Attorney General forced to apologise for Nazi jibe

Telegraph

a day ago

The Attorney General has apologised for 'clumsy' remarks after comparing Tory and Reform calls to quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to 1930s Nazi Germany.
Speaking at the Rusi defence think tank on Thursday, Lord Hermer said calls for the UK to quit international agreements echoed similar demands by legal experts in 1930s Germany, who rejected international law and human rights in favour of state power.
It sparked an outcry from leading Tories and Reform UK MPs, who called it disgraceful.
On Friday, a spokesman for Lord Hermer said: 'The Attorney General gave a speech defending international law, which underpins our security, protects against threats from aggressive states like Russia and helps tackle organised immigration crime.
'He rejects the characterisation of his speech by the Conservatives. He acknowledges, though, that his choice of words was clumsy and regrets having used this reference.'
On Thursday, Lord Hermer told the audience of senior security and defence experts that Labour's approach to foreign policy of progressive realism was 'a rejection of the siren song that can sadly now be heard in the Palace of Westminster, not to mention the press, that Britain abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power'.
He said: 'This is not a new song. The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes but can be put aside when the 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.
'Because of the experience of what followed 1933, far-sighted individuals rebuilt and transformed the institutions of international law, as well as internal constitutional law.'
Mr Schmitt is seen as an authoritarian conservative theorist who was a vocal critic of parliamentary democracy and liberalism. He supported the Nazi party, joining it in 1933, with his theories about state power providing ideological justification for the regime. He later fell from favour and was removed from official positions in the party.