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.

When UKIP and the Tories attack human rights legislation, whose interests are they serving?

What makes the appeal of UKIP truly curious is that it’s not only toxic, it’s completely incoherent.

It keeps telling us not to trust Westminster politicians. Vile bunch, the lot of them. Always lining their own pockets and corruptly working in their own interests.

In their next breath UKIP tells us that the burning question of our time is to get us out of the European Union, to repatriate powers.

To Westminster.

Do they actually listen to what they’re saying?

Behind this device there is a profound dishonesty. Firstly, because Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, is one of the few Members of the European Parliament to refuse to submit his expenses claims to the scrutiny of an independent audit. It seems that what he’s been doing may not stand up to detailed examination. Interesting: the man who denounces both the EU and the cupidity of MPs, would rather we didn’t look too closely at how he spends the money he takes from the EU Parliament.

Secondly, because UKIP, followed in this by the Tories, tend to make no distinction between the EU and other European institutions. So, for instance, they like to direct many of their attacks against the European Convention on Human Rights.

European Convention on Human Rights
Sponsored by Churchill, drafted by Brits

Pause for a moment to think about that. The Tories and UKIP are successfully making “human rights” a term of abuse. Lots of people, all of them as far as I can determine human, think it would be a good thing to get rid of legislation protecting rights that come simply by virtue of belonging to humanity.

Interestingly, when the Tory government launched its most recent attack, it appealed to the spirit of Churchill to stiffen resolve against this devious piece of European skulduggery. It failed to point out that it was backed by Churchill, who used British lawyers to draft it.

Nigel Farage went one step further in the descent into dishonesty, claiming that getting rid of Britain’s adherence to the ECHR wasn’t enough, we had to go a step further and leave the European Union altogether. As he knows, the Convention has nothing to do with the EU, but was adopted by the Council of Europe. That’s a larger and older body than the EU that oversees the European Court of Human Rights, charged with enforcing the Convention.

But what the heck, when you’re fooling people, why worry about mere truth?

Who needs the ECHR anyway? Interestingly, the answer is all of us.

One of the phenomena that has most marked the times we’re living through has been the unbridled behaviour of corporations. In a world where the drive for profit is increasingly unregulated, it can bring disaster on us all, as it did most spectacularly when the banks crashed in 2008.

Back in 1986, two individuals decided to take on one of these corporations. Helen Steel and David Morris began distributing leaflets about McDonald’s, making some damaging allegations against the company (some of which, though not all, were later judged to be true).

David Morris and Helen Steel, defendants in the McLibel case
They lost the case but won the battle

Britain has draconian libel laws. In particular, the burden of proof in a libel case is on the defendant, who has to show that any allegations made are true. This can be costly and difficult to do. And libel defendants do not receive legal aid in Britain.

So McDonald’s brought a libel case, as it had against a number of major media outlets, expecting the defendants to cave as the outlets had, and therefore to win a quick victory.

Three other defendants did indeed apologise, but not Steel and Morris. What followed was the longest trial in British history After ten years, some of the allegations were deemed not to have been proved, so Steel and Morris lost. However, McDonald’s realised that the McLibel case had done them far more damage than the original hand-distributed leaflets ever could, let it be known that it would not be collecting the £40,000 of damages awarded to it.

Now it strikes me that being able to stand up to the ever-increasing might of corporations like McDonald’s is essential for all of us, and likely to become even more important in the future. So resisting the corporations and such bad law as British libel legislation actually matters. And who ruled that Steel and Morris had been denied natural justice?

Why, the European Court of Human Rights. In 2005.

Its ruling was given against the British government. Today that government is calling for legislation to allow ministers to overrule judgements of the court.

It strikes me that we need to resist that suggestion. I’d rather like to see Ministers reined in, not gaining more power. Which is what the rhetoric of men like Farage suggests too.

But with them it’s only rhetoric. He’s at least as keen to see the authority of the Court curtailed. In favour of the very Westminster politicians he’s so quick to deride.

Then, of course, he’s planning to get himself elected a Westminster politician too, next May. And his party likes to take large donations from the corporate world. Besides, as we’ve seen, he likes to be less than candid about certain things. So, in a twisted way, his hostility to European legislation makes a lot of sense.

As long as you realise he’s just as self-serving as the worst politicians he denounces.