Look at Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister. This is no ‘decent man’ who got unlucky | Owen Jones
From Gaza to the Peter Mandelson row, his abandoned pledges to the ‘island of strangers’ claim, Starmer’s time at No 10 was truly dismal, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones
Good riddance, Keir Starmer. No sooner had the toppled prime minister wiped away his tears than the solemn guff began. The Labour leader is “principled” and “driven by a deep sense of public service and duty to this country”, said deputy prime minister David Lammy. He showed “the great dignity and integrity that is the mark of the man”, said energy secretary Ed Miliband. “A devoted and dedicated public servant” said home secretary Shabana Mahmood.
No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.
Labour was “politically and morally bankrupt” when he took over, Starmer declared in his resignation speech. Yet here was a man who not only served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, but declared himself “100% behind” him. When Starmer stood for leader, he praised his predecessor for bringing “radicalism” to Labour, declared we are not “going to trash the last four years”, repeatedly called Corbyn a “friend”, and denounced the “terrible” media attacks on him.
But Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for. At the centre of that plot was Morgan McSweeney, career fixer for the Labour right, and his Labour Together thinktank. It was generously funded by the undeclared donations of wealthy donors, leading to an eventual fine from the Electoral Commission. When journalists investigated those donations, McSweeney’s successor, Josh Simons, commissioned a PR firm to smear them. Simons, of course, later became an MP, before surrendering his seat to make way for Andy Burnham.
To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.
Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”
The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.
As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza. For nearly 20 weeks, as Israel reduced Gaza to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people while its leaders issued genocidal statements, Labour refused to back a ceasefire. Israel’s “right to self-defence” filled the void where Palestinians’ right to live should have been. As predominantly Muslim councillors resigned in disgust, one Labour official bragged that the party was “shaking off the fleas”. It took Labour six months to officially back a ceasefire.
Starmer was handed an election victory thanks to the total self-immolation of the Tories, yet triumphed on just a third of the vote, securing a landslide only because of Britain’s absurd electoral system. He soon proved that junking a political vision is easier than offering an alternative. Last year,when his government scrapped the universal winter fuel payment, Starmer calculated that the electorate would respect his willingness to make “tough choices”. Instead, voters were repulsed by an attack on pensioners, eventually forcing a partial U-turn. A Labour government then placed disability benefits in its sights, before mass opposition forced another partial retreat.
Competence was supposed to be Starmer’s one defining trait, but he always found scapegoats for his shambolic administration. Like Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant tasked with preparing for government, who suffered a barrage of negative briefings before being thrown under the bus, like so many others.
This “principled” leader once campaigned for free movement and reprimanded Labour for being “a bit scared of making the positive case for immigration”. As prime minister, he sounded like Enoch Powell, declaring immigration had done “incalculable damage” and risked turning Britain into an “island of strangers”, while building one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe. And that was not the only hostile environment built for a marginalised minority: ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index now rates Britain as having one of the worst records on trans rights in Europe, only narrowly above Russia.
His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.
Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US because he was a hero of the Labour right, despite his publicly recorded links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This was faction before country. This time, McSweeney was forced to carry the can, and there was no one left to throw under a bus.
The only defence is that Starmer’s failure does not belong to him alone. His faction and its cheerleaders in the media believed this brand of politics was an electoral elixir that would thrive in government. The truth is that they have no answers for the crisis-stricken Britain of the 2020s and its failed economic model.
Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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