How Starmer careened from honourable left to racist right

It’s been almost a year since British Prime Minister Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to one of the largest landslide victories in modern history.

The reason for the triumph is easy to comprehend. Britain had endured 14 years of degradation and despair under a series of incompetent and corrupt Conservative governments. The British people hoped that Starmer’s Labour would restore decency, honesty, administrative capability and national pride. 

This has not happened. Ten months on, Starmer is entrenched as the deeply unpopular leader of a despised government. 

Good judges doubt that Starmer will be able to retain his own Holborn seat in the next election, let alone steer Labour to a second victory. As unhappiness grows among Labour MPs, some are beginning to wonder whether Starmer can survive as leader until the next election. 

The reasons for this collapse are not hard to find. Starmer promised a new integrity in public life. Instead, he has been dragged into a series of minor sleaze scandals, displaying at best wretched judgment and at worst depravity. 

He is almost as dishonest as Boris Johnson, and that really is saying a great deal. Labour has failed to restore sound economic management or restore animal spirits to a stagnant economy. As foreign secretary, the hapless David Lammy can generously be described as entirely out of his depth, while Starmer’s insistence on selling arms to Israel in the present circumstances defies comprehension.

This week’s debacle over migration makes for an especially helpful case study. It shows why Starmer is such a bad prime minister. 

Serious alarm

There are serious problems with the system, and a migration white paper is certainly needed. Not all of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s proposals lack merit. 

The main problem is Starmer. The words he used to justify new measures to target migrants were dishonest, cynical, inflammatory and racist. 

The prime minister told journalists: “I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.” But he said exactly the opposite in the recent past. 

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Running for the Labour leadership five years ago, Starmer insisted that “we have to make the case for the benefits of migration”, adding that Britain doesn’t “scapegoat” migrants and that failings on public services “are not the fault of migrants or people who come here”. 

Now Starmer is echoing Enoch Powell, who notoriously introduced racism into British politics in 1968, with the claim that migration is making Britain an “island of strangers”.

It is all well and good when a young person with no experience of the world reconsiders her or his world view. But Starmer is in his early sixties. He has knocked about the place. It is therefore a matter of serious alarm that he should now adopt a set of new opinions about almost every single one of the great issues of our day.

When Starmer stood for the Labour leadership, he promised to end tuition fees, raise taxes on high earners, take “rail, mail, energy and water” back into public ownership, put human rights at the heart of foreign policy, and defend free movement of people. He also insisted that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was his friend.

It is perfectly reasonable - indeed a sign of moral strength and intellectual capacity - to reassess one’s opinion when facts change. Starmer’s problem is that the facts have not changed. 

The case for renationalisation of our public services is actually stronger today than it was when Starmer advocated it five years ago. The same applies to higher taxes on the wealthy. The economic and human arguments for free movement are as powerful today, when Starmer seeks to stop it, as they were when he argued in favour of migration five years ago. Human rights matter even more today amid the slaughter in Gaza than they did when Starmer pledged to put them at the heart of foreign policy.

Dangerous pattern

Starmer is, in short, a shambles. There’s no worldview, consistency or intellectual analysis. His opinions on the great issues of our time are prone to alter without explanation or warning, and at a moment’s notice. 

This unstable pattern of behaviour would be worrying indeed in anyone holding a responsible position - and is frightening, and even dangerous, in a prime minister.

But there is a rhyme and reason for Starmer’s political and moral meanderings. This is well explained in a powerful and well-informed book by investigative journalist and anti-corruption researcher Paul Holden, which comes out later this year.

Starmer's Labour has joined Kemi Badenoch's Tories and Farage's Reform in the battle for a small group of racist voters

In The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy, Holden does not attempt to breathe meaning or clarity into the tragic emptiness of Starmer’s politics. That would be an impossible task. But he convincingly argues that underneath the intellectual and moral chaos, there is, if we look hard enough, a rather pathetic consistency. 

Holden explains that Starmer, having no beliefs of his own, defines himself in terms set for him by his political opponents. In the Labour leadership election, Starmer saw his principal opponent as Rebecca Long-Bailey, champion of the Labour left, and he systematically copied her policies. Once established as leader, Starmer knew he had to beat Rishi Sunak’s Tories - hence the steady rightwards shift. 

Now as prime minister, Starmer is looking ahead towards the next election, where he perceives Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as the looming threat. Holden argues that, just as he shifted his policies leftwards in order to fend off Long-Bailey, Starmer is now moving towards the far right in order to position himself for the battle against Farage. Since Farage is the political heir of Powell, it’s natural that Starmer should adopt Powell’s language. 

I have read an advance proof copy of Holden’s book. It beautifully elucidates Starmer’s careen from the honourable left to the racist right of British politics, from Long-Bailey to Farage in five short years. As a result, Starmer’s Labour has joined Kemi Badenoch’s Tories and Farage’s Reform in the battle for a small group of racist voters. 

A vast space has opened up in the centre ground for a party ready to make the case for honesty, decency and humanity in our public life. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.