New Statesman: Keir Starmer’s quest to reshape Labour

 Like Cameron, Starmer inherited a party that had made a habit of losing elections: in terms of seats won, the 2005 election was the third-worst in the Tories’ modern history, and the 2019 election Labour’s worst since 1935. In both 2005 and 2019, the incumbent government had a large but not unassailable majority in the Commons, which nonetheless caused most people to write the opposition’s chances at the next election off long before it started.[...]

Starmer and Cameron share a recognition that many of Britain’s socially liberal voters are also economically conservative. Cameron sought to woo the socially liberal middle classes. He wanted to persuade those who were in sympathy with Tory economic objectives that they could have both social liberalism and traditional right-wing economies (the “double liberalism” championed by the Economist). Starmer’s aims run the other way: he wants to woo voters who are socially and culturally conservative but are economically on the left. Cameron wanted voters to know that he would “hug a hoodie”; Starmer wants them to know that he would make sure that the hoodie felt the full force of the law.[...]

Since becoming leader Starmer has appealed to the preoccupations and priorities of the new Tory-voting, Brexit-supporting working class. His tactical silences have been notable too. There have been small but significant gestures: opposition frontbenchers taking care to tweet their respects on the anniversary of the soldier Lee Rigby’s murder; Starmer’s support for retaining “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Rule Britannia” at the Proms. And there have been larger ones, such as Starmer’s vocal opposition to the Black Lives Matter campaign to abolish the police. Starmer is positioning himself against Corbyn on cultural matters. [...]

For Starmer and his inner circle, a more economically and socially liberal Labour might do better electorally, but it would be at the expense of the party’s soul. Winning back seats Labour lost in 2019 and 2017 is not just about achieving power, but about what type of party it is. As one of his close allies put it to me, “we’re not the Democrats” (meaning a loose coalition of social liberals, big-city progressives and some trade unions). Labour is a party of the labour interest, of working people and the trade unions movement. It is this Labour Party’s desire to revive that historic identity that distinguishes it both from its recent Corbynite past and its electorally successful New Labour days. It’s not just victory Starmer aims for, but to save Labour as we know it.

read the article

The Guardian: Labour councils launch slavery statue review as another is removed

All statues in Labour councils across England and Wales, and across London, will be examined for links to slavery and plantation owners, their leaders have said, as an east London authority took one down off its plinth on Tuesday evening. [...]

Earlier, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the capital’s landmarks – including street names, the names of public buildings and plaques – would be reviewed by a commission to ensure they reflect the capital’s diversity, with a view to removing those with links to slavery after Black Lives Matter protesters tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.

In Manchester, the council announced a city-wide review of all the statues in Manchester “to understand their history and context”. Councillor Luthfur Rahman said members of the public would also be asked for suggestions on “missing” statues. [...]

Pressed on Sky News about where to draw the line, given Winston Churchill held some racist views, Khan said the cases of Churchill, Gandhi and Malcolm X showed that many great historical figures were not perfect and history should be taught “warts and all”. But there were clear-cut figures such as those actively involved in the slave trade and ownership who should not be celebrated, the mayor said. [...]

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has said it was “completely wrong” for protesters to pull down the statue of Colston and dump it in the harbour in Bristol – putting him at odds with some MPs on the left of his party – while emphasising the monument should never have been there in the first place.

read the article

New Statesman: Capitalism after coronavirus

We should remind ourselves that only a year ago we faced the daily nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn versus Theresa May: the two worst party leaders since 1940. The transformation for the better in British politics is extraordinary. In the Labour Party, the hard left could not avoid responsibility for Labour’s crushing electoral defeat, and its ringmasters have been swept away. Not only is the party expecting change, but with his decisive leadership victory, Keir Starmer has the power to deliver it. Similarly, the Conservatives first ejected Theresa May, followed by Boris Johnson’s high-risk strategy of ousting the established order of Philip Hammond and Jeremy Hunt, which was rewarded with a decisive election victory. Both parties had been bitterly divided, and in both, the internal opposition has won an election. [...]

To guard against the strong tendency to interpret the crisis through a lens of understanding that inevitably reinforces existing beliefs, a good discipline is to start by asking: “In what ways have events not been consistent with what I would have predicted given my prior beliefs?” Applying this discipline, I think one awkward fact really does bear political attention and, as it happens, it is deeply rooted in both left and right. While it can doubtless be spun away into the deep grass, it is sufficiently surprising to mainstream thought that it should shift ideas: Britain is heavily over-invested in its belief in the efficacy of centralised state direction. Underpinning this belief are two fallacies. One is that the top knows what to do. It knows best, because it is staffed by those of the highest calibre and they draw on the finest expertise. The other is that central control is necessary for coordination. These sound – at least to the people to whom they are congenial – obvious. Indeed, anyone hearing them would judge them to be common sense. How could either possibly be wrong? [...]

When Britain’s health outcomes are properly measured beyond the privileged zone of London and its region, its health system is not even ranked within the Western European pack – according to medical journal the Lancet, British outcomes look more like those of eastern Europe. The rest of western Europe has “the best health systems in the world”. Why don’t we learn from them? And no, it isn’t just a matter of money. Coronavirus fitted this pattern: we could have learnt from the responses in east Asia, but instead, public policy – though set by scientists – was based on a British model with assumptions about critical unknowns. [...]

We need compromise, mutuality, long-term perspectives and mediators: exactly the properties that bonus-hungry bankers and aggression-fuelled lawyers are trained not to possess. Returning to the unrepresentative nature of our political parties: depressingly the Tories are overloaded with bankers, and Labour with lawyers. We need to devolve the power of decision from Whitehall, but to where and what? To communities. The right political community, at which many decisions should be exercised, is the region. Whitehall, staffed by people whose daily life is the weirdly atypical experience of professional London, is both too remote and too exceptional to be the locus of many decisions. London is less “the capital” than “the outlier”. But the term “region” begs the question of appropriate boundaries, especially after what coronavirus will do to our economy.

read the article

New Statesman: Keir Starmer: The sensible radical

Starmer tends to speak in a language of moral absolutes, but his speech that evening was neither a Corbynite meditation on good and evil, nor a clarion call for a new kind of politics. Rather, it was a straightforward elevator pitch. With a flair and levity that seems to escape him on television, he told members that he was the best person to take on – and defeat – Boris Johnson. “I really do think that man is dangerous,” he said. Corbyn and his politics, he told them, had been unfairly maligned by the press – but had still lost Labour December’s general election. He could break the cycle. [...]

Yet few will profess to knowing the real Keir Starmer. Some even contend that his leadership campaign has been an exercise in hiding from view. His pledges over the course of the campaign have, at times, seemed contradictory: he will not “oversteer” away from Corbyn’s radicalism on the economy, but he will curb the leadership’s worst excesses, win back lost ground in the south, as well as the north and Midlands, and exorcise the demons of factionalism from Labour’s ranks. Officially, Starmer calls it the politics of unity: a word that is emblazoned across his campaign material and baked into almost every line of his stump speeches. Corbyn’s enforced departure presented Labour MPs, the trade unions and its membership with an existential choice: does it continue along the road that led to a fourth successive election defeat, or veer away? If Long-Bailey’s pitch is the former, and Nandy’s the latter, then Starmer’s aim is to convince members that they can have both. [...]

His politics are continental but are not the “bland centrism” criticised by supporters of Long-Bailey. “He was very much what Europeans would now call a red-green,” said the QC Gavin Millar, who interviewed Starmer for his pupillage in 1987 and later shared rooms with him in a set of Middle Temple chambers run by Emlyn Hooson, the radical Liberal MP who had defended the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Growing up, Starmer had never knowingly met a lawyer: Geoffrey Robertson, another QC and pioneer of the progressive bar, described how he turned up for the interview in a cardigan, was “nervous and awkward”, and “looked about 14”. By then Starmer had moved into a flat above a brothel in Highgate, where he devoted himself to work. Stacked high about his room were boxes of Socialist Alternatives, an obscure and atrociously written Trotksyite pamphlet, for which he was once a co-editor. [...]

Starmer decided against prosecuting the police officers responsible for the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube having been wrongly identified as a terror suspect following the London attacks of 2005, and of Ian Tomlinson, the London newspaper seller pushed to his death at the G20 protests in 2010. Under his leadership, the CPS charged anti-austerity protesters for staging a sit-in at Fortnum & Mason in 2012; one academic accused Starmer, who once defended the rights of acid house ravers, of criminalising peaceful assembly and protests.

read the article

UnHerd: Can Keir Starmer rescue Labour?

Keir Starmer was victorious because he was the best candidate to take Labour to at least some sort of electoral respectability. His campaign was planned, professional and aimed at Labour members exhausted by repeated defeats. That, for now, is enough to give him a mandate that will last beyond the exceptional politics of the coronavirus crisis. His actions in the first few days of his leadership are already indicating that this professionalism maybe the hallmark of a new era. In this he has been helped by the weakness and division of his opponents within the party. [...]

This failure was compounded in the election for deputy leader. Since 2015 the left has unified around single candidates and slates to win elections. Not his time. It was split between support for Angela Rayner, nominated by Momentum, and Richard Burgon, supported by McDonnell. Rayner won her victory; Burgon was beaten into third place. [...]

What will Keir Starmer do and how quickly? Historically, Labour leaders focus on two aspects of leadership: management and policy. Neil Kinnock was the example of a leader who used the party machine to attack Labour’s internal dissenters and show the electorate it was serious. It was his courage in the Eighties that paved the way for New Labour in the Nineties. He brought in new, younger management of the party, most notably in the form of Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications in 1985, but also promoted young new MPs such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most of the future New Labour government. [...]

The first item will be cleaning up anti-Semitism. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been summoning evidence from a wide range of Labour members to get into the history of this mess, going back to when Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. There are pending legal as well as political consequences. Labour has to show not just contrition for the past; it has to reveal its managerial and political failures and then prove that it has a defined route to ensure they are never repeated. Action has to happen immediately and be visible.

read the article