“I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind”, said Keir Starmer to Patrick Maguire, then a columnist for the New Statesman, in March 2021.
Let us then investigate past patterns of thought to better discern future direction of travel ahead of his administration’s first budget.
From 1986 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, he was part of the “Editorial Collective” for Socialist Alternatives, a magazine deeply sympathetic to sundry socialist revolutionary movements worldwide, with Marx as the lodestar.
Context, as usual, matters. The world Starmer knew at the time was divided in two.
On one side, the US and Western Europe operated under the North Alliance Treaty Organisation.
On the other, the Warsaw pact countries came together under the deadening aegis of the Soviet Union, conquered during course of World War II. With subjugation came the imposition of Marxism from 1945 to 1989.
These two worlds were separated by what Churchill named the iron curtain.
More pithily, communist Germany’s officialdom called it the “antifaschistischen Schutzwal” – the antifascist protection wall – colloquially known as the Antifa wall.
The wall gave its name to Antifa, the group pushing left-wing ideologues worldwide.
Incidentally, very few in the West rushed to the antifascist protection wall for a better life in the communist world of destitution.
Millions, however, tried to flee the East.
Some 600 East Germans were gunned down trying to escape their socialist paradise. Millions across the Soviet Empire attempted too. Most failed.
While the 1970s were the highwater mark for the Soviet Union as its philosophy and arms spread across Asia, Africa and South America and the US reeled from a disastrous Vietnam campaign and costly welfare expansion, the 1980s sounded her final bell toll.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan, cheap oil and a strength sapping ideology, pushed the crumbling superpower over edge, weighed down by its many contradictions.
In the UK, Thatcher pushed back against much of the militant tendencies of our left wing establishment, in the space of economics and culture.
Starmer, as a fully grown man, in the 1980s, saw his ideology questioned and defeated at home.
While Starmer couldn’t foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the decade, he spent his time fixated on finding ways of relaunching in a new package an old Socialist recipe at home, in the face of what he called the “authoritarian onslaught of Thatcherism”.
Lack of union solidarity along with the “alarming increase in state power to protect the individual entrepreneurs” and alleged political pusillanimity from the parliamentary Labour party meant finding new values.
The working class, the original (but disposal) oppressed class, would have to be tweaked, redefined and broadened.
Firstly, not all working men of limited means would be included. Only the “fighting (unionised) section of the working class”, as Sir Keir wrote, would feature.
Secondly, because the white working class had shown itself too whimsical, the new working class would be enlarged to include a plethora of self-defined oppressed groups, defined by race and sex, bringing back the politics of biology, shunned by most after the horrors of World War II, in the process. This new pluralism he explained at the time would encompass “negotiating and counterposing the interests of producers with the interests of consumers, the community, women, and minority groups, the unemployed, the environment, etc”.
“This, of course, is a fundamentally anti-capitalist pluralism”, he added in the winter of 1986, heralding the advent of today’s ubiquitous stakeholder capitalism, Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) politics.
Pluralism, however, did not mean individualism. Individuals would, in fact, drown into the old Marxist dichotomous recipe made up of oppressed and oppressors.
The path, it was acknowledged, would be “full of contradictions”. There could be “no prior harmony between all the component parts of the alternative movement”.
Indeed, what long lasting oppression overlaps can be found between women, “trans”, African Christians, followers of the peace creed and homosexuals?
In a discussion with Hilary Wainwright, Starmer explained that Labour would have to open “the party to those groups so that they can use it for putting their demands forward on their own terms”.
The Labour Party would become a repository for “eccentric ideas”, malleable and wide-open to the most extreme political outcomes.
The aim would be to project a fictitious “majority of minorities” across all layers of society, leading in due course to socialist hegemony.
Political negotiation, and distribution of power, between each oppressed group would be the constant and ultimate goal.
From this viewpoint, two outlines become discernible: First, the concept of “communities”; Second, socialist self-management.
What role, if any should the police play, in civil society? “Who are they protecting and from what? Who controls them and for whose benefit?” Mused Starmer in 1987.
His answer, explaining the alacrity with which he genuflected in June 2020, when Black Lives Matter burst onto our streets, was that the police should be accountable for the community they serve, not the law passed in parliament.
The implications are striking.
Indeed, if you are, for instance, a police officer in Rotherham, you speak to community elders to solve problems (or brush them under the carpet).
Or, if you happen to believe firmly that a woman can have a penis, and that children should be taught this ineluctable truth in nursery you are emancipated from any “middle class” constraints.
Or, indeed, if as a tax-payer subsidised NGO borders are an inconvenience and you want to ship illegals from one country to the next, breaking national law in the process, nothing stops you. You are merely on the side of the oppressed.
The destruction your behaviour causes is the price society has to pay for your self-perceived oppression or the defence of someone else’s.
The corollary to the idea of many fold communities is socialist self-management detached in large measure from democratic oversight.
Each oppressed group can run its own local, national or international affairs as it sees fit.
Parliamentary support is nearly superfluous; much more important is the common sense of our age –the consensus.
The latter is a product of political negotiation between each moving part of the “emancipatory” kaleidoscope.
These, as Sir Keir wrote, can be brought together “at local, regional, national or international level” – from the local council to the United Nations, by-passing parliament if needed.
Of vital importance to these groups, however, is funding. It is only on this point that the alliance of the oppressed finds common ground.
The internal contradictions disappear when Mammon enters the stage.
It is only then that the monolith, the “middle class, white, married, home owning, straight”, Christian man, along with his subjugated spouse and offspring, comes into view.
He becomes a milch cow forced to feed this extravaganza of ungrateful oppressed groups.
Demoralised, his values are mercilessly exploited while he is robbed into penury through taxation, inflation and regulation, devoured like a great stag by a pack of demented hyenas.
The contradictions evident in the emancipatory movement will only show when the milch cow stops producing – the movement’s Achille’s heel.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Communism collapsed. But Keir, godless but deeply religious, clung to the flotsam of his noxious ideology, finding solace in the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.
By 1997 Blair and Brown gave the Socialist Alternatives view of the world its wings. Keir never looked back.
He left the extremist society in 2008, human rights and legal aid having become his bread and butter, to become Director of the Crown Prosecution Service, his head filled with dreams of revenge and political hegemony.
Keir Starmer never changed his strategic views. He stayed the course and was duly rewarded for it. He will not change his spots anytime soon.
In the words of a schoolfriend, Starmer was “left, left, left” in the 1970s.
He still firmly believes in the emancipatory movements as a tool for perpetual revolution, with one oppressed group replacing another as convenience demands.
Reality and fantasy are often in competition, in particular in the world of politics.
Lenin and Mussolini believed that mythology was more important than reality in the formation of political movements.
The myth of endless oppressed groups needing to mobilise against a monolithic, Christian, straight, property owning, white oppressor has been a powerful strangulating strategy, defeating traditionalists across the board – perhaps irreversibly.
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In this Sir Keir and his socialist revolutionary buddies have been extraordinarily successful and effective.
As Peter Hitchens wrote Starmer and his “group’s preoccupation with sexual politics and green issues has since then become the ideology of all the major parties”.
Indeed, as Starmer said: “The big issue we were grappling with then was how the Labour Party, or the left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality – feminist politics, green politics, LGBT”.
“It was incredibly exciting” – for him.
Having managed to install generalised self-management and embedded an ever-growing number of taxpayer-subsidised oppressed communities into the body politic of Britannia, he and his friends have managed to transition the United Kingdom from a dynamic country into a latter stage sclerotic Soviet Union by design in a mere dedaces.
Socialist hegemony is one thing, the health and fitness of a nation is quite another.