Lord Hermer’s ‘Nazi jibe’ shows his naivety

Amid talk of a summer reshuffle, I recently asked a senior member of the Labour party if he thought the Attorney-General was likely for the chop. He paused and reflected. ‘No’, he eventually replied. ‘But he’s going the right way about it.’ Similar sentiments will no doubt be expressed in Downing Street today as they pore over the morning papers. ‘Law chief in Nazi jibe at Tories and Reform’, screams the splash headline of today’s Times: Richard Hermer KC has done it again.

The cause of the headline is a speech which Hermer made to the RUSI think tank yesterday on the government’s commitment to international law. The Labour peer made a thoughtful, lucid speech critiquing Bismarckian notions of realpolitik and offering a reasoned defence of the rules-based order – including Britain’s commitment to the European Court of Human Rights. But one section of the speech leaps out from the page:

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.