Everyone’s favourite human rights aficionado is back at it again. Clearly not content with comparing critics of the ECHR to Nazis, Lord Richard Hermer has now suggested detractors of the foreign court want migrants to ‘drown’.
In an interview with Nick Robinson on his Political Thinking podcast, the Attorney General name-checked the Tories and Reform as cheerleaders for leaving migrants to drown in the Channel. Hermer had been responding to Robinson’s observation that parties of the right want to ‘round people up on the beaches and send them somewhere else’. To which Sir Keir Starmer’s close pal replied:
I think what they mean by that is they let people drown in the water. And that is not a British way to deal with it. That is not commensurate with our values.
Hilariously, Hermer also trumpeted that the government was ‘starting to be pretty effective in dealing with small boats’. That is, of course, despite nearly 10,000 illegal migrants having arrived by dinghy so far this year. The Attorney General then lavished praise on the ECHR as a vehicle for agreeing deals, such as the famously successful one-in-one-out arrangement with France.
He pontificated: ‘The way to deal with (small boats) is the way that we’ve been dealing with it and we’re going to carry rolling out further agreements, which is co-operation with the states through which people are travelling, through which people are launching boats. We do that through our membership of the Council of Europe.’
Hitting back at the comments, Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘It is a disgraceful slur to suggest that those wanting to end illegal small boat immigration are prepared to see migrants drown. The fact is that human rights lawyers like Hermer and Starmer are part of the problem – because they think the often tenuous human rights claims of illegal immigrants are more important than protecting our border.’
Update: Lord Hermer’s minions get in touch. A spokesman told Mr S that the Attorney General ‘repeatedly argues that this government has a steely determination to tackle illegal immigration, and this is not in tension with upholding our human rights obligations’. They added: ‘The Attorney also makes clear his concern about how some on the hard-right are using dehumanising rhetoric about migrants, and that this is not the British way.’
Good to have that cleared up…
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