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WHO IS KEIR STARMER, BRITISH LABOUR PARTY LEADER ON THE ROAD TO
DOWNING STREET?  
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Marilyn Albert
June 24, 2024
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_ A Review of “The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right” by
Oliver Eagleton, Verso Books 2022 _

Keir Starmer, The Guardian

 

The widely expected Labour Party victory over the British
Conservatives (Tories) will be an important and positive development.
14 years of austerity under the Tories has done terrible damage to
the British working class. Now it is important to understand who the
new Prime Minister of the UK – Sir Keir Starmer – really is,
because his politics and way of operating will present another
important arena of struggle.

While spending a month in England recently, I snatched up the last
copy for sale of “The Starmer Project – a Journey to the Right”
at Oxford’s famous Blackwell’s Books. It was written by Oliver
Eagleton, and published by Verso Books in 2022. Eagleton is an editor
at New Left Review and writes for The Guardian and other
publications.

Eagleton’s account of Starmer’s career has 25 pages of end notes,
so readers are free to delve more deeply into the often shocking
facts that he documents about Starmer.

Americans are most familiar with Starmer’s campaign against the
previous Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn and prominent Labour MP Diane
Abbott.

But Starmer’s campaign has been not only to marginalize and purge
Corbyn, Abbott, and other Left elected officials of the Labour Party
– it has been to transform the party into a
Center-Right organization whose “number one mission is wealth
creation” (Starmer interview in May 2024). What is Starmer’s
backstory?

He grew up working class. He attended Oxford and developed an interest
in human rights law. Dabbling in the socialist movement on the Left
of the Labour Party, he was a member of the editorial collective of a
publication called “Socialist Alternatives” and became secretary
of a socialist lawyers’ society.

But in the early 1990s, some of his colleagues perceived Starmer to be
“mutating”, as Eagleton puts it. He advocated for changes in the
socialist lawyers’ group that would end its more
militant character. He overhauled the group in a way that forecast
his make-over of Labour 30 years later.

During this period Starmer worked in apparently contradictory ways –
endorsing British police violence against Northern Irish Republicans,
but also working against the death penalty in Britain’s former
Caribbean and African colonies, while taking pains to say he was not
opposed to the death penalty “per se”.

At this point Starmer achieved the position for which he would later
be knighted: he became head of the Crown Prosecution Service –
similar to the US Attorney General, and held the job for 5 years. By
the end of his term of office, his achievements had put him on the
road to Parliament.

What were these achievements in a hugely important job in the British
government? He made a major mission of his office to work closely
with the British security agencies and their international partners
in the “war on terrorism”, getting deployed to work with the
Obama Administration and developing a relationship with Attorney
General Eric Holder to the point that Holder actually asked Starmer
to write a comprehensive critique of the US Justice Department!

Starmer’s Crown Prosecution Service was in charge of the Julian
Assange case, when Sweden requested Assange’s extradition, which
Assange feared would then lead to his extradition to the United
States. During these years, Starmer traveled to the US to meet with
Eric Holder about Assange multiple times. The documents from those
meetings have been destroyed.

In another case, Starmer worked “doggedly” to extradite to the US
an autistic computer expert who breached US security. During his
imprisonment the young man became suicidal. But Starmer persisted in
trying to get the extradition, until Conservative Home Secretary
Theresa May ultimately intervened, based on the young man’s mental
illness.

Starmer refused to prosecute police officers who killed three innocent
migrants. The author of the book estimates that there could be dozens
of cases of police violence which Starmer refused to prosecute.
Instead, Starmer turned his attention to prosecuting victims of crime,
as well as social justice demonstrators. In particular, during years
when rape cases were rising, he prosecuted several women whom he
claimed had lied about being sexually assaulted.

He wrote new guidelines making it easier for police to charge
political activists, as well as re-writing guidelines for charging
welfare claimants who had misclaimed small amounts of benefits.

Accompanying the Tories’ “welfare reform”, Starmer advocated a
“superdatabase” for government access to the public’s personal
data. This type of “law and order” is now reflected in the Labour
Party’s advocacy of eliminating “anti-social
behaviour”. Starmer’s stint as Crown Prosecutor includes many
more shocking details. Following his 5 year term of office, he was
ready to run for Parliament in 2015.

In 2016, there was an attempted “Labour Right” coup against Leader
Jeremy Corbyn. During this failed effort, Starmer backed a
pharmaceutical lobbyist who wanted to privatize the National Health
Service.

In Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, Starmer was Shadow Brexit Secretary. The
book includes a lengthy description of the whole Brexit episode,
which most Brits now believe has been a huge disaster for the
country.

Corbyn-led Labour lost very badly in the General Election of 2019,
leading to ultra-rich businessmen coming together to rid the Party of
Corbyn and uniting around Starmer as the next Party leader. In April
2020, Starmer won with 56% of the vote, becoming the next leader
of Labour and possible next Prime Minister.

At the high point of Covid19, Starmer largely went along with the
Tories’ program around the pandemic, offering little in the way of
a better plan of action.

In a section of the book entitled “Throttling the Left”, Eagleton
documents Starmer’s systematic crushing of the Left wing of the
Party.

A major component of the campaign to purge the Left was to end
Corbyn’s influence in the Party, using a smear campaign of false
claims of anti-Semitism in which others who criticized Israel were
also charged with anti-Semitism. The British news media took a major
role in this attack. In October of 2020 Starmer used a government
report on the alleged anti-Semitism to suspend Corbyn from the Party.

A struggle in the Party ensued in which Starmer backtracked his
accusations, and then reversed the backtrack. In November 2020 Corbyn
was readmitted to the Party but removed from his powerful role in
what is called the Parliamentary Party. In early 2024 Corbyn was
barred from
running for his Parliamentary Seat and he announced he would run as an
Independent. He was expelled from the Labour Party, to which he had
belonged for 40 years.

Others got similar treatment to Corbyn, including the first Black
woman to be elected to Parliament, Diane Abbott. But Abbott received
high levels of support which Starmer could not withstand and she was
returned to the 2024 candidates’ list.

All of this was the culmination of action against the Left which began
as soon as Starmer became Leader. Anytime a Labour official voted
against what the Tories did in Parliament, they were reprimanded by
Labour officialdom. In the Fall of 2021 the leadership sent letters
to socialist MPs and activists threatening to put them under
investigation for unspecified things. Labour MPs were warned not to
walk union picket lines.

Between 2021 and 2022 the Labour Party prohibited membership in seven
Leftwing organizations, expelling, as of September 2023, 363 members,
though not all for Leftwing affiliations.

As of today, less than two weeks before the election, polls show the
Tories will be badly trounced by Labour. Keir Starmer will then
become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Each Party’s campaign Manifesto can be viewed on the Party websites
or in publications such as The Guardian. Jeremy Corbyn’s website
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* Labour Party
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* Britain
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* elections
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* Brexit
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* Jeremy Corbyn
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* Keir Starmer
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