If you’ve been listening to the BBC radio lately you might have started to here eulogising of the man who looks set to be our next Prime Minister. The latest move by the Labour Party has been to not really go into detail about their manifesto but to elevate their dear leader. Kir Starmer has become the soup of the day to leftist politicians, presenters and commentators alike as his image becomes something the party wants to highlight. He is going to be standing outside Number 10, he is going to represent the UK on the world stage and he is going to make the great statements of the day. Good lord.
It is important to understand Sir Kir Starmer as a person before one listens to the hyperbole from those who wish him well. One should not always judge everything one has done in the past as people are allowed to change, are allowed to change their mind and to move on form things and that is something we as a sophisticated society should be proud of doing. There should be no archeology police, digging through things in the past in order to denigrate the present. Leave that to the hatchet-job types who work for very reputable news companies who would rather find a story that the truth. The efforts to comb the online database to find something one said 5, 10, 15 or even 20 years ago is a wasted effort when trying to find the measure of a man or woman. Those sorts of stories imply someone can’t change their stars or thoughts. One supposes that to these people if someone is sentenced to prison they should stay there forever as forgiveness and the ability to move on is impossible. To the gulag then?
Kir Starmer should be judged on his term in politics and professional life in order to see if he is able to make good decisions in the future. Measure a man for their professional life, as that is what all employers do; they look at your professional life to predict your competency in the future. That is what we should do.
Kir Starmer’s father worked in a tools factory, if you didn’t already know. In reality, Starmer’s dad owned the factory, but whatever. Starmer trained as a lawyer, as most senior politicians do these days, and was part of the Socialist (Trotskyist) lawyers association, the Haldane Society. He rose through the ranks and worked in the Crown Prosecution Service, with a particular interest in the representation of long-term court attendee and awful hate-preacher Abu Qatada and “aliran hizb ut tahrir”, an Islamist group declared a terrorist group in January of this year (though outlawed as a terorist group in many other countries including Qatar years ago). This professional decision seems…worrying.
In political life Kir Starmer rose through the ranks of the Labour Party and became an MP in 2015 in the London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, a pretty much safe Labour seat. He served in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet in immigration but resigned in protest against Corbyn’s leadership, only to come back in 2017 as Shadow Minister for Exiting the EU. During this time he helped Gina Miller’s case in court to try to stop Brexit from happening, openly campaigned for another referendum to reverse Brexit and campaigned in 2019 to have Corbyn elected as PM, though in the last instance he ‘distanced himself’ (so says he) from the leader of the party.
His record with Brexit has been rather odd for a leader in the post-referendum years. Putting the arguments on Brexit aside, Starmer openly campaigned to reverse a democratic decision taken by this country, citing the arguments that revolved around ignorance, racism and xenophobia. For a man looking to acquire votes from the public to become Prime Minister he is somehow not being talked about in the same way: what if we’ve changed our mind just 1 or 2 years after Starmer has won? Can we have a people’s vote then? For someone wishing to be leader he does not have a good track record on democracy.
The elephant in Kir Starmer’s professional room is Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer’s defenders will say he de-toxified the party, his accusers will say he hasn’t and he still has the spectre of Corbyn behind him. This man served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet - someone who allowed a disgusting amount of anti-semitism rot the party from top to bottom, had a shadow chancellor who was an avid admirer of Chinese dictator and slaughterer of millions, Mao Zedong, and someone who basically wanted to demilitarise the UK and replace the Nucleur deterrent with a stout wicker fence. Aside from being an avid Republican and anti-patriotic, Corbyn was an electoral disaster and his footnote in history along with Michael Foot will be remembered for being even more unpopular than Theresa May. Starmer supported that. Starmer campaigned for that. Starmer defended that.
As leader of the Labour Party, Starmer achieved his greatest victory so far. He saved the Labour Party, or at least he was assisted greatly. He turned he brand around, made it more palletable and the coup-de-grace was ousting Jeremy Corbyn from the party in the first week of the General Election of 2024. Since last year the Labour Party have been up in the polls with ana average lead of 20% over the least-popular government in the history of the Tory party. He has painted himself out to be a moderate Blairite with major sympathies towards the moderate left. He has achieved a coalition of the centrists and leftists behind him, to the point where the Liberal Democrats have fallen in behind him in all but name. Starmer has managed to paint himself out to be an alternative to the Tories, putting near-identical policies aside.
Starmer has nailed his colours to the mast, sometimes. He took the knee for Black Lives Matter (An overly Marxist regime dogged by scandals of embezzlement). He supported Gender Self-Identification and marched with the Trans lobby, taking a lot of flak from feminist and once-Labour supporter J. K. Rowling. Starmer is wedded to Net Zero on the environment. But Starmer has changed his mind a lot too. He has reversed policies on the green investment fund, watered down nationalising Energy companies plans and has already said the VAT on private schools will be delayed for a year (despite himself benefiting from private school but it wouldn’t be a socialist policy without a bit of ‘us vs them’ in the manifesto). Starmer has been as much of a political chameleon as the Tories have been in the party, and to his credit he seems to be getting away with it rather well. Almost too well. Almost as if no one in the media wants to look at it all too much.
Starmer has a team round him that is, well, interesting. Where once the Labour Party front benches had heavy hitters like Roy Jenkins, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown and in the case of John Prescott literally a heavy hitter, now it has Angela Rayner who was investigated for making money off the public in the selling of her council house. It has Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting…have you heard of them? It has Ed Milliband…yes the sandwich-munching ex-leader is still there as the climate change Tzar. It has Emily Thornberry who finds the English flag an extreme-right flag. It isn’t exactly a panel of egg-heads, but maybe this is unfair on them as they haven’t really done anything yet. But it doesn’t look lik an inspiring government-in-waiting. Starmer has assembled people for him to lead, not necessarily those most competent, but who would be better? Where are the Frank Fields of our age? Who knows.
In this campaign Starmer has done and said very little. He had the opportunity to set out his stall personally and politically and for the last 4 and a half weeks of the campaign he has made sure to say and do very little, choosing instead to carry his theoretical Ming Vase to Number 10. There may be a little tack away as the Labour vote has actually gone down from 44-38% in the opinion polls, losing voters to tactical voting with the Lib Dems and some voters to the Greens and Reform. Labour’s actual votes by numbers hasn’t really gone up either. In The Blackpool by-election, the last one before the general election, the amount of votes Labour actually received went down by around 100. Starmer has done very little to increase Labour’s potential votes, his lead down to Tory incompetence and ‘stay-at-homers’. Starmer isn’t quite cutting it yet.
Is this down to his past? The answer is probably not. Aside from political analysts voters really are looking for who will do better in the future, or in the case of this election the least worst. Since Starmer has the only realistic chance under this electoral system of being Prime Minister he has the benefit of actual potential. But beneath the facade of a man of action and substance there lies someone rather hollow, blowing wherever the wind goes and will be Prime Minster of a government no one really wanted, save the around 35% that will vote for Labour or just not for the Tories. Starmer, regardless of his past, will become Prime Minister. Perhaps really his past is more relevant for predicting what will happen in the future, which we will analyse in a future article (to be quite paradoxical).
When you vote will you be looking at the CVs of all the main leaders or even the constituency candidates? Will their record in politics of professiona life matter to you? It might matter for the next Prime Minister who assumes an awesome amount of power in this country. Is Peter Hitchens right in saying this will be the worst, most expensive and most Trotskyist leader the UK has ever had? Are Labour commentators, politicians and analysts right that Starmer is the competent ‘second coming’ since Blair?
As is often the case, the answer may not really surprise you…
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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