QUESTION: So what are Keir Starmer’s policies anyway?

ANSWER: They are -- yawn -- the same system-maintaining policies of other typical Labour Party leaders over the last 100 years.

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By Alan Story

Many, especially those formerly or currently on the left of the Labour Party, fail to understand Keir Starmer. They also find it hard “to get” the policies and manifesto he is campaigning on for the upcoming general election on 4th July.

Some left-leaning Labour supporters argue, for example, that he is the most right-wing leader the party has ever had. This leads to a constant stream of negative comments directed at Starmer on social media platforms. In just ten minutes at 3:30 a.m. today, I encountered the word "liar" five times and "traitor" three times. Lengthy Substack articles are dedicated to criticising Sir Keir for his latest broken promises and his movement towards the right lane of British politics.

While I can see where these critics are coming from and often agree with their points, there are two major aspects where I differ:

a) their sense of personal betrayal, and

b) their lack of understanding of the political and historical context.

The reaction to Starmer from many Labour left supporters – whether they are still actively involved, resigned, suspended, expelled, disgruntled, or inactive – often resembles the cries of a heartbroken lover. They see Starmer as the sole person who, in the post-Corbyn years, is destroying the “beloved” Labour Party they once cherished.

I wouldn't be surprised if I soon come across a throwback to my student days in the 1960s, with headlines like "KEIR STARMER: RUNNING DOG OF U.S. IMPERIALISM."

NOT A LABOUR MANIFESTO. REALLY?

Regarding Labour's general election manifesto, a recent headline in THE GUARDIAN labelled it: “IT’S A STARMER MANIFESTO. BUT A LABOUR ONE? NOT SO MUCH.”

But is it really so different from past Labour manifestos and policy positions if we view them without a nostalgic bias? This is one of the focuses of today’s THE LEFT LANE.

So why the strong negative emotions about Starmer? Perhaps because many on the Labour left fail to acknowledge a simple fact gleaned from a century of Labour history: Keir Starmer is a typical Labour leader.

He is a quintessential “Labour man” – all of its leaders, except Harriet Harman as a brief interim leader in 2015, have been men -- and occupies a similar ideological vein to that of Hugh Gaitskell (leader from 1955 to 1963) and Neil Kinnock (1983 to 1992). Ed Miliband, a former leader (2010 to 2015) is a member of his shadow cabinet. Two other former leaders, Tony Blair (1993 to 2007) and Gordon Brown (2007 to 2010) are old Labour hands with whom Starmer regularly consults.

Matt Phypers / GET PR DONE!

A CASE STUDY IN EMULATION  

Take the issue of electoral reform. Yes, it is not the most important issue of the day --- compared to, say, the cost of living crisis or the Israeli genocide in Gaza --- but winning it would end the Tory/ Labour electoral duopoly of ten decades and it is a basic democratic reform; see a blog I wrote in 2021.

Brown headed up the Labour Party’s “Commission on the UK’s Future” set up by Starmer. In 2022, he wrote its final report about whether any constitutional changes are needed to repair what is now increasingly labelled “broken Britain.” Brown simply ignored the issue of the introduction of proportional representation voting (PR).  In other words, it was irrelevant as a political issue. Natch. That’s Starmer’s position as well.

Blair promised a referendum on electoral reform in Labour’s 1997 GE manifesto. After winning a landslide, Blair simply “forgot” this pledge. (There are, in fact, a lot of similarities between Labour’s 2024 manifesto and its 1997 manifesto.) When Corbyn was leader (2015 to 2021), he, sadly, also never supported PR. Ed Miliband took the same approach.   

For all of these Labour leaders, elections are events put on for a partisan purpose --- to win power for themselves or the Tories --- and certainly not as occasions serving a wider public interest.    

STARMER: MR CONTINUITY LABOUR

This long-standing concurrence of views shows us that Starmer is Mr. Continuity Labour.  

Above all else, he wants Labour to remain as one of the “big two” along with the Tories. And so what if the seats won on 4 July bear no real relation to overall votes cast? (Polls are predicting Labour could win up to 65% of the seats on less than 40% of the total votes cast.)

“Not Labour’s priority to solve”, is the typical response from Starmerites. It has never been otherwise since the days of Labour’s first leader, Keir Hardie. In 1913, Hardie wrote: “no system of election can be satisfactory which does not give opportunity to all parties to obtain representation in proportion to their voting strength.” Left-winger Hardie, Starmer’s name sake, has been a lone voice as a LP leader.

On a wide range of other issues, Starmer sees his role is to manage capitalism “more competently”, one of the stock phrases both Starmer and Rachel Reeves, likely the next Chancellor, have hammered home during the election campaign.  All that they intend to do is buff off a few rough edges of a system increasingly wracked by crisis both domestically and globally.

WEALTH CREATION, NOT WEALTH RE-DISTRIBUTION

Wealth creation and growth, not wealth re-distribution and conquering climate change, is Starmer’s mantra. This is his priority when, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a total of 4.3 million children (30% of all children) were living in poverty in the UK in 2022/2023. And when 2023 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850, according to the UN.

Labour and Starmer feature one simplistic and downright vague slogan “CHANGE” on their campaign literature and as a lectern slogan. SNP leader Stephen Flynn got it right when he said in a recent interview that this election is about “a changing of the guard.”

That guard has been changed before. With exception of some policies introduced by the Clement Attlee government (1945 to 1951), Labour has never been a radical voice for transformative change. It has always sought to be a “steady-as-she-goes” outfit.

“Steady-as-she-goes” is, however, no guide to action whatsoever in 2024 and reveals to us, as was shown in the recent EU elections, that centrism and social democracy are both a spent force in politics.  

LABOUR IS A “RESPECTABLE PARTY”

Right from the beginnings of the very first Labour government exactly 100 years ago, Labour has always wanted to signal it was “unthreatening” and “to disprove accusations of extremism and to show it was a respectable party”, writes Malcolm Petrie in an article in the current issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS.

Titled “When Labour Was New”, Petrie’s article reviews two recently-published   books on Britain’s first Labour government of 1924. He concludes that this new Labour government (which lasted a mere nine months) wanted to demonstrate it “would not represent an abrupt departure, that Labour can govern in a similar manner to its (Conservative) predecessors”, adding “it is difficult to read accounts of the 1924 government without seeing contemporary parallels.”

How true. You are left wondering whether Labour’s first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, has arisen from his grave to draft the Labour Party manifesto of 2024 as he did in 1924.

As economist Richard Murphy wrote recently, “it is apparent that there is almost no identifiable difference between” Labour and the Conservatives … and after all, Starmer is awaiting a predicted endorsement from THE SUN, that beacon of progressive journalism.

As well, Reeves boasts that Labour has shunned putting any new taxes on the rich or corporations. Reeves says former chancellor Gordon Brown is one of her mentors and one of his first moves upon getting this post in 1997 was to reduce taxes on corporations paid during the Tory years in power of 1979 to 1997 … and to even backdate the reductions!    

So let’s now see how, on a wide range of policy issues, Starmer’s Labour Party emulates Labour Parties of yesteryear and how a politician likely to be our next PM follows in the footsteps of previous Labour PM’s and Labour opposition leaders.

A LONG HISTORY OF STARTING & ENDORSING FOREIGN WARS

++ Let’s start on foreign policy and war. Of course we should be angry, but not surprised that Starmer as well as Sunak have both walked in lock-step with Joe Biden over the monstrous Israeli genocide in Gaza. Since 7 October, at least 37,347 Palestinians have been killed and 85,372 injured by Israeli military forces. Continued British arms sales are but one example of the UK complicity in this blood bath. Starmer has consistently refused to say a Labour government would ban such sales.

Labour does have form on wars in the Middle East. Twenty years ago, the Labour government of Tony Blair was the main ally of US President George Bush in the illegal war in Iraq. In total, 49,000 UK troops were deployed to the killing fields there. (We don’t have the space here to give an account of that deplorable saga.)

But we do have the space to remind you that Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983 and often considered one of its most left-wing leaders, was an initial strong supporter of the 1982 decision by PM Margaret Thatcher to send a fleet of warships to the South Atlantic to take on an Argentinian occupying force on the Malvinas or Falklands Islands. (Again, there is not room here to discuss the Falklands War.)   

As one academic commentary said: “ Foot adopted an unexpectedly belligerent stance over the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, unequivocally supporting the decision to send a naval task force to the South Atlantic.” Another book called “Iron Britannia” concluded that Foot’s rhetoric discredited his internationalist credentials and exposed him as “a liberal imperialist”. Later, Foot slightly modified his views on this war, but that was after Thatcher had been returned to power with Argentinian “scalps” as a useful electoral bonus in the 1983 election she had been in danger of losing.     

Blair also acted as a liberal imperialist on several occasions while in power. Such a role is also likely to appeal to Starmer as PM. 

++ It is mentioned above that Starmer is an ideological bed fellow with former Labour leaders Gaitskell and Kinnock. Both took office after a series of electoral victories by the Tories. In Gaitskell’s case, it was the elections of 1951, 1955 and 1959. In the case of Kinnock, it was the elections of 1979, 1983, 1987, and 1992.

What to do?  Both of them tried to shift the Labour Party in a more and more rightward direction. In the second half of the last century, the main target of the wrath of Labour right wingers, including Gaitskell and Kinnock, was Clause IV of the party’s rule book. The clause never mentioned the word “socialism”, but it did call for the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”; its exact words can be found here. 

DITCH THIS “OUT-OF- DATE NONSENSE”

To win elections, we need to ditch this “out-of-date nonsense,” said the Labour right 30 to 50 years ago. But neither Gaitskell nor Kinnock succeeded in striking out the original Clause IV. However, Blair did in 1995 and the new Clause IV is mere “we-are-all-in-this-together” bafflegab.

So yes we should be angry but not surprised that Starmer is moving his Labour Party more and more to the right since 2020. He is merely mimicking what Gaitskell, Kinnock and Blair did in the past. Starmer has already dropped his 2020 pledges to bring rail and some utilities into public ownership.  His line that he will lead a “pro-business, pro-worker government” is, bluntly, class collaborationist bunk.   

++ Of course, we should also raise hell about the plans of Starmer and likely future Health Secretary West Streeting to bring the NHS more and more under the control of private capital. The further commodification of health care is a REALLY bad idea.

But again there is precedent for the next Labour government. It stretches back to the Blair-Brown years of 1997 to 2010. One of their favoured policy options were Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs): the use of private money to fund capital projects and public services, including those of the NHS. PFIs amounted to the privatisation of public services, assets and buildings; they were actually first introduced by John Major’s Tory government.  

PFIs: “THE WORST MORTGAGES IN THE WORLD” 

As explained by Frances O’Grady when she was General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress: “PFIs are quite simply the worst mortgages in the world. PFIs are a massive rip off. At a time when frontline services are buckling under the strain of government cuts, PFIs are siphoning off precious resources.”

Five years from now we await the explanations of why the Wes Streeting’s so-called “NHS reforms” have failed and led us down another dead-end street.  

WHERE WAS LABOUR DURING THE MINERS STRIKE?

++ Of course, we should be angry, but not astonished that Starmer ordered his shadow cabinet members not to join the picket lines of NHS workers, rail workers and others over the past three years. In 2022, the Labour leader sacked Sam Tarry as a shadow transport minister for giving an unauthorised TV interview from a picket line during a rail strike. (At the time, Tarry was the romantic partner of deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner.)

Why no surprise? Because Labour’s historical record is quite poor when it comes to supporting labour strikes and industrial disputes. Two examples come to mind:

1) We turn back again to the first Labour government of 1924. Book reviewer Petrie writes: “Perhaps the most significant moment in the short life of the new government was it early willingness to invoke the 1920 Emergency Powers Act in response to industrial action in the transport sector. As Clark (one of the authors) concludes, the priority was to show that it would not be ‘sectional’ but will act as ‘the custodian of the whole society’.”  

2) Exactly 40 years ago this month, the miners’ strike of 1983-82 was at its peak. It was to become the most important trade union --- arguably political --- battle in Britain since the end of World War II. Hard-pressed coal miners, and often their wives as well, faced the armed might of the state. And where was the Labour Party? Its leadership decided against backing the coal miners.

The moral of these two labour struggles? Only a fool would count on the Labour Party having your back when taking on the boss.    

The list of precedents for Starmer to act as “Mr Mainstream Labour 2024-2029” could fill many more paragraphs and indeed pages. But this is a Substack blog, not a PhD dissertation and so I will provide only one more example. 

APPLYING PARTY RULES RETROACTIVELY

++ Finally, we should also be angry but not surprised that Starmer and his coterie have resorted, since 2020, to the expulsion of a large number of party members. Actual figures on expulsions are hard to track down. The main targets have been socialists and left wingers, as well as those opposing the actions of the apartheid Israeli state. The latter have included numbers of Jewish LP members who, incredibly, have been expelled as anti-Semites. Jeremy Corbyn is the most high profile expulsion.

One of the main tactics used to expel left wingers has been to proscribe at least seven left-wing organisations. “To proscribe” a group means “to condemn or forbid it as harmful or unlawful.” Here is how proscriptions have worked in Labour. Say organisation ABC was proscribed on 1 August 2022 by Labour. But say on 1 May 2020 ---- that is, more than two years earlier --- Labour Party activist X had liked a tweet by ABC or had been interviewed by the newspaper of the ABC group.

The top brass of Labour have declared that such totally innocent conduct by X is enough of a “crime” to have X expelled. This approach to “law enforcement” is known as the “retroactive enforcement of the law”. It is totally discredited and in breach of what is called “natural justice.” The fact that Starmer, a barrister since 1987, allows it to continue under his watch is disgraceful.  

These types of expulsions and their frequency are without precedent in Labour, say party veterans. So on this issue Starmer is not mirroring the past behaviour of former party leaders.

Mind you, Neil Kinnock trails in second place. In the 1980s, he conducted an extensive and long-running purge --- and that is not too strong a word --- of LP members who were also members of a Trotskyist group called the “Militant Tendency” or just “Militant.” This Wikipedia entry gives you one account of what occurred. Militant was also declared a “proscribed” organisation and, in the end, hundreds of its activists, including two Labour MPs, were sent packing.

SO WHAT ABOUT JEREMY CORBYN?

Jeremy Corbyn has been a bit of “the elephant in the room” in this column; he has only been mentioned a few times. 

I grant you that Starmer’s politics are to the right of centrist social democrat Corbyn; in fact, Starmer is not even a rightist social democrat in many ways.

Corbyn himself was very much the accidental leader of Labour. To read Labour’s history through the prism of his years as leader is highly misleading. He also gave Labour a certain misplaced credibility as an alternative. For more than five years, he and the left faction of Labour were allowed to be in charge and, in the 2017 general election, Corbyn’s Labour Party won an amazing 40% of the overall vote on a relatively radical manifesto.

A YouGov poll released this week shows Starmer is favoured by 39% of voters, yet is predicted to win a landslide. (So much for the wacky and undemocratic maths of a first-past-the-post voting system.)

Corbyn has been treated outrageously by Starmer and was wrongly expelled from Labour. Yet in his heart, Corbyn remains a “Labour man” through-and-through. Who knows? If he wins as an independent MP, Starmer might even show him some mercy and let Corbyn return to the Labour fold.

AND SO WHERE DO THE SOCIALISTS FIT IN?

Some years ago, former Labour MP Tony Benn wrote: “The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England.”

Over many decades from the 1950’s until 30 years ago when he died, Ralph Miliband, Ed’s dad --- and, for my money, Britain’s leading left-wing political scientist --- subjected the Labour Party to extensive examination. He also concludes, in some of the clearest political prose written, that the Labour Party has never been a socialist party. You can read a good selection of his writing here.

Here are my conclusions:        

1) Labour is not a socialist party and there is no chance of transforming it into one;

2) The main problem with Labour is NOT its leader, whether Starmer or Blair or Gaitskell or anyone else, but rather the ideology, policies and organisation of Labour itself;

3) There is no viable future for socialists inside Labour;

4) What we need is a new mass socialist party aimed not at managing capitalism, but of replacing it.

5) The very difficult task of building such a party should begin 5 July.

What conclusions do you draw?

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber:  http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

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