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.

Not So Great Expectations

Recently I was struck by a quote from geographer Danny Dorling on the fact that, in 2020, the UK recorded the highest number of excess deaths since the Second World War.

“All these excess death calculations that are being made, we’re comparing ourselves in 2020 with five truly awful years,” said Dorling last month, “whereas other countries are comparing themselves with the best years they’ve ever had.”

Excess deaths are defined as deaths above what could be expected based on an average of the previous five years. Because of Covid-19, there were nearly 85,000 excess deaths last year. In the first three months of 2021, there were over 32,000 excess deaths.

However, the problem in using excess deaths in the UK as an indicator of the unprecedented nature of the Covid pandemic is that, because of the political choice of austerity, between 2014 and 2019 – the previous five years – excess deaths were already rising. There were, for example, over 32,000 excess deaths in 2015, over 20,000 excess deaths in 2016 and 2017 and over 22,000 excess deaths in 2018.

In other words, because of the preceding “five truly awful years”, the huge rise in excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 was less pronounced than it would otherwise have been. In yet other words, the true extent of the present human catastrophe overseen Conservatives has been masked by the previous human catastrophe overseen by the Conservatives. You might call that ironic.

Lifting the veil

This can happen because a veil of denialism still surrounds austerity. With Covid, the bare facts are generally accepted even if the reasons for the enormous death toll – at the time of writing the sixth highest in the world – are blotted out. Austerity does not even have that chink of light. A cheer-leading consensus has blinded a rational acceptance of its effects. The entire political class was in cahoots – though austerity was carried out by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, the pre-Corbyn Labour opposition voiced its support from the sidelines.

Austerity was largely implemented through swingeing cuts to benefits and central government funding to local authorities. A combination of the popular and the invisible.

The ground for the former was prepared by a massive, and effective, propaganda campaign, portraying benefit claimants – especially allegedly sick claimants – as scroungers living off the naive generosity of the taxpayer. In addition to direct cuts in benefits – the benefits cap and freeze – there was a huge increase in the sanctioning (the withdrawal of all financial support) of claimants. Over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013, a 345% rise on their 2001-2008 average (they had been introduced by the previous Labour government).

Local authorities, however, bore the brunt. The central government grant to local councils was cut by 49%. Given that most local government spending (around 60%) goes on social care, this is where the axe fell, with palpable consequences for mortality rates. In 2014, there were a million fewer social care visits to the elderly than there had been five years before.

There is nothing painless about cuts; they don’t just eradicate ‘waste’. “ … the more cuts there have been to public health, social services and benefits – particularly for people in old age – the more earlier deaths there have been in the UK,” says Dorling. “Cuts that prevent visits by social workers to elderly people reduce their chances of being found after a fall. Cuts that make it harder to rehouse someone who is currently in a hospital bed back into the community result in hospital beds not being available for others.”

All this was compounded by what was happening to the NHS. Though formally “protected” from austerity, between 2010 and 2015 health spending rose by an average of 0.5% compared to an annual uprating of 4% since 1950.

In 2017, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that the post-2010 squeeze on public finances was linked to around 120,000 excess deaths in England alone, with the over 60s and care home residents most affected. The researchers estimated there were more than 45,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014 and over 152,000 people could die between 2015 and 2020 unless the “mortality gap” was closed by more funding.

Mind the gap

But such was the size of the mortality gap, it was starting to eat into life expectancy. In autumn 2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revised its predictions for life expectancy for both women and men, cutting the estimate for both by about a year – an estimate that had been made just two years previously. Life expectancy was flatlining. After rising consistently for decade after decade, it was now barely creeping upwards. During David Cameron’s time in office it rose by a month a year for men and by just two weeks for women. By contrast, in the 1940s and early 1950s life expectancy rose by a year every three years and accelerated again in the 1970s and ‘80s.

This means, explains Dorling, “that 110 years of improving life expectancy in the UK are now officially over. The implications for this are huge and the reasons the statistics were revised is a tragedy on an enormous scale.”

The evidence kept accruing. In February 2020, the Marmot Review, an investigation into health inequalities originally commissioned by the Brown government, found that overall life expectancy had failed to increase for a decade and had actually declined for the poorest 10% of women. The author, Michael Marmot, blamed austerity for taking a “significant toll” on the nation’s health and being responsible for “flatlining life expectancy”.

And the pension industry believes life expectancy is actually falling. In 2018, The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries cut adult life expectancy by six months in what it said was “a trend as opposed to a blip”. In March 2019, Continuous Mortality Investigation, a company owned by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that the life expectancy of men and women aged 65 had fallen by five months from 2017. According to one group of analysts, the main reason was that deaths in 2018 were “particularly high”.

However, there is a silver lining. In 2017 the Financial Times had reported that the “sharp slowdown” in life expectancy could wipe £310 billion from the deficits of large companies’ final salary pension schemes.

In an irony typical of this economic system, deteriorating public health is actually good for the financial health of big firms.

At present, official life expectancy is stalling, as opposed to actually declining as it is in the US, but further revisions are not unlikely.

For whom the bell tolls

Changes in life expectancy such as these are momentous. Besides the human cost, they signal that something very significant is happening to an economic and social system. The collapse of the Soviet Union was preceded by rising mortality and declining health spending. In 1976, a French demographer – widely ignored at the time – correctly predicted the demise of the Soviet system on the basis of rising infant mortality figures. Coincidentally, since 2014 infant mortality has started increasing in England.

But despite our free institutions and allegedly adversarial media, stagnating life expectancy here and now has created nothing more than a faint murmur. The ONS’s downward revisions referred to earlier were buried in an appendix to a press release. The BBC can claim that Covid “has undone the progress made in the last decade or so” and ignore the pre-Covid rise in excess deaths (that its own graphs show!). Matt Hancock can pontificate about adding five years to life expectancy through healthy eating.

Nothing is being suppressed. All the information contradicting official complacency can be readily collated (I just have). But in the absence of mass exposure and repetition – the secret of news becoming received wisdom – the truth about austerity and life expectancy reaches, at best, a minority who want to hear about it.

And far from the damage being repaired, austerity – as enshrined by Rishi Sunak’s last budget – will continue. With the evidence about the effect of austerity in 2010s now clear, the government is responding by upping the dose.

Meanwhile, the land of make believe strides on, brimming with absolutely unwarranted self-confidence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basic income versus the economy of coercion

 Proving basic income is affordable is merely the first skirmish in long war

In 2015, an academic from Birmingham University asserted that, contrary to the beliefs of sceptics, basic income was eminently affordable. Using Canada as his example, Richard Pereira quantified the likely effects of savings from the abolition of existing social security benefits, reductions in bureaucratic costs, a smaller burden on public health care and a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion. His conclusion was that you could introduce a basic income at a ‘decent level’ without additional personal taxes. In fact, basic income might even enable reductions in personal taxes.

One of the priorities Pereira identified in making basic income affordable was plugging ‘tax leakage’ by multinationals and the rich. “Vast wealth is channelled away from public goods though … shady and secretive offshore jurisdictions,” Pereira wrote. “Some of the largest multinational companies are paying zero tax and receiving tax refunds and subsidies simultaneously.”

The release of the Panama Papers has lent Pereira’s claims about the affordability of basic income a distinct air of, to use a contemporary political buzzword, credibility. According to the Tax Justice Network, global offshore wealth amounts to $21-32 trillion. Get hold of that vast wealth and the whole political landscape shifts. Austerity loses its justification and basic income becomes a feasible aim. “Some may disagree with the notion of an unconditional cash grant, or object to it going to everyone. Just don’t say we can’t afford it,” noted one Panama Papers post-mortem.

The realisation that a colossal trove of wealth exists to fund basic income is coupled with a growing awareness that punitive welfare systems don’t even succeed in meeting their most elemental aim – that of saving money. All that checking on people’s fitness to work and whether they have applied for 47 jobs that week as they promised in their job search agreement, costs an inordinate amount of money. According the UK’s National Audit Office, the cost to the taxpayer of the private contractors carrying out fit to work tests is at least £600 million more than the government is forecast to save in benefits reductions. The ‘age of austerity’ should be renamed the ‘age of needless pain’.

But there is a danger that basic income advocates are lulled into the belief that all they need to do is rationally convince the public and policy-makers that a basic income is affordable, will lighten the burden on multiple public services and vastly increase personal freedom. People will slowly see the light.

This, however, is less than half the battle. A great many, very powerful people will not want basic income regardless of how affordable it is. They will fight against it mercilessly precisely because it will vastly increase individual freedom, and their entire worldview rests on human subjection.

The great German psycho-analyst and socialist Erich Fromm advocated a basic income sixty years ago his book, The Sane Society – he called it a ‘guaranteed subsistence minimum’. After refuting the idea that basic income sounds too ‘fantastic’ to be affordable, Fromm was less sanguine about convincing everybody that a basic income was necessary and right. “However, the suspicions against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not unfounded from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership of capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer,” he said.

Even more than in Fromm’s day ownership of capital is now overtly predicated upon forcing people to accept the work conditions that are on offer. Economic recovery after 2008 rests upon low wage, insecure service sector work. According to economists, all the net growth in jobs in the US since 2005 has been in ‘alternative work arrangements’, such as contract and temporary posts. In Britain, zero hour contracts have mushroomed during recovery from recession, while other forms of flexible work contract have proliferated. In continental Europe, massive political weight has been expended to make it easier for employers to fire workers. In France, the Nuit debout protests are against a planned labour reform that would place the country’s entire labour laws up for negotiation with employers, including the 35 hour week.

All these changes are inherently about increasing coercion. “The labour market is never free,” says Paul Mason is his book, Postcapitalism. “It was created through coercion and is re-created every day by laws, regulations, prohibitions, fines and the fear of unemployment.”

The rise in sanctioning people on benefits in Britain for not looking for work with sufficient ardour and the hounding of sick and disabled people is not primarily about saving money because, as is evident now, money is conspicuously not being saved. The reason is to force people to take work at wages they can’t live on, make life on benefits so astoundingly awful that zero-hour contracts seem attractive, and to sound a clear warning to those in work that they need to knuckle under and obey. “Economics is the method,” said Margaret Thatcher. “The object is to change the soul.”

By contrast basic income threatens to undo all the hard work of neoliberalism in shoring up the power of employers. At present, as one basic income advocate says, “all negotiating power is in the hands of those offering the jobs and not those looking for them”. Basic income will grant palpable bargaining power to individuals in the labour market, and, for the first time, allow genuine personal choice. Erich Fromm thought basic income would be the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees. Work will have to be interesting, or well-paid enough for people to want to do, or will be automated because no-one will.*.

But to the rulers of our societies this represents, not a dream of liberation, but a nightmare of the collapse of social coercion. Who knows where such a society will lead. Marilola Wili of the Swiss group, Generation Basic Income, contends that basic income will “unpredictably set human forces free in ways one may have never thought about”.

“Work for a salary is the bedrock of the system,” says Paul Mason. “We accept it because as our ancestors learned the hard way, if you don’t obey, you don’t eat.” Basic income will loosen that bedrock and quite possibly, in time, smash it completely. For that reason, many people at the summit of society will do anything to ensure it doesn’t come to pass. Let’s not kid ourselves, achieving basic income will be an almighty struggle. But it’s a struggle we need to embrace.

*Automation represents another danger basic income might pose to capitalism. According to Karl Marx, ‘the most fundamental law of capitalism’ is the tendency for the profit rate to fall as machines replace human labour, which is the ultimate source of value. If basic income cause a spurt in automation and a reduction in labour intensive employment, as unpopular jobs are increasingly mechanised, then profit rates may well, in time, crumble. Capitalism in the West has become reliant on low-wage, low productivity but labour intensive service sector jobs, which do not have to be done by people and in the future almost certainly won’t be, regardless of whether basic income is adopted. But basic income will accelerate that process. Human, sweatshop labour in China and East Asia has provided an enormous boost to profitability for multinational corporations, but that source of profit is drying up as the Chinese economy, and thus globalisation, slows. It is also true that, according to Marxian economics, various forces counteract the tendency for profit to fall, such as increased wages boosting consumer spending. Basic income could also be an offsetting force to falling profits, so its economic impact may be complicated.