Starmer Studied Law. Like Mugabe

“Let’s kill all the lawyers.”  That was Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part 2’s epic line.

Despite some additional hints in other works implying William wasn’t mad about them, generations of lawyers would subsequently attempt to jiu-jitsu the line into a vague compliment. It just wasn’t.

The statement was unearthed again by the biased United Kingdom (UK) left after research in 2014 revealed that the number of lawyers in the UK had swollen by 76% since 1987. Ridiculous, quarters of the white working class hissed, alongside fantasies about kebab knives or failing that, group castration. Just not sustainable numbers.

A similar feeling surfaced at the conclusion of a recent interview between Andrew Gold and a UK death-row human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, on Gold’s Heretics podcast. This was easily Gold’s most puzzling, bizarre, and annoying guest to date. White, mousey, noodle-armed, and goggle-eyed, Stafford Smith scolded his host: “You are white, and you are privileged.” When Gold later responded with a theory that people who live in a country are entitled to feel proud of it and participate freely in matters civic, Stafford Smith stopped rolling his eyes for the first time and gave the briefest of nods, as if to signal it was the first time he’d heard such a hypothesis that, on the face of it, sounded more or less okay.

So why open his mouth in the first place?

Human rights lawyer

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, is a human rights lawyer. The attorney general (unelected) of the UK, Richard Hermer, is a human rights lawyer. Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, is a human rights lawyer, as is Shami Chakrabarti, the former shadow attorney general, and Cherie Blair, the wife of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was just a normal lawyer.

The net effect of too many lawyers follows: “is’s” become “mights”, unleashing sequences of ambiguity. The population is forced into the infinity loop of uncertainty, the place only these lawyer-cum-politician creatures like to inhabit; if investment bankers (Rishi Sunak), or toileting jesters (Boris Johnson) or hopeless careerists (Theresa May) make lousy Prime Ministers, the arithmetic to date suggests that human rights lawyers go one step further in an impulsive race to the bottom.

The UK’s obsessions with lawyers frequently amuses much of the continent. There are more lawyers in the UK than France and Spain combined. Japan, a country filled with nice people behaving nicely, there are 30 times fewer lawyers (per head of population) than there are in the UK.

Other revelations that emerged in the past decade speak to mysterious bubble-ish behaviour. From 1997 until 2010, records indicate 13 laws were created every day in the UK, feeding a Tammany Hall-like routine of lawyers-turned-politicians feeding politicians retiring to their old profession of law. From 2010 and 2015, legislators decided it was all getting a bit much, so 13 was reduced to eight.

Gone wrong

Invariably things go wrong. A recent scoop about Starmer’s and Hermer’s respective roles in the persecution of UK military veterans appears to capture the spiral of ideology meeting ambiguity, resulting in suspicion and paranoia.

Starmer acted pro bono in the 2007 House of Lords case Al-Skeini and others v Secretary ofState for Defence . He represented interveners, including Amnesty International and Liberty, arguing that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) applied to British forces in Iraq. This involved challenging prior investigations into incidents like the 2003 death of Iraqi civilian Muhammad Salim by Sergeant Richie Catterall, whom Starmer's team described as inadequately probed. Although the UK court rejected the arguments, the 2011 European Court of Human Rights ruling in favour echoed them, compelling the UK to reopen probes.

This expanded the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT), which handled over 3 000 complaints, costing £60 million, though few led to prosecutions. Many allegations originated from a notorious shyster called Phil Shiner, later convicted of fraud and debarred.

An analytical probe is unnecessary. The facts here – that the current Prime Minister once litigated the possibility of prosecution for men and women prepared to make the greatest sacrifice for their country – speak to a government whose real power centre wasn’t formed by and doesn’t subscribe to the standard features of democracy, but rather questions about law that can be rolled or twisted into expressing, with consequences, instinctive grievances against society’s fixtures.

Inappropriate

On the strength of this alone both Starmer and Hermer appear totally inappropriate candidates; had The Telegraph presented this information prior to 2024’s elections, the general public – one of the most protective and supportive of its armed forces in the world – would have been gifted an opportunity to scrutinise beyond the limits of standard bias. But the example extends even further.

Unlike in South Africa and the United States, UK lawyers – like its doctors – are generally messy characters, bad with money management and other housekeeping. This applies particularly to the realm of human rights law, where its proponents are so angry and lost in their own tunnels of questions that they forget to brush their teeth, or wear different shoes on different feet. Starmer frequently articulates one of the most instructive statements about his existence – that he is “prepared to be unpopular to do the right thing” with few grasping that in an environment beset by so much text and subsequent interpretation that the right thing can only ever be the appearance thereof.

Is it “right” to strip veterans of protections? Here one could draw parallels between a country abandoning its armed forces in hostile kinetic jurisdictions – as South Africa was accused of doing.

Just like Stafford Smith, who spends his life wrestling the prison official’s arm from Ol’ Sparky’s button, it is not the supremacy of law that guides today’s lawyers-turned-politicians like Starmer and Hermer, but interpretation that permits political bias into calculation.

The danger of modern lawyers becoming politicians is tempered by Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who read law at Cambridge. By strength of conviction, he was able to drag the law toward himself, not the other way round, and was thus able to determine what his people really wanted. But increasingly the bad examples are overwhelming the good, and it should be pointed out here that Robert Mugabe also read law.