Memoirs of a 'decent' man

Sir Kier Starmer resigned the way he assumed power in the first place. By revealing a relationship with truth so estranged it would make Josef Stalin blush.

“Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt,” Starmer told the country outside Downing Street.

It is necessary to deal with each of these claims in turn by virtue of the fact that unless challenged, recent history becomes ossified into a straitjacket of received wisdom that fatally conditions what can be thought possible in the future.

Politically Bankrupt

In 2019, Labour under Corbyn, as Starmer and his acolytes never tired of saying, achieved the party’s worst showing since 1935, winning just 202 seats. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives  won 365 seats, their best performance since Thatcher’s victory coronation of 1987.

Apart from memory-holing the election just two years before in which Labour had somehow secured the largest increase in its vote since 1945, this warped interpretation conveniently ignores how 2019 was uniquely about one issue, Brexit. And Corbyn’s Labour, faced with a core support overwhelming backing Remain and 2/3rds of the actual constituencies it was defending having voted Leave, was trying to pull off the most delicate of balancing acts.

Its 2017 result partly stemmed from a promise to respect the result of the referendum. But this stance was made all but impossible by then shadow Brexit spokesman – Sir Kier Starmer himself – deliberately violating the agreed party policy and telling the 2018 Labour conference that he wanted a second referendum “and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option”. This led to the perception that Labour was a part of a ‘Remain alliance’ and doomed it in the eyes of many voters in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, and elsewhere.

Starmer also torpedoed cross-party negotiations with the May government in 2018 over getting a Brexit deal through the Commons, even ruling out his own party policy on a customs union. Thus, he ensured that the hardest of all Brexit deals would be the one to succeed.

But as soon as he became Labour leader in 2020, the ‘King of Remainia’ went through a strange metamorphosis and declared that “Britain’s future is outside the EU” and all arguments about the issue belonged to the past. Clearly his previous stance was very principled, though, and not all an amoral strategy to displace Corbyn at all costs.

Notwithstanding Starmer’s antics, the 2019 election would still have been closer had not Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’ (actually a company, not a political party) chosen not to stand in 317 Conservative-held seats. This had the result of artificially inflating the Conservative vote share and probably their number of seats.

Curiously, the Conservatives, who must have received – according to Starmer’s interpretation – such a resounding mandate in 2019 (in contrast to Corbyn’s Labour), have since shrunk to a rump of 121 seats. Why they have plunged into such an ‘existential crisis’ in such a short space of time is something of a mystery, unless of course the issue of Brexit artificially hid their real popularity just as it artificially magnified Labour’s divisions.

Financially bankrupt

This is especially ridiculous. Labour in 2019 were flush with cash, on the back of surging membership numbers which peaked at 600,000. Starmer’s unique talent was to reverse this process by telling hundreds of thousands of people to leave (“the door is open”), or simply expelling them.

He then partially plugged this gap by suddenly becoming immensely appealing to very rich people (many of whom formerly donated to the Tories) and corporations. For example, Labour’s 2024 election campaign was bankrolled by a huge £4 million donation from hedge fund Quadrature Capital, the largest single donation the party had ever received. But because of when it was received – in the week after Sunak called the election but before the “pre-poll reporting period” – Labour didn’t have to publicly declare it during the campaign. And our fearless media didn’t bother to enlighten anyone.

Morally Bankrupt

Now we come to the crux of Sir Kier’s appeal to posterity. He was a ‘decent’ man, fighting against the odds to rescue the party he loved from the cesspit of antisemitism into which it had fallen under Jeremy Corbyn.

The truth is rather different. Starmer, as the public face of the right-wing ‘Labour Together’ faction, cynically used antisemitism allegations to purge thousands of left-wingers from the party whose only crime was to criticise Israel, a country which would go on to refute these criticisms by committing a genocide in Gaza.

Of course, Sir Kier was on hand to support what was happening, lay on surveillance flights over Gaza, and increase arms sales at the height of the killing.

The Starmer purge extended to Corbyn, forced out of the party for observing, correctly – even mildly – that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.

Under Starmer the totalitarian mentality so gathered pace that even suggesting that Labour wasn’t riddled to the core with antisemites was an offence punishable with expulsion. Victims of this witch hunt included a Jewish professor, hauled up charges of simply repeating a pun by another Jewish member of the Labour party (Jo Bird’s ‘Jew process’) and an elderly Jewish woman accused of, among other things, “demonising Israel by inaccurately [sic] describing it as an apartheid state”.

There is a definite ‘pattern of behaviour’ here. In fact, as leader, Starmer expelled more Jews from the Labour party than all previous Labour leaders combined. As Andrew Feinstein (Starmer’s opponent in Holborn & St Pancras in 2024) pointed out, that is like expelling people of colour to combat racism.

In truth, the one decent thing that Sir Kier Starmer did was resign. Everything else was appalling.

Starmer’s handmaidens

But it would be wrong to see Starmer’s momentary ascendancy as being solely down to the man himself, once generously described as “a piece of hotel art made man”. Nor was his brief reign merely the responsibility of his sponsors in the shadowy Labour Together group, likened in their amorality to the denizens of Richard Nixon’s White House.

There had to be other powerful forces behind the strange phenomenon of Sir Kier Starmer and there were – the British media and important parts of the British state.

At every stage of his political career, the media had Starmer’s back, because, in essence, he had a job to – to destroy Corbynism at its roots. For example, every national media organisation (barring the Morning Star) enthusiastically backed Starmer’s decision to suspend Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour party for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report.

The EHRC report was itself a sham, though. It deliberately refused to hear evidence contradicting its interpretation, erroneously described those guilty of ‘antisemitism’ as being ‘agents’ of the party, and accused the Corbyn leadership of acting unlawfully by riding roughshod over ‘established procedures’ to intervene in individual cases, when the party’s rule book explicitly allowed it to.

When the circumstances cried out for investigative journalism, all you got was consecration. And a herd of braying donkeys.

Conversely, when Starmer did subsequently furiously intervene in antisemitism cases to expel the (left-wing) perpetrators forthwith – something the EHRC (wrongly) said the Labour leadership was not allowed to do – there was complete media silence.

And when Starmer jerked Labour massively to the Right, after being elected as Labour leader by promising to continue with Corbyn’s policies, the media response was largely to commend him for practising clever politics.

Sometimes the cognitive dissonance was breathtaking. One of Starmer’s pledges  to members when he was campaigning to be elected Labour leader was to “end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”. In reality when he got into government, not only did he fail to do this, he actually made it worse, increasing sanctions to their highest ever level in January 2026. According to an Amnesty spokesperson, “I’ve worked to highlight human rights violations for more than two decades and witnessed many awful situations. But never have I encountered such raw and widespread distress from people sharing their experiences in the UK.”

But, to the British media, this world, which affects millions of people, simply doesn’t exist.

And the media omertà about Starmer spread its tattered net far wider. The successful campaign by Starmer backers Labour Together to hamstring left-wing media organisations like The Canary after 2017 by getting advertisers to withdraw on the laughable basis of not supporting ‘fake news’ happened, at the time, completely in the shadows. Anti-Corbyn Labour bureaucrats’ scheme to funnel money to right-wing MPs in 2017 at the expense of the official campaign barely registered. And Starmer’s predilection for money and freebies from high-net-worth individuals and corporations to fill the financial void left by members deserting in droves was, almost without exception, left to the alternative media, who had a far smaller reach, to expose.

The 40-watt searchlights of the mainstream media continued their feeble glare after 2024. Starmer Labour’s 2025 deal with pharmaceutical corporations, which will double the amount the NHS pays for drugs, trampled all over the independence of NICE, the body that decides whether drugs are cost-effective and should be paid for by the NHS. But the deal was presented in entirely vanilla terms by the media, thus concealing what it was really about.

Our strange form of democracy – really oligarchy accompanied by ratification by universal suffrage – has left us in a paradoxical situation. Powerful and wealthy vested interests decide who can, and cannot, have political power (not Corbyn for example) but voters then cast their judgement on them. The result has been seven Prime Ministers in the last decade.

The fact that no-one of influence can see the problem is why they inflicted Sir Kier on us and expected it to work.

Living in the Past – The Prison of Political Time Lags

Back in the 1960s, J.B. Priestley noted the widely unappreciated feature of time lags in society. There is an unerring tendency, he observed, to associate any era with “its newest and more original ideas”. But this is a mistake.  Very likely, only a few pioneers actually held these notions, while ordinary people – and self-styled intellectuals – remained steeped in mentalities that simply regurgitated insights from decades or even centuries before.

“It is precisely the ‘hard-headed and realistic’ who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses,” said Priestley. “We must expect time lags of various lengths.”

Priestley was writing about scientific ideas, specifically concepts of time. Einstein, for example, started publishing about relativity at the start of the last century but, to all intents and purposes, for decades afterwards most people lived by intuitive notions of Newtonian physics. In all likelihood they still do.

But the concept of time lags can equally well be applied to politics. In fact paradoxically – as British politics now demonstrates – political cultures can become more ensconced in the past as the real past recedes into the distance.

The Brexit Right personifies this shying away from the painful realities of the present in favour of the (fictional) comforts of the past. In this dreamscape, the Second World War – in which Britain “stood alone” (not counting the Empire of course) safeguarding freedom against a totalitarian threat from Europe – is the rock around which everything else is arranged. It’s no accident that Nigel Farage urged everyone to see Dunkirk.

Less appreciated is that liberal and centrists are equally affected by nostalgia. But in this case the time frame is different. The defining period is the post-1992 era of the single market, ‘social Europe’ and the Blair-led Labour governments. This is seen as a time of expanding public spending, worker protections and a liberal attitude to social policy. Blotted out are the decidedly illiberal stances of both Labour and the EU to ‘illegal’ immigrants, sadistic policies towards the unemployed and the disabled and the imposition of austerity and privatisation.

Sometimes the two meet in a kind of paroxysm of denial. The Tories will, for example, regularly engage in the time-honoured trick of attacking the BBC for being biased and left-wing, prompting it to become even more accommodating to the Right in its news coverage. Liberal and centrists will impulsively leap to the BBC’s defence as a paragon of balanced reporting and civilised values.

The last time the BBC could be described as left-wing whilst maintaining a straight face was in the 1980s before Thatcher-appointee Marmaduke Hussey sacked Director-General Alastair Milne (Seamus’s father) in 1987. Even then, that reputation relied on little more than isolated outbursts of independence from government, which proved unacceptable. But the current surreal dance between conservatives and liberals manages to entirely erase the events of the intervening period. The appointment of the neoliberal John Birt as director-general, minute control over editorial content, outsourcing of programme-making, concerted moves towards more business-friendly coverage, reliance on establishment figures to interpret wars and financial crises, the courting of hard-right figures like Andrew Neil to anchor political reporting,  all that – the last 30 years in other words – simply doesn’t exist.

“The calendar is lying when it reads the present time”. It’s not 2022 at all, it’s still 1985.

However, it’s in the current post-Corbyn period that the wish to live in the past is being taken to new heights of absurdity. We are blessed with a Conservative government, still mesmerized by Thatcher’s epoch-changing landslide of 1983, ‘opposed’ in Parliament by the 1997 Re-enactment Society.

Thus we have the spectacle of Sir Keith Stalin calling for a “windfall tax” on oil and gas companies while Alexander Boris de Pfeffel ‘Pass the Port’ Johnson protests this would result in higher prices. They’re showing nothing but repeats on TV these days aren’t they?

There was such a thing a Windfall Tax, introduced by Tony Blair in 1997 to allegedly compensate the public for the fact that utilities such as gas and electricity were undervalued when privatised and the floated companies, like British Gas, were making “excess” profits. But that was more than three decades ago! The current excess profits of all participants – and they certainly are excessive, British Gas profits have nearly doubled in the past year – do not result from any initial undervaluation in the era of Roland Rat but from the way the system is set up to work. This is a natural monopoly, dominated by big energy supply corporations and a plethora of distribution companies with a business model that doesn’t work anymore, taking advantage of captive consumers whose freedom to choose between them is entirely hollow. The resultant profits are simply a form of disguised taxation. Except that the proceeds go to shareholders, not the government.

A windfall tax is an anachronistic and patently inadequate response to a crisis that calls for public ownership. But public ownership of utilities is one of the “sacred cows of Corbynism” ripe for slaughtering. It’s a dilemma for these ‘modernizers’ I know.

We live in a time of urgent problems. The climate emergency, capitalist failure, falling living standards, declining life expectancy, and food and fuel poverty all call for clear thinking, compassion and a willingness to discard the shibboleths of our Thatcherite political economy. In spite of this, or probably because of it, our politics is entrenching itself in the past.

How long will our political time lag last? Perhaps until it’s too late.

The History of Mr Crank

The slur ‘crank’ is enjoying something of a renaissance in these red-baiting times. The ‘crank left’ is a general term of abuse directed at those who don’t accept the increasingly shaky presuppositions of mainstream debate, with the advantage of course of not having to deal with their objections. Such weird people typically read ‘crank’ news websites, such as The Canary or Skwawkbox. Then there are ‘crankademics’, a wonderfully witty neologism trained at academics who insist on pointing out the painful lack of evidence justifying the purge of Labour party members in the name of anti-antisemitism.

There is something quintessentially English about the barb ‘crank’. It means an eccentric who is obsessed with the minutiae of a specific subject, a fixation ‘normal’, well-balanced people don’t share. In the U.S., such people might be called oddballs or weirdos but not cranks. In America ‘cranky’ is used to designate bad-tempered people but that is something different. Cranks aren’t necessarily cranky.

And ‘crank’ is unusually employed against the Left, in particular the anti-imperialist Left. To be sure there are ‘crank scientific theories’, such as that Covid-19 is caused by 5G phone masts, which originate with the Right. The vectors of strange Trumpian obsessions might be labelled cranks. But generally the Right is not assumed to be outside the pale of civilised, ‘normal’ debate in the way the ‘crank Left’ is.

As far I can tell, crank was first deployed to any great effect during the First World War. Conscientious Objectors were contemptuously derided as cranks and female pacifists shared the same fate. “I can’t stand cranks,” barks Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army when a member of his platoon confesses to have been a Conscientious Objector during the last war. “Imagine not wanting to fight … it isn’t normal.”

But the person who really forged an indelible link between cranks and the Left was George Orwell, ironically an unashamed radical socialist himself. “[T]here is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together,” wrote Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

Leaving aside the fact that undercover nudists and sex maniacs are not, as far as is known, overrepresented at Labour party meetings (nor, soon, will socialists it seems), there is the disquieting fact that some 1930s cranks – for example feminists – were clearly ahead of their time. Orwell also had a particular bugbear about vegetarians, and vegetarian options on menus. Yet anyone now branding feminists and vegetarians as cranks would themselves be open to the very same insult. Crankdom, as was noted long ago, is not a static concept.

A loyal Orwellian might retort that a being ahead of your time is scant consolation for being unelectable, or unpopular, during it. But it is also true if you accept the entire common sense corpus of your age, you end up not wanting to change anything for fear of stepping out of line. It’s also worth noting that a socialist Labour party, doubtless still replete with its fair share of cranks, won the 1945 election by a landslide.

Nonetheless, Orwell certainly started a trend and, since his time, left-wingers who strayed too far from the conventional wisdom of their epoch soon heard the epithet ‘crank’ ringing in their ears. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain could never shake the crank label. Gandhi was accused of “sheer crankiness” by right-wing historian Paul Johnson. More recently, in 2014, famed Conservative ‘moderate’ Kenneth Clarke urged Greeks not to elect the “cranky extremists” of Syriza. They didn’t listen, although presumably when the putatively left-wing Syriza utterly caved and implemented an even more ruthless austerity programme than the original, Tspiras and co. became normal adults.

Of course the most perfect crank of our age is undoubtedly Jeremy Corbyn. He had all the requisite qualities, personal and political. He was a resolute anti-imperialist and thought – erroneously actually – to be a pacifist. He also made jam, had a hobby of taking photos of manhole covers and possibly wore sandals on occasion.

Yet although he should have been an easy target, the British establishment had to strain every sinew to finally defeat him. He was subject to the most vicious and dishonest character assassination in British political history, relentlessly accused of being a spy, terrorist sympathiser and anti-Semite. Unbelievably, the campaign is still going on even after he was comprehensively defeated at the polls.

The enormous effort that needed to be expended, including within the Labour party, reveals, I think, two important things. One is that throughout the first two decades of the 21^st century, the cranks have been proven right on most important issues and the ‘sensibles’ wrong. The Iraq War was a terrible mistake, Iraq didn’t have – or claim to have – WMD and over two million Iraqis have subsequently died. The economic boom of the first years of the century was revealed to be built on sand, the bursting of which caused immense repercussions we have still living with. Austerity, supported at the time by all major political parties in Britain, but not the crank Left, was not only economically wrong-headed but imposed needless suffering on millions. Quantitative Easing – the main method of dealing with the old economic downturn and the new one – has merely increased inequality and augmented the wealth of the already wealthy. A strategy of confronting Covid-19 based on hoping it would quickly go away has prolonged the economic pain and resulted in innumerable excess deaths.

The role of ‘moderates’, of the sensible mainstream, in the 21^st century has mainly involved trying to plug holes in a dam that is springing leaks in so many places it is impossible to catch up.

The second revelation is that despite cranks residing on the farther reaches of acceptable debate, there is something inherently repellent about their main adversary, the professional politician. Politics is now a career, prepared for by a stint in student politics, followed by a sinecure in PR or the media and the obligatory role as a Spad (special advisor to a minister). It is its own world, sealed off from common experiences. As a result, most politicians, devoid of any ideas of their own, try to toady to what they perceive as public feeling without really understanding it. There is a desperate attempt to appear ordinary or normal, someone you’d want to go for a drink with. The most accomplished at this act – Boris Johnson for instance (who, it will be recalled, originally couldn’t decide whether to be pro or anti-Brexit) – are the most successful politicians.

By the contrast, conviction politicians – Thatcher or Corbyn – might appear obsessive, and thus strange. But because they see politics as fulfilling an ulterior purpose, rather than being something to be immersed in for its own sake, they come across as more human.

Yet, it has to be said there is some truth to Orwell’s accusation that the average socialist adherent is rather “out of touch with common humanity”. Partly this is due to the fact that socialists are intensely interested in politics and changing the world, passions which most people don’t share. But this trait is exacerbated by the fact that both the Corbyn movement in Britain and the Sanders equivalent in the U.S. were overwhelmingly political campaigns. They involved people signing up to organisations dedicated to changing the political sphere. Something they were incredibly successful in doing – in January 2018 the Labour party had 552,000 members.

However, they lacked an analogue in the economic sphere. They weren’t accompanied by a palpable rise in industrial unrest or trade union recruitment, features that invariably occurred in the past – for instance during the Great Depression – when left-wing movements started to take hold.

And, revealingly, the crank insult is rarely, if ever, applied to strikers or organised labour. This is not for reasons of timidity or acquiescence. Workers prepared to fight for their rights have been called ‘the enemy within’, work-shy, harbingers of mob rule or the naïve puppets of far left agitators. They are clearly seen as dangerous. But calling them ‘cranks’ just wouldn’t be taken seriously. And this, in a back-handed way, highlights the fatal flaw in Corbynism. It never overcame the Labour party’s fundamental weakness among private sector workers. And this, remember, was a party specifically founded to advance their interests. The 2019 electoral collapse had other, proximate causes – notably Brexit – but the exclusively ‘political’ character of the Corbyn surge was a major reason it was so ephermeral.

An alliance between the crank Left and a movement of alienated private sector workers would be some people’s worst nightmare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

I haven’t posted much about Brexit on this blog. Partly this is because other people are more than happy to do so I’d just be repeating what someone else has said. But it’s also because I’m convinced that in future years, in the aftermath of a future economic crash, the level of attention devoted to something that really doesn’t change the economic fundamentals much will seem bizarre.

However, I think the leaked US-UK free trade negotiations are very interesting and do merit comment because they indicate that the form of Brexit matters. Johnson’s regulatory disalignment with the EU and liberalisation-based free trade agreements represents a definite fork in the road compared with continue customs unions membership and single market alignment (the Labour party plan) or remaining.

To recap, the leaked documents reveal that US negotiators are pushing for “total market access” to be “the baseline assumption” of the talks. This primarily means services because services are the dominant part of the British economy. And this definition includes the NHS because the NHS is considered a service.

British officials have promised to “fly the good for flag for services liberalisation”. The NHS could only be excluded if, as is the custom with trade negotiations, it is specifically exempted. And the British side has declined to exempt the NHS, just as David Cameron refused to do in the doomed TTIP negotiations between the European Union and the US a few years ago. That is extremely revealing.

Other elements of the nascent US-UK negotiations include introducing lower food standards (chlorine-washed chickens), banning any mention of climate change and establishing the right of corporations to sue the British government, without any right of appeal, for practices they regard as unfair.

The EU and total market access

But before we rush to put our bodies on the line for the status quo, it’s necessary to recall what is already happening in the absence of a newly-minted trade agreement with the USA. Because it’s eerily similar. The afore-mentioned TTIP free trade agreement (FTA) between the EU and the US was considered to pose “real and serious risks to the NHS”. There were genuine worries it could also have undermined food safety, bank regulations and environmental standards. It was negotiated in secret (you had to go into a secure reading room to examine it) and it would have established exactly the same ‘corporate court’ system as the US-UK negotiations. In fact, as a result of EU FTAs with many different countries, and also within the EU, so-called investor-state dispute tribunals are extremely common. 

In Britain, the NHS is already being privatised with mental health services on the frontline. Moreover, under EU laws on fair competition, companies such as Richard Branson’s Virgin are able to sue the NHS on the grounds of putatively poorly-run tendering processes.

However, I think there is a difference between EU free trade and a future in the US orbit. That relates to public opinion. The TTIP, which was negotiated between 2013 and 2016, is dead in the water – in April 2019, the European Commission declared that TTIP was “obsolete and no longer relevant”. Partly that outcome is a result of mushrooming governmental and public opposition to TTIP provisions as they were gradually exposed. Doubtless the European Commission would have liked to proceed, without opposition and scrutiny. But it couldn’t. The same European public opinion will influence what a future Labour government can and cannot do and what is politically possible.

The same could theoretically be said of the British government. But if Johnson wins a majority on December 12 he will take that as permission to blithely ignore public opinion for five years, by which time a US-UK FTA could be negotiated and sealed.

Not all people’s votes are the same

There is also a question here about how Brexit is negotiated which has been overlooked. The leaked negotiations revealed that a no deal Brexit (still on the cards if the UK doesn’t reach an agreement on future trade arrangements with the EU by December next year) is the US’s preferred option. Conversely if the UK is still in the Customs Union and aligned to the single market – which is Labour party policy – a US-UK FTA is seen as a “non-starter”.

So if Labour wins the election and negotiates a deal in which Customs Union membership is maintained and organises a referendum with that deal going up against Remain – as is its stated policy – that will specifically rule out any future US-UK trade negotiations which lead to the privatisation of parts of the NHS or dilution of food standards. Regardless of which side wins, it won’t happen.

However, if there is a 2^nd referendum between Johnson’s deal and Remain, a future US free trade agreement – with all that that entails – is eminently conceivable. Indeed, such a scenario – propping up a minority Conservative government to allow a ‘people’s vote’ – was put forward by Lib Dem deputy leader, Ed Davey, now that Lib Dem ‘Plan A’ – revoking Article 50 – has been conceded to be pie in the sky.

Ironically, a putatively principled opposition to Brexit could result in the worst kind of Brexit happening.