If Lord Richard Hermer were well-known in any other European country, it would probably be as a traitor, and he would now be manacled to the wall in an ice-cold dungeon awaiting trial. Instead, he is the UK’s Attorney General, in which role his favourite duty appears to be hounding fellow employees of the British government, namely British soldiers. His agenda neatly overlaps with that of the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Féin, whose project through this century has been to reshift responsibility for “The Troubles”, the insane campaigns of violence that killed some 4,000 people, away from them, the republican terrorists, to the British. With the bizarre and almost inexplicable assistance from various British governments, the IRA project is coming along nicely.
Discussing Irish-British relationships with outsiders is rather like explaining gravity to clouds. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense – which is certainly the case – but it defies all the rules of logic and understanding. In essence, the British will bend over backwards to placate the Irish, provided they are republican or nationalist. But to the pro-British Irish, also known as unionists, successive British governments have been at best indifferent, at worst hostile. This has also been true in the attitudes of the present Labour government towards its own army. Both attitudes reveal a rot inside a cyst wrapped in an infection and all packaged within some suppurating wound, otherwise known as “human rights lawyers”.
To be sure, the term is an oxymoron, not least because such lawyers are not remotely interested in the “human rights” of the people they so freely accuse of this and that. Indeed, there are entire categories of human beings who in their eyes have no human rights whatsoever: Police officers and soldiers generally, unless they are black or sort of black, in which case they are “victims”. A white uniformed heterosexual male is a four-word synonym for “devil” in the human rights lexicon, and nobody masters that weird language more fluently than the aforementioned Lord Richard Hermer.
As a barrister, he led the case against a group of British soldiers in a civil suit accused them of murdering captive Iraqis in 2004. This was not a criminal trial, but a case seeking damages by their families. Hermer’s legal ally in this gold-digging adventure was a solicitor named Phil Shiner, a double-dyed convicted criminal and pathological liar who made up allegations against British soldiers and trained Iraqi witnesses to confirm them. Hermer’s role in this was not part of the quotidian duty of a barrister, which is to take on a case rather as taxi-driver accepts a fare-paying passenger, but a wholly volitional affair, in which he would not be paid if the suit was unsucccessful.
As for the worthlessness of the invented-cases, Hermer wrote a legal opinion urging that “a particular wording would give us some wriggle-room if the killings did not in fact happen”, and that it “needed to be explicit about the executions of prisoners to generate interest”. In other words, the allegations were not merely invented in order enrich all those assisting the complainants, including Hermer, but also to damage the British Army.
But Shiner’s gang over-reached themselves with their allegations, which led to the 169-day Al-Sweady inquiry that cost £31 million (€36 million). This found that every serious allegation was the product of lies, hyperbole and greed. Moreover, Hermer’s chum Shiner had been the lead in 65 per cent of the 3,400 civil suits against the British Army in Iraq, and another sworn enquiry into these cost £60 million (€69 million), leading to Shiner being disbarred and imprisoned. Yet his legal accomplice in this jolly little sewage-swim in the quest for lucre, far from being locked naked in a prison cell with a chamber-pot composed of electrified barbed wire, is today’s UK attorney general, Lord Hermer. Indeed, the state of the law towards Special Forces as interpreted by British Courts is so rancid that American Special Forces are contemplating discontinuing their hitherto vital links with their British allies, lest all their operational secrets be revealed in British courts.
No, of course, you can’t made head or tail of this. At this point, we must turn to the deathless final words in one of the greatest films ever made, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” And Chinatown, a place that knows neither law nor justice, only violence and unprincipled expediency, is what a former Labour government under Tony Blair turned Britain into nearly thirty years ago. He too understood the advantages of the concept of “wriggle-room”, which allowed him to go to go to war in Iraq on false promises in 2003. A similar deceitful wriggle-room had enabled him to betray the law-abiding constitutional parties in Northern Ireland whilst allowing the IRA in from the cold to which their many barbarities had exiled them. Though these were countless, the dead-bodies were not: 60 per cent of all Northern Ireland’s murders were by republican terrorists, 83 of the victims being of so-called “informers”, who were usually tortured before being finished off with a headshot or two.
It really should have been impossible to rescue the IRA from this self-created den of iniquity, yet the opposite has proved to be the case. Through their skilful use of, yes, “human rights’ lawyers”, the IRA has manufactured a historical narrative that is about as truthful as were the prosecution-cases against the accused in the Moscow show-trials. But whereas Stalin’s banquet of lies is now seen as the most grotesque in human history, the IRA’s more artful human rights lawyers have successfully manufactured a mythology that today enables the IRA to portray themselves as victims and yes, “human rights warriors”.
This takes us to the heart of the matter. There is no such thing as a “human rights lawyer”, any more than there are energy-free perpetual-motion machines. “Human-rights lawyers” who swear they have no interest in valuables will, while doing so, undetectably relieve you of your fob watch. Likewise, they will fervently aver that your current account is for paying your electricity bill, even as it is being syphoned off to their bank in the Bahamas. So, if ever you meet a self-declared “human-rights lawyer”, blow away his or her brains the moment you detect the arrival of the second set of inverted commas unaccompanied by a negative. And of course, then you’ll go to jail. So what? Would not the sheer pleasure of scattering their cranial contents hither and thither be worth it? Remember, all “human rights lawyers” are spivs who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. If in doubt, simply murmur Hermer.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Starmer is sinking, borrow the Bismarck!