A year in, the British Labour leader is giving the Tories an easy ride while investing his energy in an all-out war on the party\u2019s left<\/p>\n
The completion of Keir Starmer\u2019s first year as Labour leader might have passed without note, had it not been the occasion for senior party figures to express mounting concern at Labour\u2019s dismal performance in opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
At a time when Labour ought to be landing regular punches on the ruling party over its gross incompetence in handling the Covid-19<\/a> pandemic<\/a>, and cronyism in its awarding<\/a> of multimillion-pound coronavirus-related contracts, Starmer has preferred to avoid confrontation. Critics have accused<\/a> him of being \u201ctoo cautious\u201d and showing a \u201clack of direction\u201d.<\/p>\n Dissatisfaction<\/a> with Starmer among Labour voters has quadrupled over the past 10 months, from 10 percent last May to 39 percent in March. His approach does not even appear to be winning over the wider public: a recent poll<\/a> on who would make a better prime minister gave incumbent Johnson a 12 percentage-point lead.<\/p>\n Increasingly anxious senior Labour MPs called late last month for a \u201cbig figure\u201d to help Starmer set aside his supposed political diffidence and offer voters a clearer idea<\/a> of \u201cwhat Keir is for\u201d.<\/p>\n That followed a move in February by Starmer\u2019s team to reach out to Peter Mandelson, who helped Tony Blair rebrand the party as \u201cNew Labour\u201d in the 1990s and move it sharply away<\/a> from any association with \u2018Cynically\u2019 evasive<\/strong><\/p>\n But there is a twofold problem with this assessment of Starmer\u2019s first year.<\/p>\n It assumes Labour\u2019s dire polling is evidence that voters might warm to Starmer if they knew more about what he stands for. That conclusion seems unwarranted. A Labour internal review<\/a> leaked in February showed that the British public viewed Starmer\u2019s party as \u201cdeliberate and cynical\u201d in its evasiveness on policy matters.<\/p>\n In other words, British voters\u2019 aversion to Starmer is not that he is \u201ctoo cautious\u201d or lacklustre. Rather, they suspect that Starmer and his team are politically not being honest. Either he is covering up the fact that Labour under his leadership is an ideological empty vessel, or his party has clear policies but conceals them because it believes they would be unpopular.<\/p>\n In response, and indeed underscoring the increasingly cynical approach from Starmer\u2019s camp, the review proposed<\/a> reinventing Labour as a patriotic, Tory-lite party, emphasising \u201cthe flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly\u201d.<\/p>\n However, the deeper flaw in this assessment of Starmer\u2019s first 12 months is that it assumes his caution in taking on the Tory government is evidence of some natural restraint or reticence on his part. This was the view promoted by a recent commentator in the Guardian<\/em>, who observed<\/a>: \u201c\u2018Starmerism\u2019 has not defined itself in any sense beyond sitting on the fence.\u201d<\/p>\n But Starmer has proved to be remarkably unrestrained and intemperate when he chooses to be. If he is reticent, it appears to be only when it serves his larger political purposes.<\/p>\n All-out war<\/strong><\/p>\n If there is one consistent thread in his first year, it has been a determined purging from the party of any trace of the leftwing politics of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, as well as a concerted effort to drive out many tens of thousands of new members<\/a> who joined because of Corbynism.<\/p>\n The paradox is that when Starmer stood in the leadership election last spring, he promised to unify<\/a> a party deeply divided between a largely leftwing membership committed to Corbyn\u2019s programme, on the one hand, and a largely rightwing parliamentary faction and party bureaucracy, on the other.<\/p>\n As an internal review leaked last April revealed, party officials were determined to destroy Corbyn<\/a> even while he was leader, using highly undemocratic means.<\/p>\n Even if Starmer had chosen to be cautious or diffident, there looked to be no realistic way to square that circle. But far from sitting on the fence, he has been busy waging an all-out war on one side only: those sympathetic to Corbyn. And that campaign has involved smashing apart the party\u2019s already fragile democratic procedures.<\/p>\n The prelude was the sacking<\/a> last June of Rebecca Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary \u2013 and the most visible ally of Corbyn in Starmer\u2019s shadow cabinet \u2013 on the flimsiest of pretexts. She had retweeted an article in the Independent newspaper that included<\/a> a brief mention of Israel\u2019s involvement in training western police forces in brutal restraint techniques.<\/p>\n Real target<\/strong><\/p>\n A few months later, Starmer got his chance to go after his real target, when the Equalities and Human Rights Commission published its highly flawed report<\/a> into the claims of an antisemitism problem<\/a> in Labour under Corbyn\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n This provided the grounds Starmer needed to take the unprecedented step of excluding<\/a> Corbyn from the parliamentary party he had been leader of only months earlier. It was a remarkably provocative and incautious move that infuriated large sections of the membership, some of whom abandoned<\/a> the party as a result.<\/p>\n Having dispatched Corbyn and issued a stark ultimatum to any MP who might still harbour sympathies for the former leader, Starmer turned his attention to the party membership. David Evans, his new general secretary and a retread from the Blair years, issued directives<\/a> banning constituency parties from protesting Corbyn\u2019s exclusion or advocating for Corbynism.<\/p>\n Corbyn was overnight turned into a political \u201cunperson\u201d, in an echo of the authoritarian purges of the Soviet-era Communist party. No mention was to be made of him or his policies, on pain of suspension from the party.<\/p>\n Even this did not suffice. To help bolster the hostile environment towards left wing members, Starmer made Labour hostage to special interest groups that had openly waged war \u2013 from inside and outside the party \u2013 against his predecessor.<\/p>\n During the leadership campaign, Starmer signed on to a \u201c10 Pledges\u201d document<\/a> from the deeply conservative and pro-Israel Board of Deputies of British Jews. The board was one of the cheerleaders<\/a> for the evidence-free antisemitism allegations that had beset Labour during Corbyn\u2019s time as leader \u2013 even though all metrics suggested the party had less<\/a> of an antisemitism problem than the Conservatives, and less<\/a> of a problem under Corbyn than previous leaders.<\/p>\n Alienating the left<\/strong><\/p>\n The Pledges required Starmer to effectively hand over control to the Board of Deputies and another pro-Israel group, the Jewish Labour Movement, on what kind of criticisms Labour members were allowed to make of Israel.<\/p>\n Opposition to a century of British-sponsored oppression of the Palestinian people had long been a rallying point for the UK\u2019s left, as opposition to the treatment of black South Africans under the apartheid regime<\/a> once was. Israel\u2019s centrality to continuing western colonialism in the Middle East and its key role in a global military-industrial complex made it a natural target<\/a> for leftwing activism.<\/p>\n But according to the Pledges \u2013 in a barely concealed effort to hound, alienate and silence the party\u2019s left \u2013 it was for pro-Israel lobby groups to decide who should be be declared an antisemite, while \u201cfringe\u201d Jewish groups, or those supportive of Corbyn and critical of Israel, should be ignored.<\/p>\n Starmer readily agreed both to adopt the board\u2019s conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and to disregard prominent Jews <\/a>within his own party opposed to pro-Israel lobbying. His office was soon picking off prominent Jewish supporters of Corbyn, including<\/a> leaders of Jewish Voice for Labour.<\/p>\n One of the most troubling cases was Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who was suspended shortly after she appeared in a moving video in which she explained how antisemitism had been weaponised<\/a> by the pro-Israel lobby against left wing Jews like herself.<\/p>\n She noted the pain caused when Jews were smeared as \u201ctraitors\u201d and \u201ckapos\u201d \u2013 an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi pointed out, that refers<\/a> to \u201ca Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people\u201d.<\/p>\n In suspending her, Starmer\u2019s Labour effectively endorsed that type of ugly demonisation campaign.<\/p>\n Israeli spy recruited<\/strong><\/p>\n But the war on the Labour left did not end there. In his first days as leader, Starmer was reluctantly forced to set up an inquiry into the leaked internal report that had exposed<\/a> the party bureaucracy as profoundly hostile to Corbyn personally, and more generally to his socialist policies. Senior staff had even been shown trying to sabotage<\/a> Labour\u2019s 2017 general election campaign.<\/p>\n But once the Forde Inquiry<\/a> had been appointed, Starmer worked strenuously to kick it into the long grass, even bringing back into the party Emilie Oldknow, a central figure in the Corbyn-era bureaucracy who had been cast in a damning light by the leaked report\u2019s revelations<\/a>.<\/p>\n A separate chance to lay bare what had happened inside Labour head office during Corbyn\u2019s term was similarly spurned by Starmer. He decided not to defend a defamation case against Labour brought by John Ware, a BBC reporter, and seven former staff in Labour\u2019s disciplinary unit. They had worked together on a Panorama special<\/a> on the antisemitism claims against Corbyn that did much to damage him in the public eye.<\/p>\n These former officials had sued the party, arguing that Labour\u2019s response to the BBC programme suggested they had acted in bad faith and sought to undermine Corbyn.<\/p>\n In fact, a similar conclusion had been reached in the damning internal leaked report on the behaviour of head office staff. It quoted extensively from emails and WhatsApp chats that showed a deep-seated antipathy to Corbyn in the party bureaucracy.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Starmer\u2019s office abandoned its legal defence last July, apologising<\/a> \u201cunreservedly\u201d to the former staff members and paying \u201csubstantial damages\u201d. Labour did so despite \u201cclear advice\u201d from lawyers, a former senior official said, that it would have won in court.<\/p>\n When Martin Forde, chair of the Forde inquiry, announced in February that his report had been delayed<\/a> \u201cindefinitely\u201d, it seemed that the truth about the efforts of Labour staff to undermine Corbyn as leader were being permanently buried.<\/p>\n The final straw for many on the party\u2019s left, however, was the revelation in January that Starmer had recruited to his team a former Israeli military spy, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor<\/a> the use of social media by members.<\/p>\n Much of the supposed \u201cantisemitism problem\u201d under Corbyn had depended on the Israel lobby\u2019s efforts to scour through old social media posts of left wing members, looking for criticism of Israel and then presenting it as evidence of antisemitism. As leader, Corbyn was pushed by these same lobby groups to adopt a new, highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It shifted attention<\/a> away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel.<\/p>\n A former Israeli spy trained in the dark arts of surveilling Palestinians would be overseeing the monitoring of party members\u2019 online activity.<\/p>\n Tory party of old<\/strong><\/p>\n Far from sitting on the fence, as his critics claim, Starmer has been ruthless in purging socialism from the Labour party \u2013 under cover of claims that he is rooting out an \u201cantisemitism problem\u201d he supposedly inherited from Corbyn.<\/p>\n In a speech last month, Mandelson \u2013 the former Blair strategist who Starmer\u2019s team has been consulting \u2013 called on the Labour leader to show \u201ccourage and determination\u201d in tackling<\/a> the supposedly \u201ccorrupt far left\u201d. He suggested \u201clarge numbers\u201d of members would still need to be expunged from the party in the supposed fight against antisemitism.<\/p>\n Starmer is investing huge energy and political capital in ridding the party of its leftwing members, while exhibiting little appetite for taking on Johnson\u2019s right wing government.<\/p>\n These are not necessarily separate projects. There is a discernible theme here. Starmer is recrafting Labour not as a real opposition to the Conservative party\u2019s increasingly extreme, crony capitalism, but as a responsible, more moderate alternative to it. He is offering voters a Labour party that feels more like the Tory party of old, which prioritised tradition, patriotism and family values.<\/p>\n None of this should surprise. Despite his campaign claims, Starmer\u2019s history \u2013 predating his rapid rise through the Labour party \u2013 never suggested he was likely to clash with the establishment. After all, few public servants have been knighted<\/a> by the Queen at the relatively tender age of 51 for their radicalism.<\/p>\n In safe hands<\/strong><\/p>\n While head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer rejected<\/a> indicting<\/a> the police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, and his department effectively cleared MI5 and MI6 officers of torture<\/a> related to the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d.<\/p>\n His team not only sought to fast-track<\/a> the extradition to Sweden of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who exposed western war crimes, but it also put strong pressure on its Swedish counterpart not to waver in pursuing Assange. One lawyer told<\/a> the Swedes in 2012<\/a>: \u201cDon\u2019t you dare get cold feet!\u201d<\/p>\n Starmer\u2019s actions since becoming Labour leader are very much in line with his earlier career. He wants to prove he is a safe pair of hands to the British establishment, in hopes that he can avert the kind of relentless vilification Corbyn endured. Then, Starmer can bide his time until the British public tires of Johnson.<\/p>\n Starmer seems to believe that playing softball with the right wing government and hardball with the left in his own party will prove a winning formula. So far, voters beg to differ.<\/p>\n \u2022 First published in Middle East Eye<\/a><\/p>\n
socialism.<\/p>\n
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