If Starmer wants to lead he needs to find that little voice inside
This is an updated version of a piece published earlier
Has Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, mislaid his conscience? Or is he just all about winning?
Starmer was recently asked by LBC radio’s astute Nick Ferrari if “a siege - cutting off power, cutting off water - ” to Gaza was a proportionate response to the massacre by Hamas on October 7.
Innocent civilians in Gaza are dying in their thousands. Basic necessities – food, water, fuel, medicines – are in critically short supply. A siege is a death sentence especially for the young, the elderly, the sick and the vulnerable.
‘Yes’ Starmer said diffidently, Israel did have that right. You could see the cogs turning. Having banished the spectre of anti-Semitism in his party he wasn’t about to offer a hostage to fortune during what may be the last party conference before a general election.
I don’t believe for a moment that Starmer meant to condone the killing of Palestinian civilians. He made a split-second political calculation live on air, not out of conviction, but expediency.
But he badly misjudged the depth of feeling in the party at the plight of ordinary Gazans - especially among Muslims. Labour’s metro-mayors Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham broke ranks and called for a ceasefire. So did the leader of the popular Scottish Labour party leader Anas Sarwar who has family under fire in Gaza.
Starmer will come back from this. Labour remains a staunch supporter of a two-state solution and a fair deal for Palestinians. A formula will be found to keep the party together. It has come too far to falter over a loose phrase.
But the question keeps popping up: What is Starmer in politics for? Is this ex-human rights lawyer a champion of the underdog, the marginalised, the dispossessed? Is he a fighter for social justice? Or is he another company man – a technocrat- who plays the odds?
Starmer famously helped two penniless Greenpeace activists beat back a defamation lawsuit by fast-food giant MacDonalds in the 1990s in a landmark case upholding free speech. The so-called McLibel Two had distributed a handful of leaflets outside a couple of McOutlets titled “What’s wrong with MacDonalds.”
The multinational sued for defamation in the UK courts and won. Leave to appeal to the House of Lords was refused so they took the case to the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) with Starmer’s help. It found that the two were denied a fair trial because they were refused legal aid.
The case rewrote the rules. Big corporations trying to silence critics by threatening to bankrupt them through a legal system heavily skewed in their favour were no longer immune.
Is Keir Starmer a champion of the underdog or a just another company man?
I do not wish to trivialise the suffering of the people of Gaza or Israel by drawing reductionist analogies. But suffering, to the sufferer, is by definition, relative. Fairness and justice, however, less so. These are the impulses that bind progressive politics and should be the core aim of any such party seeking power.
Which poses the question: why is Starmer not raising Cain about the victims of injustice in his own back yard? It’s not as if there is a shortage of injustice or of underdogs.
What better definition of an underdog than the hundreds of sub-postmasters falsely convicted of fraud, harassed, bankrupted and in some cases driven to suicide because of a faulty computer system?
The Post Office scandal is, by a country mile, the most shameful miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Why is Starmer’s team not all over it?
The Grenfell Tower tragedy. How many are waiting to be rehoused or receive compensation? Windrush? How many have died without restitution?
HS2: a first-class piece of investigative reporting by The Times details how highly paid HS2 executives, according to whistle blowers, covered up cost overruns in the billions while entire communities in its path were bulldozed into oblivion. This is perfect hunting ground for a party led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions.
Then there’s the great Covid disaster: unscrupulous private companies fast-tracked by friendly politicians trousered millions of taxpayers’ money in return for providing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) which all-too-often didn’t work. To her credit Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said she will go after the fraudsters.
Power attracts power. Political parties that succumb to corporate lobbying is old news. Starmer is on the threshold of power, so the corporate sector is shovelling money at Labour. The business world flocked to the Labour conference in Liverpool.
Starmer’s argument for never deviating from the centre or leaving as little room as possible for the Tories to portray him as soft is utilitarian, simple and compelling.
Without winning power, change is impossible. Reshaping Labour by dragging the party onto the centre ground and erasing Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy by being seen as business-friendly and not saying anything that could remotely be interpreted as anti-Semitic (or in time of war anti-Israeli) is therefore essential.
That’s a perfectly logical position. Labour’s love of martyrdom over power is largely why progressive politics in Britain has moved in fits and starts since World War II.
But the impulses that drive the centre-left are surely universal: fairness and a level playing field. What ties a Palestinian, just like his Israeli neighbour, to a sub-postmaster in Hertfordshire whose life has literally been destroyed, or a victim of the Grenfell fire or of the injustice of Windrush scandal are a common desire justice and equal treatment.
Faith in politics and its ability to deliver a better future for more than a tiny minority of the rich and the powerful is at rock bottom. Politics has become a clash of identities fuelled by politicians – like Boris Johnson or Victor Orban - who see an advantage in labelling their opponents as ‘other’.
But, from the refugee camps of the Middle East (or Myanmar or Venezuela) to the sink estates of Middlesborough, hope of a square deal (and in some cases a square meal) is fading. Lost trust and fading hope are a recipe for instability.
Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza springs perhaps from a desire to be seen as grown-up on the world stage. Or perhaps he wishes to march in lock-step with the United States in anticipation of his first visit to the White House as the next British Prime Minister.
But there is more to leadership than being a grown-up. There is that little voice inside us that we call principle or, if you prefer, conscience. Starmer needs to locate his before he becomes indistinguishable from the party he seeks to replace.