"Britain is inexorably lurching towards total bankruptcy. I know who is really to blame"
Telegraph: 1st February 2025: Lord Hannan points the finger at whose to blame for the UK's lack of growth
"Who will get the blame when the inevitable enquiry is held into Britain’s immiseration?... Is it Rachel Reeves...or Ed Miliband... Both deserve their share of censure. But there is a third culprit... Lord Hermer, a former colleague of Sir Keir Starmer’s who, after a career representing Britain’s bitterest enemies in court – Mau Mau insurgents, Irish republicans, Islamists and others – is using his role as Attorney General to ensure that elected ministers do what they are told by lawyers.
...One of his colleagues complained that Hermer was causing a “freeze on government”... The default setting of our legal establishment is anti-growth. Or, more precisely, it is safetyist, pro-DEI and eco-obsessive, which amounts to the same thing. As long as we are governed by human rights lawyers, prosperity will elude us...
... Look at what happened... on Thursday. A judge ruled that the Rosebank oilfield off Shetland... could not be exploited. The British state sided with a gaggle of anti-capitalist protesters... Thirty years ago, such a case would not have come to court. The question of whether to extract oil was seen as a political one... to be decided democratically, not a matter of fundamental rights to be determined by the judiciary...
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, a lot of people, by no means all on the Right, have been asking why Britain seems so insipid and paralysed by comparison with the US. Why can’t we sack our state-funded diversity consultants? Why can’t we deport illegal immigrants? Why can’t we remove swathes or regulations at a stroke?... The answer in almost every case is that such reforms would be blocked by our legal and administrative apparat...
The guiding principle of Hermerism – or Starmerism, come to that – is that human rights lawyers know best..."