UK open for business
Attorney general says rule of law is essential for economic growth
The government’s senior law officer will argue today that the rule of law underpins a stable and transparent business environment, supporting investment in the UK.
In a lecture at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law this evening, the attorney general Lord Hermer KC will say:
The rule of law matters for growth, jobs and people’s livelihoods. Governments that undermine — or take a pick-and-mix approach to — these values disincentivise investment.
Today, we are hosting the Investment Summit with a clear message that Britain is open for business.
Britain has many commercial advantages, but one of our greatest is the trust that businesses can have in our courts and the confidence they can have in a stable and transparent business environment, underpinned by a strong rule of law.
Hermer is expected to argue that safeguarding the rule of law in what he regards as an “age of populism” has two components — restoration and resilience.
He believes we need to take immediate steps to restore the UK’s reputation as a rule-of-law leader, abiding by international conventions and championing international institutions.
Hermer also wants to secure the rule of law’s long-term resilience in the face of threats known and unknown, both domestic and international. He will support rebuilding a political consensus around the rule of law, reflecting on the roles of our own institutions in upholding fundamental values.
The attorney general will say we are living through uncertain and challenging times, with threats to the rule of law on a number of fronts. He believes this can be fertile ground for a type of politics that claims the rule of law is in tension with democratic values.
In its most pernicious form, he argues, this style of politics demonises other groups, usually minorities. It discredits the legal frameworks and institutions that guarantee our rights and aims to dismantle consensus around rule-of-law values.
Human rights, in Hermer’s view, are an essential element of the rule of law. Far from the rule of law being at odds with democracy, he says it is the bedrock on which system rests.
Comment
This is not the first time that Hermer has spoken about the rule of law since his appointment as the government’s senior legal adviser:
At his swearing-in in July, he said the rule of law would be “the lodestar for this government”.
In the House of Lords a week later, he promised that the promotion and protection of the rule of law would underpin the government’s approach to legislation and policy.
And at the Labour Party conference last month, he said that he and his colleagues needed to be militant about “our belief in the rule of law and human rights”. They should be “shouting it from the rooftops”.
Observers will be looking to see whether the attorney general provides concrete examples today of any changes that the government is planning to make.
He may also be asked how the government can uphold the rule of law without increasing its investment in the criminal justice system. I reported concerns last week that the government is deliberately lengthening the already long backlog of cases awaiting hearings in the Crown Courts of England and Wales.
Meanwhile, Hermer’s presumed legal advice has been challenged by the shadow justice minister Lord Wolfson of Tredegar KC. Writing in the Telegraph, Wolfson says that Rishi Sunak’s government had been right to challenge the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and Israel’s defence minister, an issue that three judges have been considering since warrants were requested by the court’s prosecutor nearly five months ago.
The UK was correct to challenge the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over this case, which is itself a heavily contested legal issue, and the International Criminal Court invited the UK to submit legal arguments on the point. But in a volte-face following the general election, the new Starmer government announced it would not be filing a submission “in line with our longstanding position that this is a matter for the court to decide”.
As a legal position, that is incomprehensible; parties make submissions, especially when invited by the court to do so, and the court decides.
Taylor Swift
In Lord Bingham’s celebrated definition, the rule of law means that
all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly made, taking effect (generally) in the future and publicly administered in the courts.
The attorney general’s advice to ministers is not law — although it is sometimes treated as such — and so it does not have to be made public. According to the ministerial code,
the fact that the law officers have advised or have not advised and the content of their advice must not be disclosed outside government without their authority.
Erskine May, the parliamentary handbook, describes this as a long-standing convention — while confirming that it can be waived.
In line with convention, Hermer has not responded to newspaper reports saying he had given advice that resulted in the Metropolitan Police providing a motorcycle escort for Taylor Swift as she travelled to Wembley for her concerts in August.
Scotland Yard had concluded that a blue-light escort was unnecessary in London although the singer’s appearances in Vienna had been cancelled after a suicide-bomb plot was discovered.
The Sunday Times said it understood Hermer effectively provided Scotland Yard with the necessary legal cover to order a security escort.
Today’s Daily Mail reports Boris Johnson as asking why Hermer had been interfering with a police operational decision.
“What point of law can conceivably be at stake? We need to be told,” the former prime minister said, “or else we must conclude the obvious: Hermer is Starmer’s stooge and sponsor and he was just doing his buddy’s bidding.”
I’m told attorney general was not given tickets to Swift’s concerts and he did not attend any of them.
His office said at the weekend: “This was solely an operational decision for the police”.
*Principles of the rules based order are being eroded by those who see Hamas and Israel as morally equivalent* is David Wolfson’s starting point but if Israel is found to have committed crimes against international law that will have consequences for businesses who have/want to invest in the UK. The Rule of law is a double edged sword at its best… any UK citizens who go to fight (or have loved ones who do) for the IDF should be mindful of the Begum case before they pray in aid *moral equivalence*… especially if efforts to remove *jury equity* are successful. Those who live by the sword…
If there were to be a very short short list of “musts” for school curricula, an understanding of the vital requirement of an irreducible application of the rule of law together with its twin enabler due process should be, to employ Lord Hermer’s phrase, our lodestar. Study leading outwards from that pivotal concept and commitment of, for example, our constitution and the principle - however significant the exceptions- of the separation of the powers should then follow as night follows day. AND: such areas of essential awareness should be inculcated from a very early stage in the education arc and onwards. Come to that, I have frequently been provoked into remarking of a number of governments that they seemed incapable EVEN of SPELLING “rule of law” and “due process”, where therein lie the bedrock which separates our administration from autocratic nations around the globe.