{"id":25293,"date":"2026-04-29T20:23:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T20:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/25293\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T20:23:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T20:23:34","slug":"the-moral-sickness-poisoning-lord-hermers-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/25293\/","title":{"rendered":"The moral sickness poisoning Lord Hermer\u2019s Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Hermer believes, and what most of the human-rights industrial complex believes, is what Martha Nussbaum and others have labelled moral cosmopolitanism. On that view, what we owe to strangers is no different in kind from what we owe to our own<\/a>. It\u2019s a position worth taking seriously. Brilliant philosophers have defended it in the abstract. The trouble arises when the abstraction is concretely applied. The lives it then ruins are, almost always, the lives of those a country should be most committed to honouring. In the hands of a barrister, it produces the email that Hermer wrote.<\/p>\n

How could this scandal have ever arisen? Because, applied to a soldier, cosmopolitanism dissolves everything that motivated him to become a soldier. It abstracts him from every web of belonging that invests his sacrifice with meaning and leaves him as a bare individual on a ledger, recorded next to the foreign militiaman who shot at him.<\/p>\n

A soldier trained in a code that scorns self-pity will rarely present himself as a claimant, whereas a foreign militiaman hostile to the nation the soldier defends will learn precisely how to do so. To treat a soldier and his hostile claimant as moral equals is not fair or even-handed. And there is a name in moral philosophy for treating unequal positions as equal: injustice.<\/p>\n

Hermer\u2019s emails crystallise the mindset animating every other surrender of British interest under this Government. The Chagos archipelago<\/a> is ours by treaty and indispensable to our national interest. If the deal that was struck in 2024 goes ahead<\/a>, it will be given to Mauritius out of deference to a non-binding advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, while the British taxpayer will receive a bill of billions to lease back what we already owned.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the Ministerial Code was rewritten in November 2024<\/a> to require ministers to comply with international law. Lord Hermer himself told Parliament that the reasons we couldn\u2019t leave the European Convention on Human Rights<\/a> (even when it stops us from deporting foreign criminals) were on the basis that doing so would be against the national interest. By that he means the architecture of treaties that ties this country\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

Protecting its subjects is the first thing the Crown is for. Hermer has spent 30 years undoing that protection from the outside; he is now charged with administering it from within. The Crown exists to protect its subjects, yet the man whose practice was attacking British soldiers in the courts is now the lawyer the Crown turns to first.<\/p>\n

The pattern stretches back further than Iraq. Scandalously, Tony Blair issued (in secret) more than 200 \u201ccomfort letters\u201d to suspected IRA terrorists<\/a>. One of these letters prompted the collapse of the prosecution<\/a> of John Downey<\/a> for the Hyde Park bombing of 1982, in which four troopers and seven horses were killed. And 40 years after they neutralised the IRA\u2019s East Tyrone Brigade in 1987, the SAS members involved will be forced to account for themselves<\/a> in a coroner\u2019s court.<\/p>\n

A nation is something far older and more demanding than a contract drawn up for the mutual provision of comfort. It\u2019s a debt owed to those who made it, and held in trust for those who\u2019ll hold it after us. That\u2019s why Reform UK has committed itself to a statutory bar that ends current proceedings against British veterans and prohibits future ones, with the royal prerogative of mercy used to pardon any already convicted under the Human Rights Act 1998.<\/p>\n

Wood led a bayonet charge against an ambush at inconceivable risk to his life while Lord Hermer was drafting emails in his chambers. Few will be willing to fight and die for Britain for as long as he \u2013 and the Prime Minister who appointed him \u2013 remain in office.<\/p>\n

James Orr is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge and Reform UK\u2019s head of policy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What Hermer believes, and what most of the human-rights industrial complex believes, is what Martha Nussbaum and others…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,2108,1183,11357,1366,94,10558,18,613],"class_list":{"0":"post-25293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-british-army","10":"tag-comment","11":"tag-human-rights-act","12":"tag-iraq","13":"tag-keir-starmer","14":"tag-lord-hermer","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-opinion"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116489866615678290","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}