[lmm]

The UK government never wanted to keep Hong Kong. (It may have wanted to pantomime trying to keep it to placate some voters).

While the UK did have a long history of legal continuity, it's made a lot of dramatic changes in recent years - the switch to the Supreme Court which has then made some legally bizarre decisions, the complete demolition of the House of Lords over a pretty short period, the efforts to entrench human rights legislation which have simply no precedent in UK constitutional history at all...

[ClumsyPilot]

> efforts to entrench human rights legislation which have simply no precedent in UK constitutional history at all...

How so? UK was instrumental in creating the European Court of Human rights? Surely they did not believe at the time that they are just creating it for everyone else?

[lmm]

The people who created the ECHR were very conscious that they were doing something unprecedented, that would change European jurisprudence dramatically. Indeed that was something they trumpeted.