AT a speech delivered to the Royal United Services Institute on Thursday evening, Sir Richard Hermer KC, the Attorney General, and the Labour government’s most senior law minister, raised comparisons between the increasingly strident calls from right wing politicians and their media supporters to break with international laws, and the developments of fascism in 1930s Germany.
In his speech, Hermer said that the idea that Britain can ‘abandon’ international law and leave bodies such as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the International Criminal Court, was a reflection of what emerged in Germany in the period of Hitler’s seizure of power.
Hermer claimed that the Starmer government’s approach to international law is a ‘rejection of the siren song that can sadly now be heard in the palace of Westminster, not to mention the press, that Britain abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power’.
Hermer continued: ‘This is not a new song. The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by “realist” jurists in Germany, most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.’
Carl Schmitt was a lawyer and political theorist who joining the Nazi party in 1933 and provided the ‘legal’ justification for fascist dictatorship over the German working class.
Schmitt preached that the German state required the use of ‘raw power’ unconstrained by any laws if it was to survive the devastating capitalist crisis of the 1930s Great Depression.
With British capitalism diving into recession, there is a reflection of Schmitt’s ‘siren calls’ coming from sections of the current ruling class.
These reflections are finding increasingly strident voices amongst Tory MPs and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
These calls are at present aimed at the ECHR, which is being held responsible by the right-wing for ‘holding back’ attempts to criminalise migrant workers.
But it also extends to all the legal protection and laws that underpin independent trade unions and the entire welfare state.
In fact, all the rights enshrined in law that workers have won in the past are now in the sights of the ruling class.
What makes Hermer’s speech important, is that it clearly reflects and represents the splits and confusion that reigns within the ruling class and its political parties.
One section, clearly fears that the siren calls to dump the pretence of law-based bourgeois democracy by tearing up all the legal constraints on the capitalist state will provoke a revolutionary uprising from a powerful working class determined to defend its rights and gains.
On the other side are those who are demanding that in its death agony, British capitalism requires a state that is based on ‘raw power’, some form of police/military dictatorship, where the courts and laws are used solely to force the working class to accept being driven into the ground, in order to save British capitalism from crashing into bankruptcy.
Both tendencies recognise the revolutionary situation that has erupted in the UK and internationally between a powerful working class and a bankrupt historically redundant capitalist system.
For the working class, the burning issue is to draw the lessons of history, not just from 1930s Germany, but from Russia in 1917 where the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin and Trotsky, seized power in the world’s first socialist revolution.
The stark difference between Germany in the 1930s was the complete absence of a revolutionary leadership.
Germany’s trade union leaders capitulated to Hitler while the Stalinist German Communist Party betrayed and split the German working class.
In Russia in 1917, capitalism broke at its weakest link and the Bolsheviks provided the revolutionary leadership to unite workers and peasants to overthrow capitalism and establish the first workers state.
The lesson for workers and youth is to follow the lead of the Bolsheviks and build the WRP and Young Socialists in the UK and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership essential for the victory of the world socialist revolution!
