From handing over the Chagos Islands to changing the law to put Gerry Adams in line for compensation, from clamping down on tweets to going after Israel, Keir Starmer has consistently made decisions that owe more to the tendentious theories of human rights lawyers than sensible politics and the national interest. Behind many of these bizarre decisions is his old chum Richard Hermer KC, a human rights lawyers of some three decades whom Starmer parachuted into the Lords to serve as his Attorney General, and whose doctrinaire Leftist legal advice is now shipwrecking his Government. The Telegraph‘s Gordon Rayner has more.
Sir Keir, it was said, trusted him to give unbiased opinions rather than trying to please him with favourable interpretations of the law. But that long career in human rights law also meant Lord Hermer had accumulated a collection of clients and cases that would not always sit comfortably with his role as a Cabinet Minister.
As we know, they included Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Fein President, whom Lord Hermer represented when he was sued by victims of IRA bombings.
Mr. Adams is now in line for taxpayer-funded compensation after Sir Keir decided to repeal a law that blocked him from claiming damages for internment in the 1970s.
Lord Hermer was acting for Mr. Adams in a private case in 2023, which was unrelated to Sir Keir’s decision to change the law, and Downing Street has refused to say whether he was involved in discussions about the law change.
But his presence in Government has been keenly felt ever since he was parachuted into the job. In accepting the role of Attorney General, he became the first person since 1922 to take on the job without ever serving in Parliament.
He was soon pressed into action following the riots sparked by the stabbing of three girls in Southport last July.
It was he who advised Sir Keir that it would be lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred online, which led to controversial prison sentences. He later said people could not “hide behind a keyboard” and would find themselves in a cell if they incited racial and religious hatred online. …
But it is Lord Hermer’s involvement in decisions about foreign policy that have the most far-reaching implications.
He was deeply involved in the decision to withdraw the U.K.’s objections to arrest warrants being issued against Israeli officials by the International Criminal Court, and was instrumental in the decision to suspend some export permits for weapons to Israel last year.
He also said Britain had an “obligation” under international law to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, even though an International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the matter was in no way legally binding.
Although he has never been an MP, Lord Hermer has staunch Left-wing views that have not wavered since his student days. …
Critics believe he has become too powerful in Government. He has issued instructions to lawyers in Government departments to “stand up for the rule of law” and send him “full and frank advice” on the legality of Government decisions.
This, Dr. Yuan Yi Zhu, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, said in the Spectator, is a sign that the Attorney General effectively held a veto over policies and that lawyers were giving directions to elected politicians, rather than the other way around.
Worth reading in full.
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He is a lying fat pig dictator who revelled in his Fascist Covid powers and had no interest in or care for how these”rules” impacted the population.
The real issue was and is how toothless and weak our Parliament and MPS have been .
Never forget them.
Personally I hope the ghastly Pig dictator dies a slow and painful death from something sometime very soon !!
I live in hope
Well people did die because of him ( plenty of them! ) and his ultimate decision-making so I don’t blame you for saying that actually. There hasn’t been enough Karmic happenings affecting the perpetrators of the whole debacle, both restriction and death jab-wise, so we need some sort of justice. I’m not averse to seeing some of the guilty parties suffer either.
Yes we need more Karma !!!!
I will gladly second that motion.
#metoo
“Next Time a Prime Minister Intends to Abridge the Liberty of Millions, They May Remember the Scenes of the Boris Trial and Pause”
They will pause and resolve not to get caught, then carry on.
No …. they plan to pass responsibility to the WHO so they can absolve themselves of the crime in advance.
Exactly!
Let’s face it.. all politicians are liars. Its what they do. They get paid to do it, so they’re professionals.
I’ve no time for any of them now, except Andrew Bridgen. The rest are just charlatans, witness the covid debates. Plenty of them must have known the damage those jabs were doing, but decided to behave in the way they did. That goes for Boris Johnson and his cronies too.. beneath contempt..
i had to laugh at the The Horncastle pensioners fined for eating a bag of chips in a laundrette one .it sounds like a comedy who would ever believe it to be true before 2020
Great article. Thanks.
I came across this piece regarding the Faroe Islands today:
‘By the end of February 2021, confirmed cases in the Faroe Islands were just under 14,000 per million and deaths were at 20 per million. In comparison, Iceland had 16,000 cases and 80 deaths per million during the first year of the pandemic.
In Iceland, the Government Ministers took pride in delegating all decisions to the Chief Epidemiologist, the Head of the Directorate of Health and a police officer…’
‘….what the Faroese approach shows us is how important it is that elected representatives take direct responsibility for all decisions, instead of delegating them to officials without any democratic accountability. This might in fact be the most important lesson we can learn from the tiny Faroese nation.’
https://brownstone.org/articles/faroe-islands-the-tiny-country-that-rejected-lockdowns/
This was not complicated stuff. Normal, sensible, intelligent people could easily work out an effective approach….because they had all had the common cold before.
What Bunter’s hearing clearly demonstrates is how profoundly, risibly, stupid the socialist fascist British State has become……
Bunter has become a laughing stock, trashed an entire country’s economy.
He deserves the worst that country can throw at him.
I didn’t know the Faroe Islands and Iceland had such large populations
Yes, all very well. What an MSM media feast which joe public will relish.
But can someone please tell me why on God’s earth a certain Tony Blair still thrives.
On any analysis that man should be in jail, or worse, or better – (depends on your attitude towards Capital Punishment I suppose).
20 years since Iraq. And I just love his attitude to us Refuseniks.
Damn right.. and they awarded the _____ the highest award in the land. That should tell you all you need to know..
The British establishment of which Blair is a member is rotten to the core. They know how to circle their wagons.
This man did much to prevent him having to face war crimes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/attorney-general-block-prosecute-tony-blair-iraq-war-jeremy-wright-qc-jack-straw-lord-goldsmith-a7686801.html
It seems it is quite ok for the British establishment to put serving or long retired ex soldiers on trial for war crimes but not politicians.
It shouldn’t go unremarkable that Fraser Nelson supported the lockdowns & even argued for an additional one in Dec 2022. Kate Andrews was the only Spectator staffer arguing against the madness.
Of course.. you’re right, I’d forgotten about that..
And that is exactly why I cancelled my subscription to the Spectator. All these bloody people are coming across “oh aren’t I clever I knew this all along” but they were just as craven as the the rest as the sheepie. Makes you sick it really does.
Then refund all fines with interest and apologise with compensation to all those criminalized or who lost employment or businesses. It is apparent that if there was a real threat it would be impossible to have one rule for one lot of people and another rule for others. Reality would intervene. Therefore, it is evident that all the rules were not based on any experience or skill, but ideas that were nothing more than world Government fantasies of control freaks.
It is also important to note that Boris was advised by ‘experts’ and this happened right across the western world and beyond. Jacinda Ardern, Nicholas Sturgeon, Justine Trudeau were more authoritarian and it seemed as if all the leaders were unable to back out and had to out-authority each other, in part driven by populations that had been primed to be hysterical by all the disaster movie type imagery coming out of China.
Bozo’s “trial.” Do me a favour. A distraction, a circus for the mindless masses.
Next.
As Toby’s “friend” JD would say “bread and circuses, bread and circuses”.
Huxley. I differ slightly. I think “circuses” are precisely what is needed.
A big ampitheatre, a few hungry Polar Bears and Boris, Professor, Susan Michie, Handycock, Farrar [your bete noire here], given a wooden sword between them.
Biggest TV spectacle ever.
An excellent idea. Thanks.
Trying Johnson over birthday cake is like trying Hannibal Lecter for stealing someone else’s Chianti!!
Your comparing Johnson to Hannibal Lecter? Why would you do that?
No. I’m not likening Johnson to Lecter.
I can’t believe I have to explain this… I’m likening the ridiculousness of the charges. Johnson was the man in charge who destroyed the UK by turning it into a police state, persuading neighbours to spy on each other and sent police in to beat up freedom protestors. He’s being charged with eating cake at a birthday party, not all the many crimes against humanity he and his ruling party have committed in the last three years. Hannibal Lecter was the Chesapeake Ripper, murdering and eating a large number of people. I’m saying that charging Johnson for eating cake is like charging Hannibal Lecter for stealing one of his victims’ bottles of wine, rather than charging him for the serious crimes he committed!
Precisely. And the biggest, most egregious crime is that the very people dreaming up and enforcing the most ridiculous, damaging, regulation, were partying in full knowledge that they were at zero risk
The most important point,
I think future PMs will be much more interested in how much he got paid for doing what he did.
They certainly won’t regard what has happened to Johnson as any sort of deterrent if the bribes are big enough.
Perhaps the most troubling of all the highlights of this article is that the British public has proven to be excellent informants to the Stasi like state storm troopers. A neighbour reporting a sleepover should, in no uncertain terms, be treated like the traitor to ‘the people’ they have shown themselves to be and perhaps be given a ‘last cigarette’ before being tied to the post. One would hope though that they didnt smoke…for health reasons of course…
A quote from an excellent article by Iain Davis over at Off-G.
“In order to avert enslavement the change we need to make is first and foremost psychological.
We have to wake up and realise that nothing any government ever does is for our benefit. We have no reason at all to trust anything governments say and we need to stop believing their propaganda.”
Iain goes on:
“G3P power only exists because we imagine that it does. Based upon this misapprehension, we consequently behave as instructed by its representatives. The moment we realise, en masse, that its claimed authority is a charade, that alleged “power” evaporates in an instant.
All the G3P is left with then is violence and simple mathematics dictates that it cannot succeed.”
Our downfall will arrive via the obedience of the masses for the trust given by the sheeple is all that is required to lock the gates.
“To do this we will have to finally accept that obedience is not a virtue. Obedience to authority is not a new problem, but the scale of ambition and the technological capability of the parasite class is.”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/22/its-the-trust-in-the-authority-stupid/
Spot on! I regard Johnson and co as traitors to the country, to the land we live in. They aren’t traitors to the people. The people of the United Kingdom betrayed themselves by going along with what they were told with such enthusiasm.
Johnson is being pursued by MPs for three reasons:
The fat oaf was never PM material. He should never have imposed the lockdowns, but that would have required guts in standing up to the MSM, and a willingness to be unpopular with those who were howling for the suspension of our civil liberties.
Ultimately, it was ditching Cummings and the reform agenda, in favour of pandering to Princess Nut Nuts and pushing the Net Zero lunacy, which has holed him below the waterline.
But no enquiry into murder by vaccination, that Boris et al ordered.
Is that a hitlerite salute I see Johnson doing?
Indeed. My thoughts also.
How appropriate.
If ever I find myself feeling sympathy for Johnson, I need only recall his satisfaction expressed in the infamous WhatsApp files when someone was reportedly heavily fined (or quarantined, or whatever it was).
Hoist by his own petard.
The lesson must be threefold:
1) Don’t introduce patently ridiculous rules;
2) Don’t criminalise guidance;
3) Maintain a fully open debate so the truth rises to the top;
We must never allow govts to declare themselves as ‘the’ experts, especially in medicine. There’s always a second opinion.
The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh got it right. They introduced the ‘Test & Treat’ program. A kit for home use that included a Covid-19 test and some early-treatment medicines including Ivermectin, so if any household member tested positive, they all took the medicine, but importantly, no sanctions. They achieved the status of the state being declared covid-free (i.e. low enough to not be a pandemic). It was simple, cheap, and supportive/caring of people. What most Western govts did was threaten, sanction and imprison whole populations. Evil!