Who could fail to celebrate the ignominious departure from politics of Sir Keir Starmer, former Honourable Member for Holborn and St Pancras, who rose to be leader of his Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition before a mercifully brief stint as the contemptible – and incompetent – prime minister of one of the most viciously racist, anti-working class, pro-Zionist Labour governments this country has ever seen.
Starmer became Labour leader with a clear mission: to expunge all traces of pro-Corbyn or anti-Zionist sentiment from the party and ensure it could continue to fulfil the role for which it was established: to defend the interests of British imperialism at home and abroad. He had already burnished his credentials with the ruling class when, as Director of Public Prosecutions, he concluded in 2009 that there was not enough evidence to prosecute the police officers who murdered Jean Charles de Menezes, and by overseeing the Crown Prosecution Service’s persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as it put pressure on the reluctant Swedish authorities to prosecute him. He boasted of his ruthless approach following the uprisings sparked by the extrajudicial police killing of Mark Duggan in 2011, when he pioneered ‘fast-track’ courts that sat 24/7 to mete out ‘swift and severe’ sentences to predominantly black working class youth.
No surprises then when this dead-eyed former ‘human rights’ lawyer defended the ‘right’ of the Zionist state to deny food, water and medicine to Palestinian children in Gaza at the start of the genocide in 2023. It was Starmer who set up a ‘coalition of the willing’ to drive forward the NATO-led war in Ukraine, when it seemed as if other European counties might falter. To say nothing of his suspension of Labour MPs who voted to scrap the pernicious two-child benefit cap in 2024, before being eventually forced to adopt the same position, or his attempt to force through an attack on pensioners’ winter fuel allowance – again, having to U-turn in the face of backbench opposition. Starmer’s profoundly racist ‘island of strangers’ speech, which deliberately echoed the ‘rivers of blood’ tradition of Enoch Powell, was a prelude to the ratcheting up of Britain’s vicious anti-immigration laws. Under Starmer, repressive legislation was ramped up while the Terrorism Act was used to stifle pro-Palestinian protest, including the proscription of Palestine Action.
Yet far from ‘Starmer’s Labour Party’ being any kind of aberration from Labour tradition, as much of the British left likes to pretend, he embodied to perfection its anti-working class, racist, Zionist, anti-democratic soul. His government proved conclusively that there is nothing whatsoever progressive about the Labour Party. Far from being ‘Trump’s poodle’, as Stop the War et al would have it, Starmer’s role was to stand for Britain’s independent imperialist interests in the world. However, in the end he proved just too incompetent and so, after a series of blunders, including his fatal support for the disgraced ambassador to the US, Lord Peter Mandelson, he was ruthlessly ejected, to be replaced by a more charismatic Northern model that the ruling class hopes will defend its interests more efficiently.
Cat Wiener
