Stewart Logan

Starmer and Hermer Built the Machine Together. Now They Run the Country. In 2007, two barristers worked without pay on a case that would change the legal landscape for every British soldier who had served in Iraq. Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer appeared as interveners in Al-Skeini v Secretary of State for Defence, representing eleven human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Liberty. Their argument was that the European Convention on Human Rights should apply to British forces operating overseas. They lost in the Court of Appeal. They appealed to the House of Lords. They lost again. But the legal principle they had argued for eventually prevailed at the European Court of Human Rights, and what followed was the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, sixty million pounds of public money, seven years of investigations, and not a single prosecution. The soldiers it pursued were, in almost every case, found to have acted properly. Starmer believed in it enough to do it for free. Johnny Mercer, who spent years dismantling the consequences, put it plainly. Starmer had insisted on doing it for free. That is not the behaviour of a barrister following the cab rank rule. That is ideological conviction. Hermer's conviction, it subsequently emerged, was not without financial reward once the machinery was running. Documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph show that having helped establish the legal architecture pro bono in 2007, Hermer then used that same architecture to pursue Iraqi claims against British soldiers at £450 an hour, fifty percent higher than the only other KC involved in the group action. He set his success fee at the maximum level permitted, one hundred percent of his normal rate. The MoD's own lawyers challenged his fees as excessive and said he was too junior to command that rate. He is thought to have earned around six figures from the broader group action. The claims he was pursuing were eventually ruled to be deliberate lies. The soldiers were fully exonerated. Sergeant Richie Catterall had been cleared of wrongdoing by the British Army in 2003 for a fatal shooting in Basra. The Army found he had acted in self-defence. The legal precedent Starmer and Hermer established triggered two further investigations spanning thirteen years. A 2016 inquiry again concluded he had acted in self-defence and found a false document had been created to shift blame onto the military. Catterall was finally exonerated. He told the Telegraph he was gutted that Starmer had helped bring the case against him and that the Prime Minister owed him an apology. Starmer is now Prime Minister. Hermer is now Attorney General, appointed by Starmer personally, elevated to the House of Lords specifically for the role, chosen over Emily Thornberry who had held the shadow brief. The former head of the Army, General Sir Peter Wall, has said Hermer's role in the Al-Sweady claims was tantamount to treason. A former commanding officer of 22 SAS said Hermer must step down. The Bar Standards Board has been asked to investigate. Nigel Farage has reported Hermer to the House of Lords standards commissioner. The Troubles Bill that is now subjecting Northern Ireland veterans to the same lawfare is not an accident of policy. The process that drove Fred, a special forces veteran, to attempt suicide after his medical records were handed to terrorists' families was not an oversight. The machine that cost sixty million pounds and produced no prosecutions was not a mistake. Starmer and Hermer built it together, one working for free out of conviction, the other later working for maximum fees out of the same conviction, and now both occupy the positions from which they can ensure the machine keeps running.

Hermer Pursued British Troops With False Claims. Starmer Made Him Attorney General. In January 2008, Richard Hermer read witness statements from Iraqi men alleging that British soldiers had tortured and executed their countrymen after the Battle of Danny Boy in southern Iraq in 2004. His response was to write that the cases were a good reminder of why he had wanted to become a lawyer. Within a week, his own team had flagged that the accounts were implausible. One claimant said he had taken a taxi to buy yogurt and ended up in a battle zone. Another could not decide whether he had been cutting grass, irrigating land or studying when the shooting started. A third said he was harvesting crops with a sickle. The inquiry later found he had been armed with an AK47. Hermer pressed on regardless. Documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph show Hermer, working alongside Phil Shiner, who was subsequently struck off and convicted of fraud, advising that the press release for a public announcement needed to generate sufficient interest. He suggested they might need to be more explicit about executions to bring in the punters. He acknowledged they needed wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen. His colleagues, taking the cue, upped the ante. A line about torture and execution was added. Shiner accused the military of a My Lai-style atrocity at the press conference. By 2013, Hermer's own colleagues privately believed the case would be found to be nonsense. One described the claimants as lying. The claims were odds-on to collapse at inquiry. Discussion turned to securing settlement before the evidence could be tested in public. Hermer advised that offers of between forty-five and fifty-five thousand pounds per claimant would be low risk. He pressed for higher settlements even as the case disintegrated around him. The Al-Sweady inquiry ultimately ruled the allegations were deliberate lies driven by ingrained hostility toward the British Army. The claimants were not innocent farmers and labourers. They were members of the Mahdi Army, an Islamist insurgent group backed by Iran. The soldiers were fully exonerated. Hermer received nothing. He had chosen this case on a no-win no-fee basis. The cab rank rule did not apply. He selected it and stood to profit if it succeeded. Lance Corporal Brian Wood was decorated with the Military Cross for his conduct at Danny Boy. He spent years falsely accused of war crimes by Hermer's clients. He has called on Hermer to resign and described his appointment as Attorney General as disgusting. He said Hermer was representing the people trying to kill them. Keir Starmer appointed Hermer to the House of Lords in 2024 specifically to make him Attorney General, choosing him over Emily Thornberry who had held the shadow role. Starmer knew Hermer's background. He and Hermer had worked together in the mid-2000s to extend human rights laws to overseas war zones, the same legal mechanism Hermer then used to pursue British troops in Iraq. Hermer is now the government's most senior legal adviser. He oversees the legal basis for military operations. He is central to the Troubles Bill that is subjecting Northern Ireland veterans to the same lawfare he practised against soldiers in Iraq. The process he helped construct is the same process that drove a special forces veteran named Fred to attempt suicide after his medical records were handed to the families of the terrorists he had fought. The former head of the Army, General Sir Peter Wall, said Hermer's role in the Al-Sweady claims was tantamount to treason. A barrister is calling for a Bar Standards Board misconduct inquiry. Starmer calls Hermer his closest Cabinet ally. The country deserves to know what that friendship has cost the people who wore the uniform. "Lance Corporal Brian Wood was decorated with the Military Cross for his conduct at Danny Boy. He spent years falsely accused of war crimes by Hermer's clients."

lol who did this.

So let's work this through using Liverpool FC as an example. In 2024/25 LFC reported £703m of revenue and a wage bill of £440m. LFC reported a £8m post tax profit once other costs had been accounted for. That wage bill would have generated around £240m for HMRC via income tax and NIC payments alone. LFC employed 1,100 full time staff and around 3,000 part time for match days etc. In the (highly unlikely event) that LFC's revenues remained as is, then the 10:1 cap would lower LFC's wage bill to about £45m [calculated by placing all playing and coaching staff on £200k per annum]. Based on last years revenue LFC's owners would see their profits rise from £8m to £403m. The tax take for HMRC would fall from c.£240m around £125m (income tax+NIC+corporation tax). Now in reality revenues would not stay as is. A maximum wage of say £200k per annum is mid Championship, top of League 1 level. So if that is the best quality of player EPL clubs could hire then revenues would fall accordingly. TV companies would presumably pay only Championship levels to show matches, and UEFA revenues would largely dry up as English clubs would be quickly eliminated - see Scotland. So for LFC, TV revenues would fall from c.£260m to say £20m. Commercial revenue would follow, say down from over £323m to £30m and UEFA revenue would at best be £30m. Last year LFC achieved £115m of match day revenue. Given the collapse of other revenue sources they would likely try and keep general admission prices as high as possible, but would have to lower hospitality prices drastically - so let's say match day = £50m [btw this would lead to a reduction in VAT payments of £13m]. So total revenue would now be less than £100m (stripping out UEFA revenue as that is uncertain) down from £700m. This is the sort or revenue earned by Celtic and Rangers in Scotland. LFC would no longer be able to employ 1,100 full time staff. Clubs in the Championship typically employ around 200-300 staff at most. Nor would they be able to afford to spend £20m per annum on its academy or subsidise its Women's team with £10m per annum. So the EPL would be reduced in quality and standing to that of the SPL. Across the 20 clubs probably 10,000 full time jobs would be cut, academies would be scaled back and support for Women's football drastically reduced. HMRC's tax take across the division would be down by at least £2bn to £2.5bn

This is the reason why we can never reform healthcare in the UK — or even have a sensible debate about it. The moment anyone suggests alternative/additional ways of funding health Labour rushes out privatisation smears and claims US private health insurance is being proposed. Labour has been doing it for decades. It explains why the NHS is effectively beyond reform. The two worst health systems in the rich world are in America and the UK. It’s why nobody has ever copied them. It would be mad to go from ours to theirs (or vice versa). But Europe is awash with health systems that can call on several sources of funds, including many with compulsory public health insurance schemes. They have better health outcomes than the NHS. They are free at the point of use (like the NHS). Most of them are better funded. But Labour puts them out of bounds, refuses even to discuss or consider. So patient care suffers. NHS struggles on. Labour is always telling us we need to get closer to Europe. It’s where we belong. But not when it comes to health, where it insists no lessons can be learned. Pretty pathetic, really.

Three former soldiers will appear at Belfast magistrates court on April 20th. One is charged with a killing that took place in May 1972. He is not accused of acting outside his orders. He is accused of acting within them. The distinction no longer appears to matter. This is the reality behind Labour's Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, a piece of legislation dressed in the language of reconciliation that functions, in practice, as an engine of persecution. The state that sent these men to Northern Ireland, that gave them their orders, that relied on their judgment in circumstances no minister has ever faced, is now the state that funds the machinery pursuing them through the courts half a century later. That is not a technicality. It is the central fact. Taxpayer money flows to the lawyers challenging the actions of soldiers whose actions were sanctioned by the taxpayer. The government calls this justice. General Sir Peter Wall, who commanded the British Army for four years, calls it something without moral backbone. He is right. The operational consequences are already visible. Elite soldiers are leaving the SAS and SBS rather than face the prospect of prosecution decades hence for missions carried out under government orders. The crisis has become sufficiently acute that reservists are being brought into the regular SAS to fill roles vacated by those walking out. Britain's most capable fighting force is being quietly hollowed out by a bill whose architects appear indifferent to the result. Seven former SAS commanders have warned that the legislation is doing the enemy's work, that operational secrets exposed through inquiries give hostile states a narrative of lawless troops. Moscow, Tehran and Beijing do not need to discredit British special forces. Westminster is doing it for them. The asymmetry at the heart of this legislation is not incidental. It is structural. IRA members were released under the Good Friday Agreement. Many destroyed evidence, stayed silent, or received letters guaranteeing they would not be pursued. Soldiers kept records, gave statements, and remained traceable. Decades later, only one group remains available for scrutiny. Not because they are more culpable, but because they are more reachable. The Coagh ambush of June 1991 illustrates the logic perfectly. Three IRA men were stopped by the SAS on their way to murder someone. A coroner ruled the force used was justified. Years later a family challenged that ruling, arguing the soldier should have paused after each shot to consider whether to fire the next one. A judge described that argument as ludicrous and utterly divorced from reality. The challenge continues, funded by legal aid, heard at the Court of Appeal just days ago. No verdict ends the process. The process is the punishment. Keir Starmer has said publicly he is absolutely confident there will be no vexatious prosecutions. Three soldiers will be in a Belfast court in sixteen days. His confidence has not reached them. The government insists its bill provides robust protections for veterans. General Sir Nick Parker, who oversaw the final operations in Northern Ireland, says ministers do not understand the duty of the state to stand by those who serve it. The duty to stand by those who serve is contractual, not sentimental. A soldier who follows orders in a war the state authorised cannot later be offered up as payment for political convenience. What is being constructed here is not a legacy process. It is a permanent legal industry, sustained by public money, targeting the most traceable participants in a conflict the state itself waged. The soldiers kept their records. That is now their liability. A serious country does not behave this way. This one, apparently, does. "Keir Starmer has said publicly he is absolutely confident there will be no vexatious prosecutions. Three soldiers will be in a Belfast court in sixteen days. His confidence has not reached them."

Mean but funny (& at least partly true).

Britain is led by a Labour Party who not only hate our Armed Forces, but in some cases actively work to prosecute them. No surprise they’re not investing in Defence. I don’t know how the ex-forces members of this govt can face themselves in the mirror. telegraph.co.uk/gift/5f0d6cd6f…

🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨 A group of former Army chiefs has accused Sir Keir Starmer’s Government of having “no moral backbone” over its “grotesquely unfair” pursuit of Troubles veterans. The retired generals said they feared that Labour’s Troubles bill could lead to a wave of “witch hunts” against Northern Irelandveterans, exposing retired troops to years of spurious persecution in the courts. Meanwhile, SAS veterans are preparing an unprecedented revolt against potential “show trials”, boycotting inquest hearings should key changes not be made to Labour’s bill. Full story: telegraph.co.uk/gift/58b60ec67…

This seems correct from @BristOliver bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-gatherin…

Fascinating letter in @Telegraph from Airey Neave’s family today. Perhaps this lead to what the Government must surely have been hoping to avoid, a case of unintended consequences? Let’s hope so. The government’s dreadful, vindictive, one-sided, terrorist rewarding, victim blaming and history-rewriting bill may actually come back to bite them if it allows, thorough the courts, for Neave’s killers and many other murderers like them to finally face justice. @williams_rje

Free for 270 years. Nobody ever asks why. 🇬🇧 In 1753 a British doctor called Hans Sloane died. He left 71,000 objects to the nation. On one condition. It must be free. For everybody. Forever. Parliament raised the money through a national lottery. And built the world’s first public museum. Not for the King. Not for the Church. For all of humanity. The idea was simple. Human history belongs to all of humanity. Not just the powerful. Not just a few. For everyone. 270 years later it still hasn’t charged a penny. 8 million objects. Two million years of human history. The Rosetta Stone. The Lewis Chessmen. The Sutton Hoo helmet. All of it free. Still today. The idea Britain invented in 1753 changed how the entire world keeps its history. This channel exists because people like you chose to make it happen. Thousands of stories like this one are waiting to be told. Battles won. Names forgotten. History that belongs to all of us but gets told to none of us. If you can afford to help keep it free for everyone else: proudofus.co.uk/support Be Part Of Us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

@shanaka86 Well written. Now watch this, to the last line.

Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality. Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by a bunch of clueless inadequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response. The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise. Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks. "Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."

@TaylsPS Easy game.

So the UK's 10-year gilt yield - the cost of government borrowing - is now up at 2008 levels. An 18-year high The difference is that, back then, UK national debt was 48pc of GDP, and now it's the best part of 100pc. So the debt service costs are much MUCH heavier. Of the £14.3bn the UK government borrowed in February alone, no less than £13bn of that was spent on interest on existing debts - a situation which is not only unsustainable, but very close to provoking a disastrous financial collapse. Yet still, our national discourse is all about more spending, more borrowing, more "state intervention". When is the Labour party – and much of the listless, unthinking rump of the UK's political and media class – going to start acknowledging reality? WHEN ....?

@yuanyi_z If only 'Membership is now earned through public service and merit' was true - more likely to be earned thru patronage.

Hereditary peers are still members of the legislature. Is it really appropriate for the Cabinet Office to use Civil Service social media to attack the legitimacy of sitting lawmakers?

I get asked sometimes what politicians should do about energy prices. None of these measures would solve the problem tomorrow. It’s too late for that. But this is our second gas crisis in five years. If we don’t do this, we will be back here again in a few years.

@BurnsideWasTosh What do you mean 'give them to Norway' - surely we need to pay them billions to take them off our hands.

In 1973, petrol price surged - but no one thought of asking the gvt for an energy bailout. Now, it's the default reaction. The cost? More debt, higher tax and interest rates, cost-of-living squeezes. Matthew Syed on the case for breaking the cycle:- thetimes.com/comment/column…