Starmer and Hermer content to let others do our dirty work.

Juliet Samuel asks: “So what about Britain, which aspires to lead the Nato response to Russia?”

“[T]here are clear signs that, for all Sir Keir Starmer’s strong words, this government’s real priorities lie elsewhere. Starmer has so far ignored the argument made by the former defence secretary Ben Wallace, in a paper for Policy Exchange in March, that we should follow our allies’ withdrawal from “outdated” weapons treaties…

“Instead, last week, the prime minister’s close ally and attorney-general Lord Hermer, laid out a rather different view of national security. The bedrock of British security, according to Hermer, is international law — not only individual treaties like Nato but the entire system of international law in which, it might be observed, he has made his career.

“One answer is what General David Petraeus, speaking on the same day as Hermer, called “legal freeloading”: letting others do our dirty work. This seems to be our chosen approach to our soldiers, who find themselves pursued through the courts by legal parasites years after serving their country, from Northern Ireland to Iraq. And we are not talking about clear-cut cases of murder or abuse, which should of course be prosecuted, but difficult judgments made in the heat of battle and raked over decades later under the auspices of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), whose authority is invoked even when our parliament has introduced statutes of limitations for action abroad.

“The government’s own defence review demands that its ministers start thinking differently. The alternative to a defence policy run by lawyers is not Nazism, as Hermer ludicrously claims. It’s a recognition that the post-Cold War legal order, and its expansion since, imposes excessive constraints on our ability to achieve genuine defensive readiness.”

Read the full article here: https://www.thetimes.com/article/302cb0b1-e1e0-4f33-9dda-92713a478783?shareToken=58f4b362f7ed2aa43f282e5affca17d4