Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale, male and stale than the Garrick: Labour leaders who have won a majority in a general election. He will be only the fourth since the party first fielded candidates in a general election, after Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.
The conventional wisdom about such victories – particularly about those achieved by Wilson and Blair – is that they are the fruit of Labour moderates taking control of the party from the left, thus reassuring the conservative-minded middle classes. You still see this narrative about Starmer surprisingly often. He is the safe centrist option, the return to sanity after the hard-left madness of the Corbyn era. And there is certainly some truth to this idea. Starmer is not a socialist of the old school, fixated on mass ownership of the means of production. Nor does he appear to share Corbyn’s crankish views on foreign policy and security, where the western powers and their allies are always in the wrong, and ‘liberation’ movements, however violent, are invariably on the side of the angels.
It’s worth remembering too the sheer bland mediocrity that we are likely to see in the next government
All the same, it does not follow from this that he is a pragmatist or a moderate in objective terms. Starmer is a man of the left, on every key contemporary battlefield, whether that’s immigration and borders, national identity, the family, or freedom of speech. In these areas the main effect of a Starmer ministry will be to cement the Blairite revolution. Just consider the recently announced tax raid on parents who educate their children privately; part of the project to increase the power of the state over children.
It’s worth remembering too the sheer bland mediocrity that we are likely to see in the next government – the dogged promotion of terrible ideas by people who have spent their entire careers in the progressive left milieu where such ideas are treated as gospel. Consider one of Sir Keir’s recent appointments to the House of Lords, Ayesha Hazarika, now Baroness Hazarika. She has followed a pretty standard trajectory for a party apparatchik, with a long spell as a special advisor in the Brown-Miliband era followed by a spell as a radio host. Like many Labour ‘centrists’, she gave the impression of having principled objections to Jeremy Corbyn, until his undeniably impressive performance in the 2017 general election, at which point she decided that he should be given a chance after all. She now presents on Times Radio, that bastion of pro-consensus Sensibleism, while her Twitter account sends forth anti-Tory invective.
The Upper House is now stuffed full of such people – on both sides, in all fairness. And by the time the new House of Commons sits later this year, they will form an unassailable majority on the Labour benches. A new clerisy, formed almost entirely in the dogmas of the post-1997 British state, indifferent to the old liberties of speech, thought and assembly. It has occurred to me that Keir Starmer is a new kind of prime minister, representing the total transformation of Britain in the last few decades. He is unambiguously atheist in a way that few previous holders of the office have been; he clearly has no affection or respect for the country as it was before the late twentieth century; he is totally committed to what you might call ‘human rights-ism’ as an animating principle of administration. He is quite happy to see the sovereign power of parliament suffer death by a thousand cuts, from the courts, the devolved administrations, the quasi-judicial standards committees, and leaders of the public sector (in a little-reported incident last year, NHS England flat out refused to stop hiring equality and diversity personnel when instructed to do so by the Health Secretary).
He is occasionally mocked over a long-ago appearance on the chat show Kilroy, where he defended the organisers of illegal raves in his capacity as legal officer for the National Council of Civil Liberties. But the jokes about a young and over-serious lawyer talking about raving miss the point. Much more relevant is the simple fact that our future prime minister – fresh from his membership of a Trotskyist faction – was using his expensive legal training to defend organised criminality in the name of human rights. There is little reason to think that he has abandoned the idea that human rights can be used as a moral battering ram against the wish of the majority to enjoy their property in peace and order, and against the effective application of the criminal law. Very few of the people who will accompany him to the highest levels of public life are likely to question his views on that, or on any other matter of importance.
