Thirty years ago, a largely unknown US academic named Christopher Lasch made a bold prediction: that the next revolt in Western politics would not be the people rising up against the elites, but the elites rising up against the people.
Three decades on and that prophecy seems to be coming true. Running Britain today is a vast bureaucratic, political and legal cabal that thinks it is not of the people, but above them.
Nobody embodies that arrogant elite more perfectly than Lord (Richard) Hermer, the Government’s Attorney General and most senior legal adviser.
Since July last year, when the former barrister stepped into this historic role, his official remit has been to safeguard our country and its citizens. Yet, all too often, Hermer’s words and deeds suggest the opposite.
Now it has emerged that the Attorney General has handed himself an ‘effective veto’ over state policy, by ordering civil servants to tell him if they suspect ministers’ decisions could break the law.
Hermer has inserted this so-called ‘snitch clause’ in new guidance to Government lawyers – deemed a ‘power grab’ by critics. Worse, he has watered down instructions which were originally designed by his Tory predecessor Suella Braverman to prevent lawyers from blocking Government policy.
Former Tory attorney general Sir Michael Ellis has fittingly accused Hermer of ‘empire building’. Quite so.
Remember, this is an unelected Cabinet figure, hand-picked by fellow human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, who has now effectively given himself the power to act as deputy prime minister in all but name.
Nobody embodies that arrogant elite more perfectly than Lord (Richard) Hermer, the Government’s Attorney General and most senior legal adviser
Remember, Hermer is an unelected Cabinet figure, hand-picked by fellow human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, who has now effectively given himself the power to act as deputy prime minister in all but name
Indeed, we have already seen the scale of his interference in reports that Hermer advised the Government not to join the US and Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities last month.
What was his reasoning for not joining our allies in obliterating these potentially apocalyptic stockpiles, enhancing global security and the safety of the British people? Apparently, it could have breached ‘international law’.
If you need any further proof that we live under the rule of lawyers rather than the rule of law, here it is.
The slightest glance at Hermer’s CV shows a carousel of wrong-headed decisions hostile to British interests – attitudes that clearly now prevail in the Government.
Let’s start with his previous work in private practice at the ultra Left-wing chambers Doughty Street, where he met his good friend Starmer.
The ‘cab-rank principle’ supposedly requires barristers to accept any case within their competence, however repellent the client or cause.
Yet it is interesting how our Attorney General has managed to represent quite so many figures one might describe as ‘enemies of the state’ – some of whom he has been accused of representing on a voluntary ‘pro bono’ basis when the cab-rank rule doesn’t apply.
They make for a grisly roll call of terrorists and mercenaries.
He has watered down instructions which were originally designed by his Tory predecessor Suella Braverman to prevent lawyers from blocking Government policy
Abid Naseer, the ringleader of an Al-Qaeda terror cell in north-east England, who was just days from bombing a Manchester shopping centre in 2009. Defending this loathsome creature from deportation, Hermer described MI5’s case against the Pakistani student as ‘pitiful’ and ‘far-fetched’
Among them is Abid Naseer, the ringleader of an Al-Qaeda terror cell in north-east England, who was just days from bombing a Manchester shopping centre in 2009.
Defending this loathsome creature from deportation, Hermer described MI5’s case against the Pakistani student as ‘pitiful’ and ‘far-fetched’.
Naseer was later found guilty in America of plotting to detonate a car bomb outside Manchester’s Arndale Centre and further killing hundreds of Easter shoppers by placing suicide bombers at the exits.
He is now in a maximum-security prison in the US. So I’m not sure how ‘far-fetched’ it was to argue he was a terrorist.
Then there’s Rangzieb Ahmed, an Al-Qaeda chief linked to the July 7 terror attacks whose grim 20th anniversary the nation has just marked.
Representing this bearded fanatic in 2020, Hermer even argued that the British Government should ‘compensate’ Ahmed for his alleged torture – in Pakistan.
The list goes on. That same year, it was Hermer who argued in favour of reinstating the British citizenship of dim-witted jihadi bride Shamima Begum, who left the UK aged 15 to join Islamic State in Syria.
Or take the former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, whom Hermer represented in 2023 against victims of three IRA bomb attacks who were suing him for damages.
Hermer argued in favour of reinstating the British citizenship of dim-witted jihadi bride Shamima Begum, who left the UK aged 15 to join Islamic State in Syria
Hermer later had a key role in Labour’s amendment of the 2023 Legacy Act, which means Adams and up to 1,500 other former suspected terrorists are now in line for compensation from the British taxpayer.
A brazen and shameful conflict of interest? Hermer won’t say: When asked whether he had a ‘conditional fee agreement’ with the Irishman – meaning he would be paid only if Adams won his case – Hermer replied that he couldn’t ‘recall’.
This ugly record has rung alarm bells among people who truly believe in British interests.
These concerns have continued since Hermer took his seat in the Attorney General’s office.
Yet Sir Keir appears delighted with his work. Yesterday Downing Street said Hermer’s ‘frank legal advice’ is in the ‘interests of everyone for the system to work properly’.
How farcical. Remember, it was Hermer who signed off the Government’s despicable surrender of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – with Britain now set to spend as much as £30 billion to lease our own military base on the island of Diego Garcia, funding tax cuts for Mauritians.
Sir Keir appears delighted with his work. Yesterday Downing Street said Hermer’s ‘frank legal advice’ is in the ‘interests of everyone for the system to work properly’
It was Hermer, too, who signed off the controversial prosecution of childminder Lucy Connolly, sentenced to nearly three years in prison for an offensive social media post during the riots following the Southport atrocity last summer
It was Hermer, too, who signed off the controversial prosecution of childminder Lucy Connolly, sentenced to nearly three years in prison for an offensive social media post during the riots following the Southport atrocity last summer.
Was Connolly’s incarceration really in the public interest at a time when Labour was struggling to tackle prison overcrowding? Many thousands of British people profoundly believe it was not.
And it was Hermer who was forced to apologise in May after comparing those who support leaving the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) to Nazis.
In a lecture at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, Hermer said calls to leave the convention were a ‘siren song’ that had been heard before – including in 1930s Germany.
In other words, those who would like to see our country have some control over its borders – control suppressed by judges’ expansive interpretation of ECHR laws – are akin in their world-view to members of the Third Reich.
Apology or not, Hermer’s choice of words afforded a compelling glimpse into the boundless arrogance of this over-promoted bureaucrat – who has now, it seems, seized the power to veto decisions of national interest
Apology or not, Hermer’s choice of words afforded a compelling glimpse into the boundless arrogance of this over-promoted bureaucrat – who has now, it seems, seized the power to veto decisions of national interest.
In the face of such controversy, the clamour grows more deafening every day: Hermer has to go.
The Attorney General is, of course, entitled to his perfectly woke opinions. What is intolerable is the extent to which he and his fellow Government stooges appear to believe their views are the only ones that count.
As that forgotten academic Christopher Lasch forecast all those years ago, the revolt is now under way. And Richard Hermer epitomises the elite willing to ride roughshod over the views of the British people.
MATT GOODWIN is Senior Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham. You can read more of his analysis at mattgoodwin.org