IN A week marking four years since he first stood for the Labour leadership, Keir Starmer has pitched again for the public’s support with a Bristol speech and the start of an election campaign in Wellingborough.
The speech was predictably underwhelming: union leaders pointed out that abstract targets are little use without a means to achieve them.
Labour cannot tackle the energy crisis without taking public control. Labour might claim workers will have better pay if it’s in power, but if it simultaneously says it won’t raise public spending then it is hard to see how this will be realised.
Labour can call all it wants for emergency Cobra meetings to consider devastating floods: the fact it subordinates its own green investment plans to rigid borrowing rules shows it has no grasp of the scale of the climate crisis or the huge pressure it places on communities, cash-starved local governments, even its beloved business.
Even tub-thumping about Tory cronyism and corruption rings hollow, given Labour’s openness to increasing NHS reliance on the private sector following donations to the shadow health secretary from investors in US healthcare firms, its U-turn on a tech tax after talks with Google, or its leaked emails to water industry bosses asking for ideas on how to suppress the popular demand for nationalisation.
So it would be easy to dismiss Labour’s current offer as a mixture of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Easy, but wrong.
Starmer does have a mission, and it surfaced most clearly in passages attacking populism and calling for a politics of national reconciliation.
Not because Starmer will challenge the hatred and division spread by the Tories, at least not on race and immigration. He has ignored a comprehensive report exposing anti-black racism in his party and suspended the first black woman ever elected to Parliament from Labour’s ranks. He says he’s open to building offshore camps to detain asylum-seekers and tries to compete with the government on race-to-the-bottom scaremongering over refugee arrivals.
Starmer’s project is to reconcile a turbulent people to a system that neither represents nor serves them. It’s a restoration project, an attempt to put a decade of political unrest behind us and reconcile the ruled to their rulers.
That explains the horror of “protest” politics, the paranoid vetting of candidates for public office and the determination to return decision-making to a narrow professional caste, whether by preventing ordinary party members from choosing their representatives or by establishing new fiscal oversight bodies to stop elected politicians departing from Treasury and Bank of England orthodoxy, however disastrous that orthodoxy is proving.
Its stumbling block is the inability to reconcile working-class and ruling-class interests, clearer than ever in an era of soaring poverty and record-breaking profits for the few.
It can only mask those contradictions through repression. And this is something to fear from a Starmer government.
His authoritarian instincts, visible in his harsh record as director of public prosecutions, have been on full display as a Labour leader who meets every dissenting voice with silencing orders, bans on debate, suspensions and rigged disciplinary procedures.
Britain is on this trajectory already: Tory governments since 2019 have dramatically curtailed protest rights, while state and corporate censorship are getting worse.
But Labour’s complete commitment to that agenda — and Starmer is on record saying he will maintain Tory policing laws — is a threat the left has yet to take seriously enough. Capitalism in Britain now maintains itself through the steady dismantling of our democratic rights.
Starmer’s appeal for an end to class conflict may be couched in the language of reconciliation but its reality means disarming citizens and working-class organisations oppressed by an ever more authoritarian state. It is a project that must be resisted to the hilt.
