In a Labour government the Attorney General will be Emily Thornberry. In power she would be the government’s chief legal adviser – dealing with questions of international law, human rights and more, as well as superintending the main independent prosecuting departments. It might be worth knowing what her views are on other countries’ models for justice in that case…

Talking to Andrew Marr, Thornberry managed to admit that murderous communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was a “divisive figure”, before heading into a praise-filled diatribe for the regime:

“I went to to Cuba in the early 1990s when there was a great economic difficulties in that country and I found a country that was egalitarian with a fantastic health service… in my view it was a brave island that stood against a regime that for 50 years would not trade with it and would not let other countries trade with it too.”

The health service wasn’t fantastic enough to prevent two million Cubans escaping to get to the freedom of the American “regime”. Nor to save the 6,800 Cubans killed by firing squad and extrajudicial assassination. Maybe Thornberry paid a visit before the USSR’s full funding of the dictatorship ended and food shortages became the norm. Thornberry ploughed on when Marr tried to mention the regime’s “machine gunning people in boats including children when they’re trying to leave“:

“To give more doctors to fight the Ebola crisis than the Americans and that little tiny country could do that… they also exported their values across South South America and into Africa producing doctors and nurses… it was an enormous achievement for a little Caribbean island.”

Those exported doctors are, of course, actually slaves of the state, which is paid for its “missions” and treats doctors as prisoners while its own health service crumbles. Starmer is proposing to have as the Crown’s chief legal adviser an admirer of a totalitarian state which imprisons and tortures opponents, prevents free expression, bans independent trade unions, discriminates against LGBT people and only allows communists to serve in parliament…