may be prima facie more cosmopolitan in outlook, in practice, most of these were still very narrowly focused on the national context.

The coding exercise focused on the samples retrieved using ‘Human Rights Act’ as search term, as, overall, this search returned the largest number of articles. Just as in the English national press, the HRA acts as shorthand for ‘European human rights’ in newspapers in the devolved nations. The HRA therefore provides an obvious point of comparison for this study. However, it should be emphasised that the ECHR was not excluded from the analysis here: a large number of the articles under consideration also reference the ECHR, in other words, it is not uncommon for both the HRA and the ECHR to be mentioned in the same breath, for example, to remind readers that the HRA incorporates the ECHR. Simultaneous references to the HRA and the ECHR are in some cases an indication of their conflation in the newspaper coverage.² If the sample for a particular title was greater than 100, only the first 100 most relevant articles (as determined by the Lexis algorithm) were considered for the coding exercise; for titles that returned a sample that was smaller than 100 but greater than 20 every single article was considered for manual coding. To maximise the size of the samples, articles of any word length were included. However, only articles in which the HRA was the central focus were coded: this effectively meant that reports in which the Act (and/or the ECHR) was merely tangential to the story were not included. Applying this filter revealed that very few articles across the corpus were mostly or wholly dedicated to the HRA (see Table 1).

Scotland

Starting with the Scottish press, the coverage is predominantly found in four of the main daily newspapers. The publication carrying the highest volume of coverage (and also the highest number of articles dedicated mostly or wholly to the HRA) is The Herald, a broadsheet based in Glasgow which proclaims not to have any political affiliation. In second place is The Scotsman, a broadsheet based in Edinburgh. Its editorial line has been described in the past as ‘a mixture of fervent unionism and anti-Europeanism’ (Kemp, 2001). The Sunday Herald advised its readers to vote ‘yes’ in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, while The Scotsman came out in favour of a ‘no’ vote (BBC News, 2014). The Daily Record and Sunday Mail, third on the list in terms of volume of coverage, is a tabloid with traditionally ‘a very visible presence in Glasgow’ (Douglas, 2009, p. 55). In the past, it used to serve shipyard workers and workers in the manufacturing industry, which explains its traditionally left-leaning sympathies (Greenslade, 2011). Finally, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, another broadsheet, also carried a sizeable amount of coverage. The paper has a Conservative background and mainly serves the northern parts of Scotland.

The number of articles coded, combined with the overall number of articles referencing the HRA, shows that there is a moderate level of coverage in the Scottish press. The topic is certainly not ignored but it is not one that tends to dominate the headlines either. The most striking feature of the coverage is that over time the tone of the reporting has grown more positive about the HRA. So, for example, the Daily Record in the early years when the legislation was in force denounced it in statements such as: ‘A sex beast who raped a woman three times at knifepoint is trying to use the Human Rights Act to get out of jail’ (Mcllwraith, 2007). However, in more recent years, it has featured headlines that are explicitly defensive of the HRA, including, for example, ‘Tories risk doing UK a great wrong; Sturgeon vows to fight bid to scrap Human Rights Act’ (Ferguson, 2015). A similar conversion to the cause can be seen in The Scotsman. On 7 August 2005, following the terrorist attacks in London, it asserted that ‘[l]ong before terror became an issue, the ECHR wreaked havoc with UK law’ (Anonymous, 2005). However, in recent times, the newspaper has become more positive in its reporting of the HRA. A similar pattern can be observed in the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Although The Herald’s stance on the HRA is overall positive, it was also more likely to sound the occasional critical note in the early years. This suggests that even sceptical newspapers are capable of growing more positive about the legislation.

What about the prominence of the HRA as a news story? It is seldom front-page news: only The Scotsman (thrice) and The Herald (once) very occasionally feature the HRA on their front pages. There are nevertheless a high proportion of opinion-led articles (editorials, opinions/commentaries, readers’ letters and interviews). The number of coded articles in the Daily Record may be small; it is nevertheless striking that more than half are opinion pieces. In The Herald, more than a third of articles were opinion-led, whereas in the Aberdeen Press and Journal, it is around a third. The lowest volume of opinion can be found in The Scotsman, but here too it still accounts for about one in five articles. Also, across the four publications, the overwhelming majority of articles tend to be authored by journalists. This is potentially significant in the sense that, conversely, it is often a sign that specific elites are mainly speaking to themselves when it is just experts exchanging opinions and ideas. The fact that most articles are written by journalists and the strong representation of opinion, alongside news reports, across the corpus suggests that, in so far as it is debated, press discourse on the HRA in Scotland is inclusive and relatively lively. A final observation is that articles on the whole tend to be relatively short (under 600 words), with the exception of the Scotsman which tends to feature longer pieces of 800 words or more.

Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, coverage of the HRA can be found predominantly in three of the main dailies, the Unionist News Letter, the moderately Unionist Belfast Telegraph and the Nationalist Irish News. The volume of articles that centrally feature the HRA, making them eligible for coding, is relatively low. Many articles tend to reference the legislation in a merely tangential manner. The HRA is mentioned in passing in stories concerning, for example, policing, the impact of Brexit and abortion law in Northern Ireland. Thus, the legislation is quite frequently dropped into the conversation and informs the background of a wide array of news stories without being the central focus.

In term of trends, it is only since 2015 that the HRA has started to attract some attention in the News Letter as a topic in its own right. The debate mainly revolves around the issue of the pros and cons of repealing the HRA to replace it with a Bill of Rights. The paper is not exactly a staunch advocate of the legislation: one editorial openly called for the UK to leave the ECHR to be in a better position to combat terrorism (Anonymous, 2016). Another commentary argues that the HRA has had a detrimental impact on Northern Irish law, especially bail arrangements (Lowry, 2016). However, there are also a few headlines that are unambiguously defensive of the HRA. The Belfast Telegraph, from which the largest number of articles were coded, has been covering the HRA in some depth since it came into force. The coverage is overwhelmingly positive in tenor: only five items of the coded sample could be classed as offering a negative assessment of the legislation. While coverage focusing solely or mainly on the HRA is very limited in the Irish News, it has grown more positive over time. In 2006, the newspaper referred to the Act as ‘a whinger’s charter’ in an opinion piece (Kelly, 2006). By contrast, in recent years, there is more attention on the negative implications of a possible repeal of the HRA on the peace process (Simpson, 2016a; Simpson 2016b).

Another noteworthy feature of the coverage are that the majority of articles is authored by journalists, with occasional guest pieces by the likes of ministers and NGOs. Most stories fall into the category of news reports. The second most important category are opinion-led articles in the form of editorials, commentaries and readers’ letters, which can once again be seen as an indication that the HRA is the subject of some public debate. There were no interviews in the coded samples. The articles are generally short (less than 600 words): the Belfast Telegraph, however, does feature several longer pieces (more than 800 words). It was not possible to establish whether any of the coded articles appeared as frontpage news in the News Letter, the smallest sample in the coding exercise, as the relevant data was unavailable from Nexis. However, such data was available for the Irish News and Belfast Telegraph, showing that the HRA did not once make the frontpage.

Wales

Coverage of the HRA in the Welsh press is mainly found in the Western Mail, the Daily Post and the South Wales Echo. The Western Mail is the oldest daily newspaper in Wales, while the Daily Post began life as a regional edition of the Liverpool Daily Post and only became a standalone title in 2003. The former title mainly serves south Wales (despite claiming to be ‘Wales’ national newspaper’), while the latter has its main readership base in the north. In fact, the Daily Post is nowadays no longer sold outside of north Wales, but it in 2017 it was named the best-selling regional newspaper in Wales (Thomas, 2017). The third Welsh newspaper is the South Wales Echo which predominantly serves readers around Cardiff and can therefore be best described as a local newspaper (Thomas, 2006). In terms of political focus and orientation, Thomas (2006) notes that there has been a ‘depoliticisation of content’ in the Welsh press attributable to an increased popularisation. The key theme is crime law-and-order news, lending Welsh newspapers a tabloid feel. Only 12% of coverage in daily Welsh titles is devoted to politics (Thomas, 2006, p. 14).

Considering that only articles in which the HRA featured prominently were included in the manual coding exercise, the volume of articles that was coded is once again relatively small: this serves as confirmation of the overall picture that the HRA is not extensively debated. As the HRA often throws up political issues, its lack of salience is consistent with the fact that politics is not widely covered in Welsh newspapers. At the same time, the HRA is also a topic that is closely related to law-and-order issues, the bread and butter of the Welsh press. It comes as no surprise that the legislation is readily mentioned in this context, often in a very negative way. A polemical opinion piece in the South Wales Echo (Anonymous, 2011) opens with the argument that ‘[i]t’s about time we changed the name of The Human Rights Act to the Criminals’ Rights Act, because it does us mere law-abiding citizens no favours’. Another reader’s letter, this time in the Western Mail, refers to the HRA in the context of ‘criminals milking the system’ (Bishop, 2011).

The tenor of the coverage is finely balanced between positive and negative sentiments towards the HRA, with the notable exception of the South Wales Echo which overwhelmingly adopts a negative stance. The coded sample for this newspaper is small (n = 13), but it is nevertheless striking that it contains only one positive article about the HRA. Another important characteristic of the coverage in the South Wales Echo is that the various pieces, without exception, are opinion-led, the overwhelming majority being readers’ letters. There are several possible explanations as to why readers’ comments are almost entirely negative: either the criticism could be said to be a genuine reflection of public opinion, especially but not exclusively among readers, or there may be an editorial selection bias in favour of letters expressing negative sentiments. The other two publications, the Daily Post and the Western Mail, offer more balanced coverage. Once again, in the early years of the HRA, the coverage tended to be more negative compared to recent years when the Act became increasingly associated with the fate of devolution and the need to protect it against interference by the Westminster Government.

The HRA predominantly features in conventional news and background pieces, with opinion-led articles counting for one third of the coverage. Here too, the outlier is the South Wales Echo where the coverage mainly involves readers’ letters: the sample in this instance is therefore opinion led and authored by non-journalists. In the Daily Post and the Western Mail, by contrast, the articles tend to be written by journalists. Consequently, in common with what has already been observed in the Scottish and Northern Irish press, articles tend to be written mainly by authors who can be considered to be non-experts.³ Another general characteristic of the entire corpus is that articles are usually short (600 words or less). In addition, the HRA has never been front-page news in any of the three newspapers. Page two is the closest it comes to the front page in the sample.

Asserting a ‘European’ national identity: devolution and the HRA

The previous section has highlighted how newspaper coverage in the devolved nations has over time grown more positive about the HRA. This section elaborates further on the nexus between human rights and national identity. Newspapers have traditionally been an important enabler of nationalism. Benedict Anderson credits the printing press as instrumental in the very creation of national identity. Of newspapers he says that:

[T]he newspaper is merely an ‘extreme form’ of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: one-day best-sellers? The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing-curious that one of the earlier mass-produced commodities should so prefigure the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables- nonetheless, for just this reason, creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction (…) What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?’ (Anderson, 2006, pp. 34–5).

The newspaper as serial, continuing the narrative of ‘us’, of who ‘we’ are on a daily basis, is a prominent platform for imaging the nation. It is true that with falling sales of traditional print newspapers in a 24-hour news cycle, the ritual of synchronous mass consumption of an identical product has changed. Yet, newspapers have not lost their importance: their rhythm may have become faster paced, but they still provide a shared narrative through the endurance of reporting, the practice of organising events into a narrative that addresses an audience as ‘us’, that is, as an imagined community.

Michael Billig (1995) coined the phrase ‘banal nationalism’ to capture how newspapers, among others, partake in the routine flagging of national identity. The central point of his banal nationalism thesis is that it is small pointers, such as the use of ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ -known as ‘deixis’-, that are the bedrock of the routine reproduction of nationalism in the press. In cases where the reference is purely to ‘the nation’, ‘the country’, ‘the people’, etc, the deixis is entirely subsumed in the definite article: ‘[T]his deixis can do its business unobtrusively, running up the flag so discreetly that it is unnoticed even by speaker or writer. The nation does not need to be mentioned, let alone be named’ (Billig, 1995, p. 107). The newspaper format is exquisitely an exercise in daily flagging of nation because of the habits and expectations it creates in this regard: ‘[w]e, the readers, readily accept the deixis of homeland, and the apartheid of news into ‘home’ and foreign. We feel at home in a paper which gives more attention to news located within the homeland’s borders’ (Billig, 1995, p. 126). In other words, the nation is taken for granted in the way in which newspaper reporting is structured.

One of the articles in the sample that best captures the symbolic importance of European human rights to ‘the homeland’ is not particularly subtle in its reference to national identity. Published in the Welsh the Western Mail in May 2015, then Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones is quoted in the piece as saying that he wished to lead a ‘Celtic rebellion’, uniting the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Governments against the UK Government’s attempt to repeal the HRA and replace it with a Bill of Rights. Other articles, for example in the Herald (Gardham, 2015), also make reference to the Welsh and Scottish Governments working together to prevent a repeal of the HRA. The use of the word ‘Celtic’ conjures up the image of an alliance of three nations against England/the UK united by their shared cultural heritage. Claiming the HRA as ‘Celtic’ signals that the Act is deeply rooted in the psyche of these countries. It defies the idea, so often promoted in the coverage in the English national press, that human rights are something that is imposed in a top-down fashion by Europe and are fundamentally alien to the British Isles. This positive endorsement of the HRA is ultimately about forging a closer link between the ‘homeland’ and Europe itself. In the case of Scotland, the close association of Scottishness with Europe has long been a feature of the imagined community. Ichijo (2004, p. 99) argues that ‘(…) Europe helps the Scots to assert their moral superiority over, above all, the English and other nations in the world. They see themselves as a people with high moral standards’. The tenor of some of the coverage of the HRA, especially articles involving a possible repeal of the Act, suggests that European human rights form an integral part of these higher moral standards, not just in Scotland but also in Northern Ireland and to a lesser extent in Wales.

The main objection to a repeal of the HRA in the newspaper articles is that it is incompatible with the spirit and the letter of devolution. The coverage projects an image of human rights as something with which people in Scotland can protect themselves against undesirable UK government policies. For example, an opinion piece in The Herald explicitly praises the Scottish Government for supporting human rights, while castigating the UK Government for doing the very opposite: ‘Unlike Westminster, the SNP government has not made human rights a party political football and has consistently supported the Human Rights Act (HRA)’ (Ewart, 2014). Human rights are not just claimed as an integral part of the identity of the individual nations, but also of Britishness itself. There are clear warnings in the coverage that repealing the HRA would weaken the cultural bedrock on which the British identity is built and could even help to bring about the disintegration of the Union. Whether human rights are framed as quintessentially British, Celtic or Scottish⁴, they are portrayed as intimately bound up with collective identity and the imagined political community. The HRA, more specifically, correlates positively with this sense of identity; this is in stark contrast to the discourse promoted in English national newspapers in which the Act is seen as fundamentally at odds with British civil liberties encapsulated by the Magna Carta (Gies, 2015).

A repeal of the legislation would not only offend against a cherished part of collective British identity; according to some of the press coverage, it would also lead an inevitable clash between the UK government and the devolved administrations. One article in the Scotsman quotes a spokesperson from the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) as saying that:

Human rights are a devolved matter and any plans to take Scotland out of the ECHR would require the consent of the Scottish Parliament. Given the strong support for the ECHR and the Human Rights Act in both the parliament and across Scottish civil society consent would not be forthcoming and thus any attempt to repeal existing rights would be likely to provoke a constitutional crisis (Gourtsoyannis, 2016).

A similar characterisation of the potential repeal of the HRA as an act of violence by the UK government against the devolved administrations can be found in the Irish News (McHugh, 2016). The prospect of repeal is presented as a potentially very serious conflict that goes to the very heart of the relationship between the central and devolved governments, hence the notion of a ‘constitutional crisis’ (see also Allen, 2016). The very thought that the UK Government could contemplate repeal without seeking the consent of the devolved nations is the obvious driver of such a potential clash: fundamentally, such a move is seen as violating the right to self-determination enshrined in the devolution settlements. In the case of Northern Ireland, there is the additional injury of the prospect that the peace process, described as ‘fragile’ (Allen, 2016), may be irrevocably harmed. One Irish MEP warns that repealing the HRA would lead to ‘a loss of faith in the British government’s commitment to the peace process’ (Simpson, 2016a).

What can be observed in these different pieces is the flagging of a nationalism that adorns itself with the perceived virtues of human rights. Far from being cast as an undesirable European imposition, human rights are claimed as the representing the very best of the national character and national consciousness. The coverage implicitly asserts a moral superiority over the Westminster Government and its scant regard for the central place of European human rights in the fabric of devolution. The undisguised threat is that scaling back human rights protections could be the straw that breaks the Union’s back. If Brexit has the potential to drive a wedge between the constituents parts of the UK, a repeal of the HRA would deepen the crisis and, judging by the tenor of some the reporting, also strengthen the case for independence, particularly in Scotland where the issue has already been gaining some renewed momentum following the Brexit referendum. The debate about the ECHR in newspapers in the devolved territories is driven by the latter’s significance as a domestic political issue which is inevitably bound up with the issue of Europe. The primary focus is not the cosmopolitan context in which international human rights charters invariably operate; rather it is the more parochial, national context that provides the main angle.

Conclusion

‘Who will willingly die for Comecon or the EEC?’ asks Anderson (2006, p. 53). An equally pertinent question is: who would give their life for the European Convention or the Council of Europe? The point of Anderson’s rhetorical question is that while individual nations readily instil pride and a sense of belonging, big supranational organisations seldom generate such affection. Media references to the nation are so commonplace as to be banal and invisible; European institutions, on the other hand, appear to be at best unknown and at worst detested in UK media. Such is the fate of the EU but also the ECHR. The HRA, the ECHR’s domestic equivalent, overall tends to attract a greater amount of publicity than the ECHR itself, but it still only commands a modest level of attention in the devolved press in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales: this becomes obvious when the coverage is filtered to exclude articles in which the topic is merely tangential. Mirroring the hostile discourse found in the English national press, there is a body of articles in the devolved press that is unequivocally critical of the HRA.

However, spurred on by Central Government plans for reform and possibly even repeal of the legislation, recent years has seen the emergence of a more positive narrative in which the HRA is invested with a modicum of national pride. This study indicates that the European Convention is mainly refracted through the lens of national identity: relevant issues are closely associated with the domestic rather than the cosmopolitan polity. The relatively low volume of newspaper coverage devoted to the HRA in the devolved nations suggests that hitherto there have been mere murmurings of discontent about the prospect of a repeal of the HRA and its impact on devolution. A full-blown Celtic rebellion, as per the eye-catching article in the Western Mail, is yet to materialise. Even if the political struggle over human rights were to gain momentum in the various nations, there is a question mark over whether the press in the devolved territories, following a period of marked decline, would have the capacity to act as an effective counterweight to the more powerful Eurosceptic English press and promote a different type of nationhood in this regard. Nevertheless, the fact that there is a growing appetite for embracing the HRA as integral to the nations’ own separate identities is a vivid illustration of how the question of ‘Europe’ has the potential to continue to divide the UK beyond the thorny issues thrown up by Brexit.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

Notes on contributors

Lieve Gies

Lieve Gies is Associate Professor. Her areas of research include media representations of human rights law.

Notes

1 One of the more colourful examples involves the story of a police force which resorted to the HRA to justify their decision to buy fast food for a fugitive in the middle of standoff (Gies, 2015)

2 Take, for example, a letter to the Scotsman from a SNP Member of the European Parliament berating the newspaper for conflating matters but also emphasising that the fate of devolution is inextricably entwined with that of the HRA: ‘You appear to have conflated the distinct European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) requirements written into the Scotland Act - that Holyrood legislation and Scottish ministers respect Convention rights - with the much wider reach of the Human Rights Act, which binds over all public authorities in Scotland to observe fundamental rights. If this act were repealed, all of those protections the Scottish people currently enjoy would be stripped away. Even the Scotland Act is ultimately a piece of Westminster legislation and although schedule 4 rightly protects the Human Rights Act from any amendment by the Scottish Parliament there is nothing to prevent it being amended or repealed from London.’ (Smith, 2014; emphasis added)

3 A caveat is that it is not always possible to determine whether readers’ letters are written by experts in human rights or related fields.

4 Rosie et al. (2004) note how ‘nation’ in the context of UK newspapers is capable of oscillating between different meanings including ‘Scottish’, ‘English’ and ‘British’.