Labour’s international law credo is costing us
Throughout history, British people have chosen a moral credo over practical duties to protect citizens. We must change course, says Mark Wheatley
This is a story about a saint, a King, an Earl and a Prime Minister. It is about how the English have subjected sense to credo before and how we – across the wider United Kingdom – risk doing so again.
It is not an attack on belief – whether blind or considered – but a plea for balance. For proportion. For common sense.
The credo then was Christianity. Today, it is a narrow, sometimes selective reading of international law – elevated to doctrine.
The King was Edmund the Martyr. Faced with Viking incursions, Edmund chose submission over resistance. Chroniclers cast this as piety: a ruler unwilling to shed blood, prepared instead to suffer as a Christian witness. There is dignity in that choice, courage too. But there is also something else: a refusal to exercise the primary duty of a sovereign – to defend his people and his realm.
The result was not peace, but destruction. Edmund’s sanctity did not deter the Vikings; it emboldened them. His martyrdom may have inspired later generations, but it did nothing to protect his own.
A century later, another English figure confronted a similar test under very different terms. At the Battle of Maldon, Earl Byrhtnoth faced a Viking force across a tidal causeway. He held the advantage. The enemy could be contained, starved, repelled.
Instead, in a gesture often interpreted as honourable, even chivalric, Byrhtnoth allowed the Vikings to cross and fight on equal ground. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later poetry immortalised the moment. It gave us the famous line, often rendered as a celebration of courage in defeat: resolve hardening as hope diminished.
But strip away the romance and the decision is harder to defend. Byrhtnoth exchanged a winning position for a fair fight. He elevated a code – a credo of honour – above the practical obligation to win. The result was predictable: defeat, death and the loss of those he was bound to protect.
These are not comfortable examples. They cut against the grain of how we like to tell our national story. But they matter, because they illuminate a recurring tendency: to mistake moral posture for strategic judgement.
Which brings us to the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer.
In recent months, we have seen a series of decisions justified – sometimes exclusively – on the basis of “international law”.
The United Kingdom stood apart from action against Iran, reportedly because legal advice suggested participation might not be permitted.
We are told that boarding sanctioned Russian vessels in the Channel is constrained by similar considerations.
The stalled proposed transfer of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands has likewise been framed as an obligation, not a choice.
Rigid interpretation
In parallel, the UK remains bound to a rigid interpretation of the Climate Change Act 2008, treated not as a statute open to amendment by a sovereign parliament, but as a fixed point from which policy cannot deviate.
Net zero, whatever its merits, has taken on the character of an article of faith – resistant to recalibration even as circumstances change.
In each case, framing of law is not being used as an instrument of utility or policy, shaped by a parliament sensitive to national priorities.
It is being presented as something external, almost sacerdotal – a body of rules to which democratic judgement must defer.
This is a profound shift, and not one the British constitutional tradition readily supports. Parliamentary sovereignty, hard-won and jealously guarded, rests on the premise that no Parliament can bind its successor. Law derives its authority from the democratic process; it does not stand above it.
This adherence costs us politically and commercially. It makes us poorer and weaker. It must be challenged.
Of course, international law matters. It underpins alliances, facilitates trade and provides a framework for cooperation in a dangerous world. But it has never been absolute. States interpret it, contest it and – when necessary – act in the grey areas it inevitably contains. Our allies do so routinely, guided by their own national interests.
The question, then, is not whether we should respect international law. It is whether we have begun to treat one interpretation of it as a substitute for judgement itself.
History offers a warning. Edmund’s faith and Byrhtnoth’s honour were not in themselves misplaced. What was misplaced was their elevation above the practical responsibilities of leadership. Both men chose to inhabit a moral narrative at the expense of the outcome that mattered most.
We should be wary of doing the same.
A mature state does not abandon principle, but nor does it outsource decision-making to it. Law should guide, not govern in the abstract. It should serve the nation, not supplant it.
Otherwise, we risk repeating an old English habit: mistaking the comfort of credo for the harder task of thinking – and acting – for ourselves.
Mark Wheatley is director at Delano Wheatley Consulting Limited