To the Sun, on its front page on Thursday, it is simply “the hated Human Rights Act”. To this newspaper it is something quite different. The Human Rights Act is a source of pride. It is a civilised and a civilising law. It embodies the fact that Britain remains a nation where key universal benchmarks of human decency and protections against state abuse are upheld by the courts – upheld, in some cases, against governments that may be tempted to bow the knee to newspapers demanding arbitrary abuse of rights. In the Guardian’s view, the Human Rights Act should be defended and not repealed.

The Human Rights Act is certainly not perfect. It has done an imperfect job of checking the growth of creeping authoritarianism, first under the New Labour government that brought in the act, and now under the often rather more cautious Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. But the arbitrary use of stop and search powers highlighted this week at the Conservative conference took place in Human Rights Act Britain; the court-authorised police access to journalists’ phone records revealed this week in the Chris Huhne case took place here too; and the secret evidence and closed procedures which were at the heart of the collapse of the Moazzam Begg prosecution on Wednesday, have flourished in Human Rights Act Britain as well.

There is a reasonable debate to be had about this act. There is a similarly practical debate to be had about the jurisprudence of the European court of human rights, which has sometimes been uneven and has occasionally pushed its boundaries too far. But the court nevertheless also remains what it always was when it was established in postwar Europe – an international setter of standards for the behaviour of the states of Europe towards their citizens. Those standards should apply in Britain as much as in any other country.

But this is not the debate that the ascendant factions in the Conservative party are seeking. Driven by a mix of lazy and offensive Europhobia and a desire to appease the rightwing press they are trying to make a reactionary gesture not to improve the quality of human rights law. The Conservative party’s much trumpeted proposals for abolishing the act – a promise repeated by David Cameron in Birmingham on Wednesday – embody this. They are a confused and dangerous jumble of political prejudice and legislative foolishness.

The Conservative proposals bring together five principles, each of which is generally desirable in itself yet none of which can in practice be an absolute. These issues – national sovereignty, parliamentary sovereignty over the courts, human rights protections, binding international treaties and obeying the rule of law – have all been whisked together into what would in practice be a total legislative mess, solving few of the issues in the way intended.

Even if the UK courts ruled supreme, for instance, they would still be able to invoke ECHR jurisprudence and principles, just as they did before the 1998 act. And even if parliamentary sovereignty is reasserted, the courts would still have judicial review. Meanwhile, the idea that rights and responsibilities are a trade-off is a lazy abstraction. There are rights. And there are responsibilities. They are not mutually dependent in law. These plans are a dreadful tangle. The former attorney general Dominic Grieve, who was presumably sacked in the summer reshuffle so that these plans could go ahead, is right to describe them as “almost puerile”.

At the heart of Chris Grayling’s proposals is a revealing admission. The European human rights convention, on which the 1998 act is closely based, is “an entirely sensible statement of the principles which should underpin any democratic nation”. Mr Grayling and the Tories will not want to say this too loudly to their party or to their tabloid cheerleaders, but they propose that the convention should be put back wholesale into their proposed British bill of rights and responsibilities. The hated human rights, in other words, are too important to do away with. We agree. There actually is a modern British bill of rights already. It is called the Human Rights Act. The Conservatives should get their prejudiced hands off our fundamental freedoms.