WORKERS would lose vital legal protections under Tory plans announced today to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch vowed to leave the ECHR as part of a proposal to deport 150,000 people a year from Britain as she launched her party’s annual conference in Manchester.

She told GB News that every Conservative candidate who didn’t sign up to abandoning the treaty would face being dropped from standing at the next election.

Mr Nowak said: “Pulling out of the ECHR won’t stop the boats. But it would wreck vital co-operation with France and Europe that’s key to tackling the smuggling gangs. 

“It would also rip up fundamental rights we all rely on like fair trials, free assembly and workers’ protections — as well as jeopardising the Good Friday Agreement.  

“Let’s call this out for what it is: a dangerous xenophobia-fuelled gimmick when Britain needs fair, grown-up, practical solutions that actually work.  

“The so-called party of law and order wants to recklessly shred international laws the UK wrote in order to chase Reform’s tail.” 

Ms Badenoch, who was previously cautious about leaving the ECHR, insisted that her whole shadow cabinet backed her so-called “borders plan” for a US President Donald Trump-style crackdown on immigration backed by a new “removals force” modelled on the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency.

It aims to deport 750,000 people over the course of the next parliament — more than the 600,000 targeted by Reform UK’s “mass deportation” plan announced over the summer.

Ms Badenoch commissioned Tory peer Lord Wolfson to examine the practicalities of such a move earlier in the year.

But when asked where deportees would go if they could not be returned to their own countries, she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that the question was “irrelevant.”

Pressed on it, she said: “Not here, not here. They don’t belong here, they are committing crimes, they are hurting people.”

Labour accused Ms Badenoch of being unable to answer “the most basic questions about the policies she’s supposedly spent months thinking about.”

But Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay backed Ms Badenoch today, claiming that the ECHR was “no longer fit for purpose.”