Losing The Argument: Starmer’s Lawyer Decries Taking Back Border Control as Like Germany in 1933

Abrogating international law to take back the power to control Britain’s borders is akin to Nazi German “Realpolitik”, the human rights lawyer who is now attorney-general said in a nakedly political attack on the UK’s right-wing opposition leaders.

Top human rights lawyer Richard Hermer, claimed by the left as a longstanding activist who was made a ‘life peer’ last year to take up his controversial role as attorney general by his friend and colleague Sir Keir Starmer has said those who are willing to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are sounding the same “siren song” as Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in the 1930s.

Both Brexit campaigner and Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, and select Conservative politicians have already concluded the ECHR and its associated court have become so powerful the United Kingdom has been rendered meaningfully powerless to decide on how to operate its own borders. Consequently, they argue, the country should assert its sovereignty and leave the body if necessary.

In comments that have been decried as a desperate smear and bid to discredit the government’s political opposition by linking it with murderous regimes, Lord Hermer said in an address to military-security think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on Thursday night that doing so would be only to the benefit of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

He said:

…our approach is a rejection of the siren song, that can sadly, now be heard in the Palace of Westminster, and in some spectrums of the media, that Britain abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power.

This is not a new song.

The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.

Governments exercising “raw, wild power” is not a “realistic way to advance national interests”, he said. Nevertheless, in comments that have been interpreted by The Times and others as a bid for the government to move away from being perceived by the public as being a slave to international law, Hermer said he instead wanted to reform the ECHR from the inside. This position, he said, was between the blindly pro-international law “Romantic idealists” and the Nazi-like “Pseudo-realists”, draping himself with the label “principled pragmatism”.

The debate seems to be taking something of a Brexit-like flavour on, with two camps settling positions on the ECHR that it is either irretrievably broken, or that it is better to stay inside and reform it from within, exactly as the debate on the European Union was in 2016.

Reform’s Richard Tice called on Hermer to apologise for the remarks, and Conservative Party leader-in-waiting Robert Jenrick called the comments a “disgusting smear”. He said: “It is appalling that Hermer would insinuate those who think we should leave the ECHR are like the Nazis. David Lammy tried that disgusting smear with Brexiteers and it didn’t work for him. It won’t work for Hermer either.”

Nigel Farage told The Daily Telegraph: “It is disgraceful that Lord Hermer should compare the growing campaign for national sovereignty and freedom from outdated international courts with 1930s Germany.

“Our national interest is being damaged by dangerous young men crossing the channel and the absurd surrender of the Chagos Islands. Hermer and Starmer are out of touch with the British public and these insults will only strengthen our case. The next general election will see leaving the ECHR at the centre of debate.”

British conservative political magazine The Spectator posited that Hermer reaching for the Hitler card showed the government had “definitely lost the argument” on the ECHR and felt forced into desperate measures.

As previously reported, Lord Hermer gives the impression of being a man who feels he is on a crusade against what he calls “populism”. Addressing the Justice Committee in Parliament in January, he called popukism “one of the most profound challenges of our age” and that a “full panoply of measures that governments here and allies across the world are going to need to be thinking about” would have to be introduced to tackle it.

Hermer has previously said he believes international law is inseparably the rule of law, saying: “To shore up the rule of law against the forces of populism, we must also emphasise its importance as an idea that unites, rather than divides us. The work to rebuild a political consensus around these values will not be easy. It must be proactive, cross-party and internationalist.”