There are few more vivid illustrations of the ongoing “vibe shift” away from the post-Cold War norms of Western governance and towards the Right-wing restoration of national sovereignty than the 2001 romcom Bridget Jones’s Diary. In the film, the main love interest — the idealised image of the perfect man, summoned up from the depths of the New Labour unconscious — is a human rights lawyer, who may or may not be based on Keir Starmer. Indeed, in a crucial plot point, said love interest secures the affection of the heroine and the adulation of the tabloid press for halting the Government’s removal of an asylum seeker. As these narratives go, Starmer must ruefully observe, it’s a relic of a vanished world.
The global human rights industry was largely a product of America’s unipolar moment, holding out the prospect of an international enforcer of liberal values, the closest to a global hegemon that history has yet witnessed. Having convinced themselves that history had ended, with themselves the victors, buoyant liberals, as the political theorist Patrick Hayden observed, saw the creation of an international human rights regime as a means of “replacing the realist national interest-based security paradigm with a cosmopolitan, person-based paradigm”. Within Britain, there was no more zealous enforcer of either American power or human rights legislation than New Labour, and the legal supergroup Matrix Chambers it spawned — of which Starmer, Cherie Blair, Philippe Sands and Attorney General Lord Hermer are all alumni.
Yet Britain’s continued rule by the Matrix Chambers coterie does not serve it well in this actually-existing era of international competition. In October, the Attorney General condemned politicians “who appeal to the ‘will of the people’” rather than adhere to the perfect and unchangeable abstractions of international law. But the latest revelations of Hermer’s pursuit of war crimes charges against the SAS, following his long history of acting against the interests of the British state and people, pose a problem for Starmer. A country increasingly sick of activist lawyers will not long consent to be ruled by them, nor to pay heavily to advance their pet projects, as with the self-defeating Chagos Islands surrender, a personal Sands crusade. Starmer is learning, admittedly late in life, that in a democracy the popular will counts for more than the approval of fellow human rights lawyers.
For Sands and Hermer, both self-avowed devotees of the mythical “1945 order”, the world is divided between righteous advocates of the rule of law and “populists” who seek to overturn it. It is a version of cosmopolitanism honed into an uncompromising, even fundamentalist vision. Above mere nation-states shines down the perfect and immutable Law, towards which frail, misguided, even wicked human societies, swayed by the currents of mere democracy and the temptations of national self-interest, must be shepherded, whether they will it or not. If it weakens individual statehood — “that most artificial and fake of constructs”, as Sands once put it — so much the better: only thus can utopia be reached. Unlike America itself, which along with Russia and China has always placed its sovereign interests above treaties and tribunals, we remain ruled by zealots, highly-educated naïfs who affirm that international law exists as an objective reality in itself, rather than a political construct derived from state power and the will to wield it.
Starmer’s self-inflicted woes are the result of this intensely religious vision meeting political reality. Fortunately for the British taxpayer, Donald Trump is likely to override the Chagos Islands deal and the “relentless legal maximalism of the UK Government”, giving Starmer a valuable if painful lesson on what international law is, and what it is not.
At the very least, the Prime Minister has learned that Britain’s actual sovereignty over the Chagos Islands is a legal fiction, subject to Washington’s veto. Just as the Matrix Chambers worldview is an unwitting product of American global hegemony, so is its negation the product of its retreat: in preparing to defend itself from challengers, America must wield power over its empire all the more firmly, including disabusing our provincial governors of their cosmopolitan illusions. One can make a lucrative career, as Starmer’s friends have, of sawing away the props of a nation’s sovereign power. The result, however, is not enlightened global arbitration but instead domination by stronger, fully sovereign nations.
In just the same way, the end of the Gaza war has come not from the Biden administration’s lawyerly hand-wringing but as an order from the incoming emperor to restore peace in an outlying corner of the empire. Appeals to international law had no impact on Benjamin Netanyahu’s behaviour, but reasserting the raw facts of relative power appears to have ended the war in an instant. States have always been governed and interacted with each other according to their national interests; those who impede these interests are swept aside. In a world of renewed global competition, it is only Starmer and his circle who still inhabit a world as benignly make-believe as Richard Curtis’s vanished Nineties London.
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Would only quibble with the suggestion that the Matrix Chambers mediocrities were some sort of supergroup.
Taxi for the human rights lawyers. Who were only ever interested in the human rights of minority groups. And far too often foreign ones.
From a report in The Times 11th December 2024.
‘Lawyer guilty of Iraq war torture fraud avoids prison’
Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, was named “human rights lawyer of the year” by campaign groups Liberty and Justice in 2004.
The Law Society, the professional body of solicitors, named him solicitor of the year in 2007.
He was declared bankrupt in 2017
He was struck off as a solicitor in 2017.
He was given a two year sentence, suspended for two years in December 2024.
There is no paywall with this link:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/phil-shiner-southwark-crown-court-lawyers-conservative-british-b1199221.html
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/phil-shiner-sentencing-fraud-charges-v39d9bjtw
If the day ever comes when the great BBC-watching, legacy newspaper-reading older parts of the Brtitish public have an epiphany and it finally dawns on them the degree to which their country is governed by its parasitic lawyer classes….that will be a great day in our county’s salvation. Sadly though, most older voters still buy into the BBC/ITV/C4 party political psychodrama even though it is, in reality, mostly a form of tv entertainment that obscures, more than enlightens what is really going on in our governance. The other thing that the party-politics media psychodrama has long obscured is the enormous unelected power of the permanently Leftist Civil Service (as I illustrate in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing)
You’re right and one could adduce other examples of deluded, cosmopolitan internationalism, such as the ‘Climate Crisis’.
The challenge is the degree to which these delusions are hard-wired into our polity, and especially our Civil Service world-view. The climate farrago is, again a case in point, where legally mandated targets have to be met, at all costs, and regardless of changing facts, the effect on the economy or wider geo-political constraints: Putin and his revanchism, for example.
That makes it difficult for any government to change, as they need to overturn something rather than just shift priorities. When groups have a vested interest in the status quo and ‘Starmer and the KC Sunshine Band’ are heavily invested in ‘Rule by Lawyers’, real change is, and will be, hard.
Excellent analysis.
Only aspect missing maybe : the saviour complex, and in turn, his contempt for the people he rules.
“… Britain’s continued rule by the Matrix Chambers coterie …”
It is scary how such a tiny group of people have been able to invert the law in favour of minorities, at huge cost to the majority (e.g. 1 million immigrants annually into the UK). These people are not driven by any fundamental humanity. They are driven by a legal religiosity which ultimately hands them the levers of power. The Woke madness that engulfs us all today is a direct consequence of their legal manipulation and addiction to power – i.e. controlling by application of the law shaped in their worldview.
These are dangerous people.
Extremely rich and extremely powerful dangerous people actually
Quite so! Consider Mr & Mrs Tony Blair for starters – both rich human rights lawyers.
Labour is indeed locked into the international rule of north London human rights lawyers and MPs. Other than public sectorism, ethnicism and envy there is no other ideology in place. But it is being rapidly unpicked with the departures of Louise, Sue and Tulip. Hermer will undoubtedly follow.
The iron law of the Irish exception however means Hermerism will live on in Northern Ireland where lawfare can only continue to prosper as the judiciary has been captured. The cost of unending re-investigation of state ‘crimes’ will accelerate into its third billion as Hilary Benn dismantles the Legacy Act. This will continue under the watchful eye of the Queen’s University campaigners, Dublin’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Strasbourg, the ‘legacy practitioners’, Gerry Adams, and the rights and equality-trained Belfast judges. Even Trump couldn’t face that nexus down.
Now it’s been revealed Hermer represented the Islamic State killers and in 2020 ‘won’ a Supreme Court appeal and so prevented the UK from sharing intelligence with US. This story is in the Telegraph.
So he has built a career acting against UK interests. What is he doing anywhere near government now?
More Starmer-Hermer scandal.
So wtf are you doing commenting elsewhere that Hermer got “a free pass”? If you thought that, the comment to which i’m replying makes no sense.
Please try to “think harder” before commenting – it’s why Unherd (who you claim to despise) was set up.
Think about it. You might find it helps.
Beautifully put. Starmer and his buddies are learning the hard way that being nice to everyone doesn’t mean that everyone will be nice to you. How much of Britain will be left when that lesson is finally learned? Who knows.
Excellent analysis!
Let’s hope that the perversion of human rights legislation by activist lawyers (who’ve become conveniently rich along the way) to subvert the established order of things and to invert the law in favour of minorities at the expense of the majority is coming to a decisive end. The sooner the better!
Written from an American perspective so ignoring all the ongoing Starmer-Hermer scandals.
No mention of Hermer’s intervention in Tommy Robinson’s civil contempt of court case.
No mention of the Gerry Adams scandal. Hermer represented him against UK, and now, is or is not, party to the decision to allow Adams to claim further compensation from UK. When asked if he was involved Hermer said he couldn’t remember.
No mention of the asylum claims for Chagos islanders, who Hermer represented and lost, who now magically been given asylum… by Hermer?..
Why do Unherd ignore all the scandals following anything Starmer and Labour touch?
Tommy Robinson was jailed for Contempt of Court, which in U.K., is a criminal, not civil, offence; I don’t whether it is in the US?
He was in danger of fatally prejudicing the ‘due process’ of a case by his comments; this was, and is, regarded as very serious. That is why there is little sympathy in the UK for his plight.
Yes, but the law is not equal. If you remember, Greater Manchester Police did not prosecute after a policewoman was assaulted because one of her colleagues assaulted them back. Only Nigel Farage’s intervention forced the prosecution to go ahead.
Whilst I agree the policing can be selectively applied (and arguably always has been, whereby white collar criminals can scam thousands and get away with just paying it back, while somebody on benefits tries to scam a few hundred and gets banged up for it), I don’t really see how the two crimes are related.
Robinson had already been charged with defamation when he couldn’t back up his accusations, and was warned he faced prison if he did it again which he duly did. He wasn’t hard done by, just stupid
The contempt of court case wasn’t for prejudicing the due process of the rape case, it was for continuing to show the film about the school bullying scenario despite the ruling that it was libellous – but if you watch the video, you can be in no doubt that this was an odd ruling.
Tommy Robinson is in jail for sharing his Silenced Documentary! Exposing government and media corruption! Watch it it’s very sad
A very interesting summary, although I think international human rights did indeed arise in the aftermath of WW2, when Nazi Germany had shown the World that nations could not be trusted to safeguard the lives of their citizens. It was a radical shift from the governing ideology of Wilsonian self-determination (i.e. nationhood against Empire) which dominated at the end of the First War.
Why does Starmer get s free pass?
Why does Hermer get a free pass?
Why do the Pakistani rape gangs get a free pass?
Have you read the article?
There’s no “free pass” for Starmer or Hermer just the opposite.
They don’t, the article (and many others) are highly critical of all those you’ve mentioned. Stop spouting your nonsense
Why is Tommy Robinson, who reveals all the lies, all the corruption, in prison?
Because he broke the law, same as everybody else in prison
It’s not be ‘benignly’ make believe. That’s Hollywood deodorant.
They had their chance and failed catastrophically – just look at the state of the world now compared to the 1990s before they took power in the form of Clinton/Blair.
Let’s get rid of all of them before they do any more damage.
What hope is there for a country, the UK, when there is no longer rule of law, but the vile English-hating rule of a clique of untouchable Labour laywers and politicians?
And a media so emasculated they will not call them out, let alone, bring them to account?
Or a media so corrupt they allow themselves to be bought as a political tool? Unherd.
If you believe in human rights as a step towards Utopia then, obviously, anyone who doesn’t agree with your beliefs must be evil as they reject Utopia.
I’ve written this as sarcasm, yet if you look at the behaviours of the current Labour Government a great deal could be explained.
Alan Watts in the 1960s preached the idea that ‘all this trying to make everything right is a big part of what’s wrong.”
So Labour, out of power for 14 years needs to make everything right. National Institutions like the NHS and the railways are wrong. Plan A – give pay rises to government employees to make things equal, thereby increasing by definition the number of poor people.
Immigration is a problem so Plan B is to build more houses – but not enough and not for long-term residents and without the skills to build them.
Don’t tax individuals so Plan C is to tax businesses, thereby reducing growth in the future. Therefore..
Create a new pretend industry called Green Power so Plan D is to destroy our energy base.
The ‘people’ will be too ignorant to understand these things so Plan E, the ultimate success, is to put anyone who disagrees in prison. The ‘people’ also won’t see the point of this so they will only understand if murderers are released to make space for these political prisoners.
It is called Communism. (Marxism makes it sound too technical and logical).
Spot on!
I like the end of C Wiliam’s post. Clear prisons of murderers to find places for Facebook posters.
That will teach the people. You don’t count at all. You will keep your mouth shut.
It’s intimidation. It’s Starmer’s Labour.
Remember Lincoln’s wish for freedom and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”.
That seems so far away now.
I can’t use the reply button. In UK contempt of court is a civil, not a criminal offence.
In 2018 Robinson was sent to prison for contempt of court for live videoing, outside the court, a rape gang trial. This was a travesty of justice and overturned after his lawyers took it to the Court of Appeal.
The second tlme was after the notorious Syrian waterboarding story which the media invented in 2018. Robinson defended publicly the English boy and alleged the Syrian boy was aggressive and a trouble maker in the school. This was ruled to be a libel agalnst the Syrian boy. Robinson went to the Huddersfield school to interview on secret camera the teachers and school children to confirm the English boy was innocent and had been crucified by the media.
This is all told in his video film Silenced watched by over 150 million people.
Robinson is now in prison for releasing Silenced. Many of the witnesses in the film went to London to defend Robinson at the libel hearing.
Robinson recounts how in this court case all the journalists present stood up and walked out when his witnesses started to give evidence.
In 2024 Robinson was arrested under Terrorism charges when he came back to UK from holiday after the summer riots.
Hermer was instrumental in ensuring he was imprisoned again for the civil charge of contempt of court for releasing Silenced. Another Starmer-Hermer scandal.
Then God help us all for we may be the next victims of such bare-faced injustice.
Starmer described himself as being not a man of faith. Yet he has this ‘intensely religious’ vision of law-based international order, a faith worthy in its purity as that of Saul of Tarsus before his conversion.
Unlike Saul who had his conversion on a road to Damascus, it seems that Starmer can go on the long (rail)road to Kiev and remain firmly zealous in his faith.
If the law-based international order is dependent on the power of the nation-state, on what does Starmer’s 100-year pact with Ukraine rest? And, moreover, what are the terms of it? Aircraft carriers don’t have wheels. What international heft does a ‘community of communities’ have; one scourged with shoplifters and ‘grooming’ gangs, in which prisons are bursting at the seams and the Channel may as well be dry land?
What use to the emperor is such a province, one where local authorities can no longer afford even to keep public toilets open?
Tommy Robinson’s Silenced has been watched 150 million times on X.
I wonder how many British people have seen it. A few hundred?
Is Starmer going to drag UK’s reputation into the gutter and stamp on it there for the next four years or will the media start to ask him questions and make him account for what he is doing?
The “enlightened missionary zeal” of illiberal progressives who overtly and covertly reject the fundamental liberal principle of the free exchange of ideas is appropriately illustrated by the 2021 films Tides. In this sci-fi dystopian thriller, a single righteous dogmatic man lies and cheats in the certainty that his moral superiority justifies barbarism and authoritarian power with morally inferior deplorables labelled as “Muds” in relation to his own morally superior barbarism.
The trouble with messianic zeolots is that all too often they don’t have the self awareness to realise that they too are driven by animal instincts with their messianic mental constructs being the conduit by which to accumulate animal power. Illiberal progressive radicals have done this through the ultra competitive game of turning the liberal principle of free exchange of ideas into the radical principle of unfree exchange of ideas. However this sublimated and shrewd form of animal power is no match for raw animal power.
Progressive radicals might have had a chance if their messaniac global belief system that allows for the free movement of people, capital, goods and services was underpinned by a truly ecological perspective which takes account of national biocapacity so that it would be understood that the free movement of people into ecological deficit countries results in globalised human rights violations and is therefore fundamentally inhumane as a result of needing to appropriate foreign land, energy and materials in order to supply the consumption needs of national population overshoot.
Thus, without an ecologically rational global vision that is able to limit the free movement (liberty) of people into ecological deficit countries then the progressive radical worldview was always going to lead to human rights violations through the dispossession of land, energy and materials. This is why progressive radicals, in the UK at least, largely maintain a national “little Englander” perspective regarding their radical global worldview with the only exceptions being to ad hominem attack foreign dissenters of their inhumane worldview that actively seeks to create globalised poverty, conflict and forced displacement and then be the ones to offer solutions through a progressive radical world order.
This is animal power using and abusing humanism by capturing minds within a nationalist framing in order to hide the global impacts of their inhumane radicalism.
“Starmer is learning, admittedly late in life, that in a democracy the popular will counts for more than the approval of fellow human rights lawyers”.
Can we really, truly say that we are actually even still in a democracy?
The will of the people is quite clearly, for example, that illegal immigration should be immediately stopped and a reversal being enacted by large scale deportations.
Yet the government is using our money to house illegal immigrants, feed them, clothe them and – when they murder, rape and rob the indigenous British population – pay lawyers to keep them out of jail.
I can’t find *that* in the democracy pamphlet.
But both parties continued reluctance to do so has led to them both becoming incredibly unpopular, and Reform gaining popularity so you could argue that democracy is indeed working correctly.
It’s only the antiquated FPTP system that prevents it happening more quickly by preventing smaller parties from breaking through
There is no democracy without a free press.
The most damning moment in the Jordan Peterson podcasts is when Tommy Robinson recounts how at his libel court case, where he was accused of libelling the Syrian refugee school boy in Huddersfield, when he brought in his witnesses to confirm what he had said about the Syrian schoolboy, all the journalists, en masse, got up and walked out of the court room. They heard nothing from the teachers and schoolchildren who knew what had happened. Then they didn’t have to lie in their media court reports.
UK media stinks. And I include Unherd in that.
Think about that.
It appears we are being governed by a bunch of student union activists.
I do wonder how Starmer and friends would cope if conflict arrived at their doors. Who knows, we might be unlucky enough to find out.
If it’s the US coming to our rescue, then this might be a good thing
“Hermer’s pursuit of war crimes charges against the SAS, following his long history of acting against the interests of the British state and people“
So British military should be allowed to kill unarmed Afghan civilians and if a lawyer back home should try and take them to account, then he’s “acting against the interests” of Britain? Or being an “activist judge” alongside some DEI crusader attorney?
This is quite worrying to read, especially from a war correspondent. There’s nothing better for Britain and its international standing than for people to see that it doesn’t shy away from prosecuting its own when needed.
Oh do shut up about “war crimes”. How many in the Taliban have been prosecuted for murdering their own citizens who won’t comply with their medieval world view? Especially women, who defenceless and alone, are murdered for daring to be human. Absolute cowards, the Taliban, and those who defend them.
Just to note that your comment is a really perfect example of UnHerd whataboutery.
(1) Refuse to answer the original point – ‘Oh do shut up….’
(2) Introduce linked but irrelevant topic – ‘How many in the Taliban….’
I realise of course that this very comment is a pretty good example of what is usually termed trolling, tho I prefer the term ‘off-topic sniping’.
Exactly.
Even if his points about the Taliban were correct (they’re not), following his logic Britain should have no moral compass of its own, and just do whatever its ‘enemies’ do.
That’s not the Britain I grew up in, know and love.
What were British soldiers doing in Afghanistan? Why were you there? What did you and the Americans achieve?
Western outrage against the Taliban is hilarious – the Afghans (once again) beat the most advanced military in the world (and its obsequious allies) fair and square.
Try not to be such a sore loser.
If the Attorney General has to be investigated for malpractice and conflict of interest who is there to do it? He’s the senior lawyer.
The end of Starmer is nigh. And not a moment too soon.
No reply button available so I’m having to comment here. Everything Simon Diggins says below is utterly wrong. Contempt of court is a civil matter in the UK. And there is huge sympathy in the UK for Tommy Robinson’s politically motivated solitary confinement in a high-security prison.
Conversely, everything Richard Littlewood says in the comments about Tommy Robinson’s case is correct. Mr Diggins et al should watch Silenced and also TR’s Rape of Britain films.
Excellent piece .. wasn’t Lord Charlie Faulkner Matrix Chambers too and his son got a safe labour seat ..
If Sands thinks that nationhood is an artificial and fake construct, what on earth is he doing representing the state of Mauritius in its attempts to colonise a neighbouring atoll?