Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Keir Starmer: A More Presentable British Socialist?


By Madeleine Kearns
Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Last December, the Labour Party suffered its worst defeat since 1935. In the run-up to the election, the party’s manifesto received heavy criticism for being unrealistic, overreaching, and unpersuasive. Former Labour Party leader Tony Blair described it as “promising the earth but from a planet other than Earth.” But what really doomed the party was its leader — Jeremy Corbyn.

Sir Keir Starmer — who succeeded Corbyn on April 4 — certainly seems to be an improvement.

Starmer’s skepticism of Corbyn was evident early on. He did not initially back the former leader and was later part of the effort to oust him in 2016. When this failed, Starmer served as shadow Brexit secretary and helped guide the party toward a more coherent stance on Brexit.

The son of a nurse and a tool maker, Starmer attended a grammar school and then Oxford University. A human-rights lawyer, he was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. As National Review’s Kyle Smith wryly observed, Starmer is “younger and handsomer” than Corbyn and is even rumored to have been the inspiration for the fictional romantic lead, Mr. Darcy, in Bridget Jones’ Diary. Still, he faces an uphill struggle. To win in the next election, Labour will need to swing 10 percent of the electorate.

So far, Starmer has managed to sidestep the toxicity of the Labour Party’s ongoing civil war. His parliamentary career began in 2015, after the Blair-Brown era had imploded in the controversy of the Iraq War. Distancing himself from this contentious era, Starmer has made an end to illegal wars one of his top priorities. At the same time, he has managed to distance himself from the more radical, progressive “Corbynista” wing within the Labour Party. He has apologized unreservedly for the anti-Semitism and vowed to root it out. His new shadow housing secretary has said that Communists are not welcome in the party. And Matt Pound, head of a Corbyn-skeptic group Labour First, was another Starmer appointment. Pound is a self-described “full-time” organizer against the “hard left.”

“Never again can Labour be a party that millions of people feel they cannot trust to govern, to manage our economy, or to keep our country safe,” Starmer said earlier this month, positioning himself as a more moderate, unifying figure. But can he achieve this while still maintaining Corbyn-era leftist policies? Starmer intends to re-nationalize the railways and utilities, increase taxes on top earners and companies, abolish university tuition fees, and “put the green new deal at the heart of everything we do” — all reminiscent of Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto.

Starmer has called his party to never lose sight of the “voters ‘lent’ to the Tories in 2019.” He has argued that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the “desperate fragility of the state’s safety net and the unfairness of a broken system: from our chronically underfunded NHS and care service to our woefully inadequate social security system and the lack of protection for our self-employed and small businesses.”

The trouble is that the Tories had already thought of this before the crisis struck. Even in the last election, Johnson worked hard to distance himself from the controversial years of Tory austerity. Starmer has said that he intends to “stand up for universal services and defend our NHS.” But Johnson’s government has done the same. The Tories’ most recent budget offered the biggest spending splurge in decades. And the pandemic has only made the conservatives swing even further to the left. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, recently indicated that the government would establish a coronavirus jobs-retention scheme for all employers, covering up to 80 percent of wages, as well as injecting £7 billion ($8.7 billion) into the welfare system.

During the Blair years, the Labour Party combined social liberalism with more centrist economic policies. Now, Johnson’s conservative government occupies that popular spot. Given that socialism has not been politically viable in Britain for nearly 50 years, and given that the Tories have swung hard to the left, Starmer’s biggest challenge may be that his brand is irrelevant.

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