As they came into office, Labour knew they were the good people. They had rejected and expelled the Marxists and their false gods and in their places were installing prophets of the one true religion: human rights. Devoutly secular, this ideology would have the European Convention on Human Rights as a bible.
Published: 23 January 2025
Sir Keir Starmer was launching a crusade for the deepening and strengthening of the international rule of law.
One of his best buddies, Richard Hermer, a human rights theologian, had been enobled and appointed attorney general to fashion and implement the necessary measures.
In the United Kingdom, as judicial power expanded, lawyers would become the high priests.
Hermer’s October speech ‘The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism’ showed that, like Starmer, his sheltered life taught him nothing about politics or those strange savages who voted in the UK for Brexit or in the US for Donald Trump because they failed to grasp that it was our moral duty to favour the rule of international law over the national interest.
Most of us will remember from the early days of this government Starmer’s impassioned insistence there were no rules against politicians accepting free clothes.
And indeed he was right. There weren’t. He seemed genuinely baffled that so many people seemed to think it wrong. The smell test isn’t a feature of Starmer’s world.
The human rights industry wants to clean up the grimy world of politics by juridifying it. Values-based politics should be replaced by the imposition of the legal and quasi-legal rules – conventions and procedures, for instance.
Judges would take all the decisions.
And the common people would be kept in their place.
The great enemy for Hermer and Starmer is “populism”, the “divisive and disruptive force” that can result in votes for candidates who don’t realise that the rule of lawyers is good for them.
The plan was that after their resounding defeat of the wicked Tories, they would be a shining example to the world of how a just government with firm ethical principles could bring about a prosperous, united people.
Sadly, instead, every day brings dreadful news at home and abroad.
If they hadn’t been so triumphalist, so cocksure and so self-righteous, I could almost feel sorry for the Labour team who are presiding over the wreckage of most of their policies this week. What must it be like to be Ed Miliband as net zero is in mortal peril?
They appear to be as lost as abandoned children in a war zone, hanging on to their belief in their moral supremacy like a comfort blanket.
Rachel Reeves, still refusing to change course, is at Davos, where the world’s movers and shakers are talking about the age of Trump and such worrying trends in the UK as the collapse of business confidence and soaring unemployment.
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In Ireland, where the US was seen as the Fairy Godfather, there are terrible financial challenges, mostly emanating from Washington.
And president Trump and Elon Musk are enthusiastic supporters of Israel, which Ireland has demonised.
After president Higgins said that calls from Nato’s secretary general to member states to increase funding for military uses were “appalling”, the former Estonian president, Toomas Ilves, asked: “Do these people have any sense of self-awareness, their privileged geography or the appropriateness of even commenting as the beneficiary of implicit NATO security?”
It’s a question that Trump will be asking the good people in Whitehall.
