Keir Starmer's challenge

Just twenty minutes before the results of the election for a new Labour leader were announced, I was still on tenterhooks. The signs had all been hopeful, but I’ve been disappointed by election results too often before. It was conceivable that the Party membership might have decided that the best person to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be another Corbynist.

After two general election defeats under Corbynist leadership, it seemed insane to try our luck at a third. But was a presumption of sanity justifiable?

I’m glad to say that ultimately it was. Despite my anxiety, the new leader was Keir Starmer, elected on the first ballot with 56.2% of the vote. A comprehensive victory and a solid mandate.

Keir Starmer (right)
with Jeremy Corbyn, whom he replaces as Labour leader

Starmer is a former of Director of Public Prosecutions, leading all public criminal prosecutions in England and Wales, a role he played with great effectiveness.

Before that he had been a defence barrister, notably defending the McLibel case, where McDonald’s threw all its weight as a major international corporation, into persecuting two individuals who had protested against them.

He was elected to Parliament in 2015. That meant being caught up at once in the string of crises that started with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, followed by the 2016 referendum that led to Brexit, general election defeats in 2017 and, crushingly, in 2019, and finally the Coronavirus pandemic. If Starmer had been hoping for a quiet life, he must have been badly disappointed.

He served in Corbyn’s team for three years, even though he’s no Corbynist. That’s a key quality: without being a member, he’s established that he can work with a wing of the party which, though reduced to a minority now, still holds massive sway amongst the membership.

Corbynists were keen to drive non-Corbynist MPs out of Parliament. It’s deeply unpleasant and damaging to the party, forced to focus in on itself and riven by factionalism. That’s why, though there are understandable calls within the new Labour majority to retaliate in kind, they need to be resisted.

No purges has to be the watchword, and I think Starmer is well-placed to issue it.

That isn’t only for ethical reasons. A pure, homogeneous party is far too narrow. The insistence by Corbynism on its own version of socialism has driven many out of the party. Much more seriously, it has driven voters away. As Phil Wilson, a former Labour MP who lost his seat in the December 2019 debacle, puts it:

There was no need for Corbynistas to listen to them [voters]; they needed to listen to the Corbynistas. Corbynistas knew what was best.

We need to reach out to voters. That means that we need to reach out to those who walked away from the Corbynist Labour Party, without losing those who stuck with it because of Corbyn. We need to embrace all wings of the party.

In other words, we need to rebuild Labour as a broad church. That means including the Corbynists. Ironically, the very expression ‘broad church’ was treated as practically obscene in Corbynist circles.

This is a paradox. Starmer has to rebuild the Labour Party with the Corbynists but in spite of the Corbynism. Why? Because it’s the hard Left, most recently represented by Corbynism, that has ensured that Labour has held power in only thirteen of the last forty years.

In my lifetime, I’ve twice lived through an experience I would have hoped not to live through even once. That’s Labour falling under the control of the hard Left. It happened first in the early 1980s. In the 1983 election, Labour won fewer seats in parliament than in any other election since 1935.

Making the Party electable again took fourteen years. The bulk of that work was done by a leader from the soft Left of the Party, Neil Kinnock. He had the misfortune of losing two elections himself, but at each of them he increased the tally of Labour MPs. That prepared for Tony Blair’s victory in 1997.

In 2015, Labour did it again. We let the hard Left take control. And, lo and behold, the result is that we’ve once more been reduced to the lowest number of Parliamentary seats since 1935. Worse even than 1983: 202 seats compared to 209.

Keir Starmer, like Neil Kinnock, is a man of the soft Left. He’s indicated his willingness to unite the party, claiming he would neither trash the achievements of the Blair Labour government nor those of the Corbyn period.

He has pledged to work with the government to combat the Coronavirus pandemic, but to oppose it actively when it does too little, or the wrong thing, or the right thing too late.

He seems to have all the right attributes. He could indeed rebuild the Party. Whether he can do it in time for the next election remains to be seen – Corbynism has left us low indeed. But he might.

What he, and the Party generally, must do, however, is learn from this experience as, apparently, we didn’t learn from the experience of 1983.

It’s important to keep the hard Left on board. They must be free to act as a ginger group, they must be able to influence policy, they deserve respect and cordiality.

But the hard Left must never be allowed to take sole control of the party again.

Once was an error. Twice was ridiculous. Three times would be suicidal.