Blair shelves party line over Bill of Rights

Tony Blair has shelved Labour's commitment to a Bill of Rights, which would enshrine in law the basic rights of British citizens.

A senior source told The Independent yesterday that a secret decision in effect to abandon the policy was taken at the start of this year.

A Bill of Rights was promised in Labour's last election manifesto and enthusiastically endorsed by the late John Smith, but has not been mentioned by Mr Blair since his succession to him two years ago.

Jack Straw, the shadow Home Secretary, and Mr Blair agreed at a private meeting nine months ago that such a Bill would not be enacted in the first parliamentary term of a Labour government.

Their draft manifesto, expected to be endorsed in a membership ballot which closed yesterday, promises only to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into British law.

This was described in a 1993 Labour policy document as "a necessary first step, but it is not a substitute for our own written Bill of Rights".

Some constitutional reformers point out that bringing the convention into British law will not give people any rights that they do not already have - it will only make it easier to enforce them, because complainants would no longer have to go to the Strasbourg court.

A Bill of Rights has been central to Labour's programme of democratic reform for more than a decade, designed to assert the dignity and independence of British citizens against the untrammelled power of an over-centralised state in a country without a written constitution.

But Mr Blair has been anxious about the legislative overload of Labour's constitutional programme since he inherited responsibility for it as shadow Home Secretary in 1992. At that time, Labour promised an all- embracing Bill of Rights which would be "entrenched" by giving a new elected second chamber the power to delay changes to it.

Since becoming leader, he has also postponed plans to replace the House of Lords, promising only to end the voting rights of hereditary peers, deferred regional government in England and insisted on referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution.

As his successor, Mr Straw has also shifted the emphasis of Labour's approach.

In a speech at the end of last year, he floated the possibility of a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities", suggesting that in the long term the idea could be adapted to promote the "New Labour" concept of enforceable citizens' duties.

In his John Smith Memorial Lecture in February this year, Mr Blair referred only generally to a "code of citizens' rights".