A constituent stopped me in Ramsgate recently to ask if the Human Rights Act would be looked at again. I was able to reassure him that the workings of the Act are being reviewed and the Government is committed to ensuring it is used properly.

That said, there are a thousand ‘myths’ about this legislation. So, for everyone in Thanet who has been worried by press coverage of the Human Rights Act, let me put the record straight.

As a country we signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950 but until 1998 you had to go to the European Court of Human Rights to take advantage of the rights the Convention gave us all. The 1998 law simply allows you to exercise your rights in a British court. It didn’t give us more rights; it just made the ones we already had easier to enforce.

The European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights have nothing to do with the European Union. They are not, as some people misleadingly claim, inventions of Brussels and were created after the War as a way of ensuring that no Government in Europe could ever again do what Hitler did. The idea the post war Government had was that as soon as a totalitarian government began the process of stripping rights from citizens, those citizens could use the Convention to nip it in the bud.

So when we are told, usually by right wing newspapers and politicians, that the Act should be scrapped do they mean the Act should be repealed, so that us Brits can only seek justice under the Convention in a European Court at much greater expense? Or do they mean scrap the Convention signed in 1950 and take a chance that no future Hitler will come along and take our rights away for good?

The rights we have under the Convention, and which we can now enforce in Britain because of the Act, include the rights not to be tortured, the freedom to worship, the freedom not to be discriminated against, the freedom to a fair trial, the freedom to have your privacy and family life respected and the freedom to join whichever political party you like. Exactly which one of these freedoms do right wing commentators object to us exercising in a UK court?

Of course, there are times when people use the Act to get something that most ordinary folk believe to be unreasonable and when terrorist plotters use it to stop themselves being deported we all question the way the Act is interpreted by the courts. But before we abandon it, we should also remember the disabled people who now have better support because they used the Act to challenge the care they were receiving or the older people who were being denied privacy and dignity in their old age who have used it to win better conditions. We must not throw the baby out with the bath water.