Lord Hermer is everything that’s wrong with Starmer’s Labour

It is often said that Keir Starmer stands for nothing. But if you want to understand the true priorities of the PM, listen to the burblings of Lord Hermer. The attorney general has long been a close friend of the UK prime minister, both personally and ideologically. He donated to Starmer’s party leadership bid in 2020. In 2024, he was one of the few cabinet appointments the PM made personally, plucking him from the bar and parachuting him into the Lords. Both have enjoyed long and storied careers working as human-rights lawyers.

The authentic voice of Starmerism can be heard most clearly in Hermer’s deference towards human rights, international law and the foreign courts that enforce them. Indeed, his misplaced reverence for these institutions has now landed the government in the mire, exposing yet another of Starmer’s promises as utterly worthless.

Last week, Hermer delivered a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs, in which he compared those who want to leave or challenge the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – ie, Reform, the Conservative Party, the popular press and much of the public – to Nazis. Specifically, to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, when Hitler became German chancellor, and who argued for the exercise of state power without the constraints of legal norms. In high-minded circles, comparing your opponents to Schmitt is a way of calling them Nazis without calling them Nazis directly.

Hermer has since apologised for his ‘clumsy’ phrasing. But given that he was delivering a pre-written speech, whose wording was also presumably cleared by No10, it is reasonable to conclude that this reflects the government’s view. Reforming, let alone leaving, the ECHR is seemingly regarded as tantamount to fascism.

This is despite the fact that most reasonable people would acknowledge that the ECHR is one of the main roadblocks to one of the pledges Starmer made only a few weeks ago – namely, to ‘finally take back control of Britain’s borders’. This is because Articles 3 and 8 of the EHCR, the right not to be tortured and the right to a family life respectively, are regularly invoked by illegal migrants to avoid deportation.

Each week brings a new story of someone in the UK illegally, often a hardened criminal, who is granted the right to remain on the most spurious and preposterous ‘human rights’ grounds imaginable. In recent weeks and months, illegal migrants have been able to claim asylum due to their crimes being too severe, their sex offending being compulsive or for having had an affair in their country of origin. The result is a migration and asylum system that favours criminals over the genuinely deserving. A system that no one could possibly defend – apart from, of course, the human-rights lobby and its cheerleaders. Like Hermer and Starmer.

The ECHR essentially makes deportations impossible, nullifying any deterrent for arriving illegally. Having finally clocked this, nine European governments recently signed a letter demanding more freedom to make ‘political decisions in our own democracies’ – which is hardly a Hitlerian demand. Tellingly, the UK, no doubt thanks to Hermer and Starmer, was not among them. We wouldn’t want to be a ‘Nazi’ country like Denmark or Poland now, would we?

Last month, in his own flagship speech on immigration, prime minister Starmer promised to end the ‘squalid chapter’ in politics where leaders promise one thing on migration while delivering another. Yet, within a few weeks of that intervention, his attorney general was essentially dismissing anyone who is serious about tackling illegal migration as proto-Nazis.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that despite the PM’s tough rhetoric on border control we saw a record 1,200 small-boats migrants arrive on Britain’s shores on Saturday – the largest influx recorded in a single day this year. A government that is so deferential to international law, despite its obviously dysfunctional and anti-democratic results, was never going to get to grips with this problem.

The Nazi jibe was merely the latest statement from Hermer that makes clear this government sees international law and human-rights obligations as more important than UK law and the national interest. Last year, Hermer said that Britain’s strict deference to international law would be critical to seeing off ‘the populist challenge’ around the world. The UK, the attorney general insisted, should actually go ‘further than simply meeting our obligations’ in international courts.

This statement is the clearest explanation we have for how the Chagos debacle came about, whereby the Labour government has ended up ceding British sovereign territory to Mauritius and paying billions for the pleasure, while also denying Chagossians living in the UK a right to return to their homeland. There was never any court order forcing the UK to relinquish the Chagos Islands. There was only ever an advisory judgement from the International Court of Justice, which had no legal force. Obeying this was, as Hermer might have it, going ‘further than our legal obligations’ – yielding to an international court, even if the outcome is obviously illogical, perverse and regressive.

As long as Hermer and Starmer continue to fetishise international law, and refuse to contemplate any changes to the ECHR, there will be no end to the dysfunction this government will oversee.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.