Lord Richard Hermer was appointed Sir Keir Starmer’s Attorney General in July 2024. From 1243 until his appointment, the job was mainly to provide “legal advice and support to the Law Officers who give legal advice to government”.
Governments, backed by parliament, in the name of the Crown, could pass laws it deemed necessary to conduct the affairs of the state.
The ultimate priority was the country’s security and the pursuit of the national interest.
The Attorney General’s office was there to advise on the level of legal risk in the pursuit of stated policy goals. As the 2015 guidance note on legal risk made clear, ministers should have the “confidence that lawyers are acting in their interests and looking actively for ways to deliver policy objectives while identifying ways of minimising risks”.
On a further note, this time from 2022, it reminded lawyers that their advice on legal risks should not become a “block” to a Minister’s stated policy aims. Government lawyers worked for their political masters. They were merely advisers, nothing more or less.
With Richard Hermer’s appointment, all that is set to change. In his October 2024 Bingham Lecture on the rule of law entitled “The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism” and his subsequent November 6th 2024 guidance on legal risk, Hermer seems to suggest, against common sense and centuries of practice, that international law stands above domestic law.
He asserts with the certitude of a cult member that the rule of law is international law “writ large”. “States must comply with their international obligations, just as they must comply with domestic law”, he declared, having seemingly not opened one newspaper lately, adding that the government should seek to “align the UK’s domestic law and international obligations and fulfil the international obligations binding on the UK”.
“To honour the UK’s international obligations”, he continues, “the government should not invite Parliament to legislate contrary to those international obligations”.
In one speech and short guidance, Hermer stripped the United Kingdom of her sovereign rights.
Keir Starmer’s Attorney General favours international law over sovereignty, writes Alex Story
Getty Images
In the process, perhaps unwittingly, he established himself and his office above the duly elected government of the land and its laws, answerable to no one, elected by none, in charge, in effect, of everything across all policy areas, “be they legal, political, diplomatic and/or reputational”, as he writes, subject to, as we will see, nothing other than his whims and radical political interpretations.
Indeed, he wrote that it might not be appropriate for a Minister to proceed with a policy, even if the proposed policy is unlikely to be challenged in court “for example, in situations where the fundamental rights of individuals are significantly undermined”.
He never defines what these rights might be, where they are to be found, and why supranational organisations, such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation or the World Health Organisation, all partially or mainly funded by corporations, mega private donors and charities and NGOs, should be deemed to have more legitimacy than our ancient parliament.
However, he did want his thousands of lawyers to “feel empowered to give their full and frank advice to me and others in government and to stand up for the rule of law”. That is, he called on them to become a small army of political militants.
This, without having stood for office, away from public scrutiny, which is, as appears to be in his opinion, the awful place where the evils of populism are to be found.When he says, “applying law not politics”, he seems to mean precisely the opposite, insinuating political power with no democratic oversight.
As it happens, domestic law is the source of any country’s sovereignty and independence, as well as in our case, our freedoms. As Doctor Conor Casey and Doctor Yuan Zi Zhu wrote so elegantly in their paper From Rule of Law to the Rule of Lawyers, “the power to legislate contrary to international law is an affirmation of the rule of law, not its abnegation”.
Countries are entitled to breach international law, in particular for reasons of “national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”, points repeated numerous times in the European Convention of Human Rights and accepted in the Human Rights Act of 1998.
Indeed, Lord Justice Diplock, Casey and Zhu remind us, found that “the Crown has a sovereign right, which the court cannot question, to change its policy, even if this involves breaking an international convention”.
The late Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge added to the obvious point made above that “although parliament is expected to respect a Treaty obligation, it is not bound to do so”.
Charles De Gaulle, from a French perspective, agreed, saying: “Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”
A truth that has been standard fare for over millennia.
International law always stood beneath domestic law, whether Customary international law (CIL) or treaty obligations, because the nature of the international system “recognises no overarching sovereign” and domestic law is within reach of those it affects most and whose treasure the State continually devours. That is where constitutional legitimacy lives and dies, nowhere else.
More fundamentally, international law, without the protection of domestic law, is profoundly undemocratic and a recipe for perpetual external interference in one’s internal affairs, the corollary of which is eventual conflict. In the minds of Hermer and of internationalists on whose behalf he seems to be speaking, no borders and no sovereignty exist.
It is a Marxist worldview, accepted by very few outside Richard Hermer’s narrow circle of friends, based on the idea that, as Starmer wrote, “society is not a necessary but regrettable diminution of the individual’s unlimited natural right to do as he or she likes”.
Put another way, sovereign nations are the fetters that crush a man’s freedom. For Hermer and Keir, less society is better.
To us, the people asked to pay the cost of their delusion. However, no borders mean no safe havens. These two views are at fundamental odds.
The gap cannot easily be bridged. Hermer makes that point explicit in his speech by referring to “global citizens” and “global challenges”. He effaces from his view the soon-to-be invisible British subject.
It appears that to our Attorney General, the UK citizen has shrunk to a mere minor (and the only paying) stakeholder in our country’s newly minted caste of decision-makers.
The major ones are, to Hermer, “politicians, judges, lawyers, civil society”, in that order.
Hitherto, judges and lawyers had no more political rights than binmen or janitors in the promulgation of laws. And “civil society” while left general and ill-defined is worthy of guesswork to seek to identify what Hermer means.
One must suspect it includes the BBC, the champagne quaffing chattering classes, the “think tanks”, the NGOs, such as “Just Stop Oil”, the trustafarians, and the Church of England vicaresses. Like all with a totalitarian impulse, it seems Hermer wants to enforce a consensus of people like him onto the broader populations, the “reactionaries”, as he brands us. Dissent, to him, it would seem, is not the natural state of a dynamic and thriving democracy in which consensus is moulded in the arduous crucible of open discussions as most understand it but an affront to his silk and expertise which is evidently concentrated on the technicalities of human rights law, developed at Matrix Chambers, and not much beyond that.
His only real concern is to uphold Britain’s reputation as a go-to place for the Rule of Law, which he locates outside of our borders.
He seemingly wishes to do so by denying the United Kingdom’s sovereignty and tethering our beleaguered country to some of the most corrupt supranational organisations in the world.
Finally, in a more comedic turn, he tells us that a robust adherence to international law is “essential to our ability to grow the economy”, adding in the most thespian way, “as grow it we shall” – as if Der Willen on its own can keep the sinking ship of state afloat.
Unable to operate in the national interest, our sovereignty and our citizenry denied, and our security undermined, Hermer predicts economic growth for UK Plc.
The only source of aggregate economic growth, in an overregulated, sclerotic and over-taxed United Kingdom, will be through mass immigration, which his past as a human rights lobbyist is well suited to deliver, leading to a continuing per capital impoverishment and a further downgrading of our country in the endless competition between nations.
As Doctor Conor Casey and Doctor Yuan Zi Zhu make abundantly clear, albeit courteously, much of Hermer’s guidelines are “constitutionally dubious” and “an extraordinary change to the settled legal-constitutional position” of the country. To you and me, they are fully unconstitutional.
In my opinion, Hermer should be impeached before our country sinks further into the orbit of sundry international (and deeply suspect) organisations, such as the United Nations, only to disappear Pluto-like out of the galaxy of nations.