- The Latest
- Topics
-
About
Is the UK’s ‘respect for international law’ an excuse for an unaccountable legal dictatorship at home?
February 10, 2025
1 Reaction
Traditionally, it has been only criminals who broke the law. These days, the law instead all too often finds itself being broken in a far more complete manner by those who are supposed to be busy upholding it – namely, the lawyers.
Particularly broken at present are the malfunctioning laws of the United Kingdom, their chief current wrecker being Lord Richard Hermer, the Attorney-General for the governing left-wing Labour Party.
I wrote about this particular deluded individual here on Mercator last week, in relation to Hermer’s Panglossian fantasies about how, if Western nations like Britain and the US would only follow made-up international laws down to the very last letter over dangerous military-related issues of global geopolitics, then rogue opposing non-Western powers like Russia and China would inevitably pay our fine moral example some heed and follow suit themselves by ceasing to invade and threaten foreign lands like Ukraine and Taiwan in the future – a notion fit only to be described as being “unrealistic” at best, “insane” at worst.
There is an equally malign consequence of Hermer’s utopian legal mindset I did not mention last time around, however, and that is the highly destructive impact of his ideas upon purely domestic UK laws, rather than upon the country’s legal dealings with other nations. If anything, the damage presently being done by this particular aspect of his thinking are even worse.
Bordering on illegal
An old colleague of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, with a corresponding background in international human rights law, Hermer is as left-wing as lawyers come, as shown by 2024 comments of his about the very idea of a political party pledging to “control our borders” being inherently “de-humanising” to those attempting to illegally cross them: rather awkward, given the political party for which he now works publicly pledged (albeit falsely, just like their Conservative predecessors repeatedly did) to protect the nation’s borders themselves at the last election.
Lord Hermer’s opinions upon such subjects matter. As the government’s chief legal compliance officer, Hermer is responsible for assessing which particular policy proposals are likely to be deemed legal or illegal by courts, lending him de facto responsibility for deciding what can and cannot be done when running the country. Given his fanatical belief in ensuring the supremacy of international laws over boring and outdated old national domestic laws – or “seek[ing] to raise the standards for calibrating legality”, as he robotically puts it – this can make it difficult for ministers to actually act to deliver on their manifesto promises.
Labour have just announced that their forthcoming Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill will be scrapping important prior legal provisions giving ministers the right to disregard interim injunctions from the wholly unelected European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg when deporting illegal immigrants, even those who perform trivial little acts like raping people, blowing them up, or stabbing their children to death. And why? Ask Lord Hermer.
On January 30, the Attorney-General gave a speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), pledging attendees his solemn assurance that, despite the UK supposedly having left the EU, the supposedly “sovereign” country still intended to remain firmly entangled within the legalistic web of the Union’s parasitic judicial offshoots nonetheless: “And if I may, I’d like to be very clear. The new United Kingdom government will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights or refuse to comply with judgements of the Court or requests for interim measures given in respect of the United Kingdom.”
We are told by Labour that their new Borders Bill will grant Britain full control of its external borders; and yet Lord Hermer’s PACE speech explicitly hands control over them towards Brussels and Strasbourg instead. As one unnamed government source asked UK broadsheet The Times: “Both of these announcements were made on the same day. How can they possibly be reconciled?” The answer is that they cannot: except by purest shysteristic casuistry.
To the mere legal layman, Britain may appear to have ceded sovereignty of her borders to Europe and the ECHR, goes the misleading legal argument. But as she has done so voluntarily, this means that ultimately the nation doesin fact have control of such boundaries: the government controls its own decision to hand away its control to others.
Some less legally-minded members of the UK government disagree. Last week, several Labour Party Ministers also spoke to The Times under condition of anonymity, claiming Hermer’s legalistic hold over his old pal Keir Starmer was so tight it amounted to a near-total “freeze on government”. Under previous Conservative-era administrations Attorney-Generals advised Ministers should go ahead trying to implement new policies unless there was a plausibleprospect of them being sunk by unaccountable foreign do-gooders in international courts. So sacred did Lord Hermer consider such holy bodies, though, he had altered official advice to mandate no such policies should proceed if there was even the tiniest, implausible chance of them being so thwarted, either.
End result? Nothing meaningful whatsoever could ever get done in the country anymore. Nothing, that is, except for a few very curious exceptions – i.e., any measures that Lord Hermer himself happened to personally politically approve of.
Powers of Attorney
As one other source told The Times, “He seems to be picking and choosing when to follow legal convention.” Whenever it comes to a measure he wishes to see undermined, like restrictive immigration and border policies, Hermer insists everything must be done precisely by the book, even (or perhaps especially) when it goes against our own sane national self-interest.
And yet, in the initial aftermath of Labour’s election in July last year, The Times was told: “He was willing to swallow – to a certain degree – not necessarily following the right [legal] process in the early days because they had to work at pace. He understood things had to be done quickly and he wasn’t quite as obstructive.” He “wasn’t quite as obstructive” of what, though?
The Times’ source does not say, but the major legal event of the early days of Labour rule were the nationwide anti-immigration riots following the Southport stabbings of three little girls by a disturbed young man of Rwandan descent, when there was quite clear government-directed abuse of the normal legal process, particularly around the blatant misuse of the remand system, to target people spreading purportedly inflammatory “far-Right” rumours criticising immigrants online.
Although Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights is supposed to guarantee all British citizens the right to freedom of expression, Lord Hermer advised the government that it would be lawful to charge social media users with the offence of “stirring up racial hatred”, leading to a string of persons with previously clean criminal records suddenly being placed in prison awaiting trial for little more than having typed out some intemperate words about Muslims on Twitter.
Very strange how, for a man who is such a strict stickler for obeying the obscure minutiae of international human rights law, Lord Hermer was quite happy to oversee the above desperate measures just so long as they were being implemented against the “correct” people – i.e., those whose politics he happened to disapprove of.
And, make no mistake, Lord Hermer does disapprove of the primitive plebs and their views. If there’s ever a cause out there any normal person would disapprove of, you can bet the learned lawyer would approve of it. One such ignoble cause would appear to be that of democracy itself – far too important and rarified a matter to be left to the demos themselves, naturally.
Why should people without any legal qualifications at all ever be allowed to get what they have misguidedly voted for? Lord Hermer appears to think there is no good reason. Another unidentified Minister told The Times the following:
“He seems to think – and has said as such – that international law is more important than national law, and that’s totally insane. It’s a massive misunderstanding of how the public see their government and the laws that are made in this country. Look at all these deportation decisions [about foreign murderers and rapists] that get made in the courts. People find them really shocking – that we can’t remove these people from our country – and rightly so but he would not be on that side of the argument. He thinks he makes policy. He doesn’t, but he gets involved in everything and he’s an activist.”
In his fanatical desire to set domestic UK policy by the “neutral” proxy of what he claims to be the far higher law of international human rights, Lord Hermer only ensures the further perpetuation of that most corrosive of concepts for continued public respect for the law as a whole – that of rule by lawyers, not of rule by laws themselves.
Lord Snooty
Lord Hermer laid out his elitist legal philosophy in a speech given last October, whose very title, “The Rule of Law [sic] in an Age of Populism”, drips with barely concealed contempt for those petty ill-educated idiots who keep on voting for incomprehensible things like secure borders and the right to kick foreign child-killers out of what are supposed to be their own countries.
Who are the “populists” who such awful people keep on voting for these days, though? People like “the orange tyrant” Donald Trump, whose fascist sort Hermer describes thus: “We face leaders who see politics as an exercise in division; who appeal to the “will of the people” … as the only truly legitimate source of constitutional authority.” Far better, of course, to submit to those infinitely more educated individuals like himself as being “the only truly legitimate source of constitutional authority” instead, rather than archaic, inverted comma-encircled ideas like “the will of the people”.
In his October speech, Lord Hermer decried a concept he terms “thin law”, the traditional, commonly understood notion that the law is supposed to be impartial, devised by sovereign nation bodies like Parliament, and that nobody stands above it, not even Lord Hermer. However, thinking of the law like this risks only viewing it through a “distorting lens”. Instead, so sayeth the Lord, there is a superior countervailing “thick law” in existence too, one which, ironically, most voters are far too thick themselves to understand – the “thick law” of rule from abroad by unaccountable bodies like the ECHR. When viewed through this particular “distorting lens”, one may ask what was even the point of Britain voting for Brexit back in 2016, though?
In 2020, when still just an ordinary barrister, Lord Hermer was asked in an interview which single law he would choose to pass were he ever to serve as Britain’s Prime Minister for the day. “The European Union (Please Can We Come Back?) Act 2020,” he instantly replied. Without having ever stood for elected office – unlike every other Attorney-General since 1922, each of whom had got the job by having already served as an MP, rather than simply by virtue of happening to be the Prime Minister’s friend – I think he may have engineered just such an outcome completely by stealth anyway.
In a January interview with The House, a niche magazine aimed at British MPs and their aides, Hermer said of his critics that: “If they are criticising the government because it wants to comply with international law … then that’s a fight I’d quite look forward to.”
I’d welcome such a fight myself too. If conducted openly and honestly, in full glare of the media and public, it would finally reveal to British voters the awful truth that they no longer inhabit a true democracy at all any more, just a shrunken, desiccated simulacrum of one. There can be no operative “law of the land”, when the only true land its globalist leaders owe any allegiance to is that of an impossible transnational utopia. This particular Lord has become far too Almighty for my liking.
Forward this article to friends interested in UK politics!
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.
Image credit: The Joint Council for the Welfare of Migrants / official portrait Lord Hermer
Have your say!
Join Mercator and post your comments.
