SIR KEIR STARMER has doubled down on Labour’s notorious attack ad claiming that Rishi Sunak doesn’t think child abusers should be in jail.

The ad has caused unease even on the Labour right. Former home secretary David Blunkett calls it gutter politics. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper claims she was not forewarned.

But Sir Keir stands by the ad, emphasising his old job as director of public prosecutions (DPP) as he pitches for the law and order vote.

His spell as the state’s chief prosecutor does merit scrutiny. 

That he was present at the meetings which decided sentencing guidelines weakens his attack on Sunak, as was clear from the embarrassment the line of questioning caused his colleague Emily Thornberry on the Today programme today. 

Thornberry’s awkwardness may stem from the recollection that she herself wrote to Sir Keir in 2012 to complain that the Crown Prosecution Service was weakening guidelines on specialist barristers in rape prosecutions. But the logjam in Britain’s courts has more to do with Tory cuts than sentencing policy.

What should bother socialists is the abundant evidence those years provide of Sir Keir’s authoritarian instincts.

This was the DPP who pushed fast-track prosecution to criminalise as many people as possible during 2011’s London riots — resulting in absurdly harsh sentences such as the six months handed to a 23-year-old with no criminal record for taking a case of bottled water.

The DPP who, at the height of George Osborne’s poisonous “shirker versus striver” rhetoric and while Iain Duncan Smith at the Department for Work and Pensions was subjecting disabled people to humiliating, punitive and inaccurate “fit for work” tests, joined the Tory war on the most vulnerable by announcing longer sentences of up to 10 years for those media bogeys, benefit cheats.

And the DPP who urged Swedish prosecutors not to get cold feet in pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a journalist trapped in a British prison for exposing appalling war crimes by the United States.

It is no surprise that someone with this record feels he can out-Tory the Tories on law and order, but a campaign fought on these terms is the last thing the labour movement needs.

We are confronting a viciously authoritarian government as it is. In the last couple of years ministers have rammed legislation through Parliament to allow state agents licence to commit crimes of any kind on troublingly vague grounds (such as the country’s “economic wellbeing”) if authorised by any of a bewildering array of government agencies.

They have handed police power after power, to shut down protests at a whim and lock up demonstrators deemed to have caused a “serious nuisance.” New powers are progressing through Parliament: the Home Secretary wants police to be able to ban individuals (who needn’t have a criminal record) from protests altogether and break up protests in advance of any suspected “disruption.” 

Scandal after scandal can rock the police — the rape and murder of a woman by a serving officer, another jailed for decades of “violent and brutal” sex offences, leaked WhatsApp messages showing a culture of misogyny, racism and homophobia, a Met Commissioner forced to admit over 1,000 serving officers have criminal records.

None of this slows the rush to further empower police officers. Even minor draconian gimmicks like the crackdown on nitrous oxide involve giving them more powers to abuse — in this case an “enhanced” right to conduct drug tests that will be deployed with all the racial prejudice we see in stop-and-search statistics.

We urgently need a pushback against this overbearing state — a campaign for our rights as citizens to go about our business unmolested by the police; to associate, to demonstrate, to strike.

Instead Labour is engaged in a race to the bottom with the Conservatives that can only affirm our trajectory towards a less free future. It’s a dangerous and disgusting spectacle.