It’s rather soon for the governing party to be having a civil war, but here it is playing out in the press. And it’s getting very bloody.
Published: 13 February 2025
The chief protagonists right now are both Labour peers: Maurice Glasman and Richard Hermer.
Lord Glasman, a professional trumpet player who became an academic political philosopher and was ennobled in 2011, was the founder of what became known as Blue Labour, which he defined as a “small-c conservative form of socialism” which drew inspiration from the roots of the pre-1945 patriotic Labour Party.
As a community worker, he has striven to foster a “Labour big society” based on ideas of “family, faith and the flag” through local institutions from churches to football clubs.
A practising Jew and constructive critic of Israel, he is fun, has friends from every tradition and dislikes idealogues. He was the only Labour member at president Trump’s inauguration.
A high priest of the human rights cult, barrister Lord Hermer is an old friend and colleague of Sir Keir Starmer, both “lefty lawyers”.
He made his reputation taking cases against the state, which one might think an odd qualification for an attorney general.
But Starmer, who is the despair of ministers because he is so lacking in political sense, chose him because they were mates who love international law and seems not to have grasped that he is fanatically anti-state.
His clients have included Shamima Begum, the former Islamic State volunteer and Gerry Adams. He encouraged Caribbean countries to seek reparations from Britain. And the Chagos Islands debacle could cost up many billions.
“In Lord Hermer,” said shadow minister for justice Robert Jenrick, “Starmer has brought back Corbyn in a barrister’s wig. He’s pro-boycotting Israel, supports reparations, celebrates Just Stop Oil eco-zealots and is anti-border controls.
“His far-Left political views are a risk to our country’s security. He should be nowhere near the government.”
Glasman’s patience has snapped. Hermer has to go, he has said publicly. He is the “absolute archetype of an arrogant, progressive fool who thinks that law is a replacement for politics”.
“They talk about the rule of law but what they want is a rule of lawyers,” he added.
Bad as legal excess is in England, it’s much worse in Northern Ireland.
The scandalous ruling that there was no legal justification for killing the four would-be IRA murderers at Clonoe even though they were wielding a machine gun infuriated shadow secretary of state Alex Burghart.
“These terrorists called themselves an army, they carried weapons of war, they sought to kill, and they operated entirely outside the bounds of the law….if this is the state of the law, then the law is an ass.”
In Northern Ireland, it’s more like a braying donkey.
As Jeff Dudgeon, one of the authors of a just-published Policy Exchange report on spiralling legal costs in Northern Ireland, pointed out, “Nobody takes cost into account in Northern Ireland, possibly because other people are going to have to pay for it.”
It’s not just the law that is an ass. We are told the prime minister “has absolute confidence in his attorney general.”
The prime minister’s chief of staff, Cork man Morgan McSweeney, is not. He saw off Sue Gray. Hermer needs to watch his back.
