Lord Hermer’s ‘Nazi jibe’ at Reform won’t work

It is an axiom of political debate that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have definitely lost the argument. That golden rule seems to have escaped the notice of the Attorney General Lord Hermer, who, in a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank did just that.

Hermer, a close friend and fellow human rights lawyer colleague of Sir Keir Starmer, told RUSI that both Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Kemi Badenoch’s Tories were echoing Nazi ideology that placed national law above international agreements with their threats to withdraw Britain from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR):

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… 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.