KEIR STARMER’S Times interview exposes a Labour leader as arrogant as he is dishonest.
Few would disagree with his claim that Labour is “unrecognisable” compared with 2019 — but an honest media would ask this would-be prime minister some searching questions about that.
How does he defend standing to lead the party on a platform of continuing the socialist policies of Jeremy Corbyn, and why, if he was lying then, should we trust him in government?
When he tells anyone unhappy with the way he has changed the party that they are welcome to leave, what gives him the right?
Why should an MP only elected in 2015 tell activists and campaigners of decades’ standing to take a hike? More importantly, why should affiliated unions — which have already seen one of their number, the BFAWU, disaffiliate in disgust — allow a leader to abuse a position he obtained under false pretences to fundamentally change the character of the party they founded?
Starmer repeats the smear that Corbyn’s Labour tolerated anti-semitism. That is not to say there was no anti-semitism in Labour under Corbyn, or that his leadership always dealt with accusations of anti-semitism appropriately.
But statistical evidence has never supported the notion that Corbyn’s Labour was more anti-semitic than other political parties or that anti-semitism was more widespread in it than previously. These charges against it were false.
That was why they could howl that the Shami Chakrabarti report on handling anti-semitism cases was a whitewash while praising an Equality & Human Rights Commission report that lamented the failure to implement Chakrabarti. That is why they ignore the EHRC’s own acknowledgement that disputing the prevalence of anti-semitism is anyone’s right when Corbyn has been stripped of his status as a Labour MP for doing nothing more than that. A status, Sir Keir finally spells out, he will never regain.
This was a calculated character assassination which served a straightforward purpose: the discrediting of the biggest socialist movement in Britain for decades.
That movement drew hundreds of thousands of new players into politics, young and old. It bagged millions of extra votes for Labour in 2017 in all corners of the country.
The new members were never welcome. They were attacked as “Trotskyists” or slandered as bullies by pampered, privileged MPs. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves says blandly that falling Labour membership is a positive; now Sir Keir tells those who remain to shut the door on their way out.
These are the reactions of a professional political elite who despise ordinary people and resented their brief intrusion into the Westminster game. We should turn their contempt on them.
These professional politicians have delivered falling living standards, collapsing public services, a world on fire. The paranoid vetting now applied to every parliamentary candidate will only increase the sycophancy and groupthink which have made Parliament unfit for purpose, a closed loop of self-referential egotists. They have no answers.
It is time we say, with a certain famous revolutionary, that “any cook can run a country” — that the nurses, bus drivers, posties and others striking for a fair deal know better than MPs what changes our country needs.
The Corbyn surge was about democratising Britain, and the vicious reaction is about suppressing democracy. Its target is not the MP for Islington North but the trade union and socialist movement.
This persecution should not go unanswered. Trade unionists should demand a serious challenge to Sir Keir: after all, with his refusal to support workers’ wage demands or stand on picket lines, union members can expect little to change if he wins power.
The Labour leader has made it abundantly clear what his goal is: a party in which socialist and internationalist politics are banned. Every councillor, every MP, every union needs to be asked what it is doing to stop him.
