I voted for Starmer in 2020. I'm not making the same mistake twice.
I voted for Keir Starmer in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election. I liked his pledges, I liked his rhetoric and I took him at his word when he said:
Corbyn made our party the party of anti-austerity and he was right to do so. We must retain that, not trash it. We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document.
Starmer’s pledges have since been abandoned and scrubbed from his website. His rhetoric is unrecognisable, his word broken. I feel ashamed of the small part that I played in his rise to power and I’m here to warn you: do not empower this man, he will betray you.
2021: Wait a minute, this isn’t what I voted for
It first became clear that Starmer wasn’t the man he’d claimed to be when, in 2021, he instructed his parliamentary party to allow the passage of two abhorrent pieces of Tory legislation.
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act which authorised law-breaking by undercover cops.
The Overseas Operations Bill which, in breach of international law, protects the British armed forces from prosecution for atrocities as grave as torture, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
With a sense of whiplash, I cancelled my Labour membership. I couldn’t be a part of this. I suppose it was my fault really. I’d taken “No more illegal wars” as a commitment to peace and human rights. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that his pledge meant “legalise war crimes”. This wouldn’t be the last time that Starmer wriggled out of a pledge on a technicality.
2022: Excuses, excuses
By 2022 Starmer was proudly distancing himself from his own pledges, which he framed as unpopular:
I’m ready to break pledges to make Labour electable.
If you don't like the changes that we've made, I say the door is open, and you can leave.
This framing was bogus. Starmer was a mildly popular opposition leader (+22 on the first day of his leadership) who abandoned a number of popular pledges like public ownership of rail (+48), mail (+57), energy (+55) and water (+55) and abolishing the House of Lords (+46), and is now mildly unpopular (-6).
Another excuse Starmer’s allies make for his abandoned pledges is that they’re too expensive, here’s Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer:
Someone who doesn’t get rid of expensive spending commitments after the triple economic catastrophes of Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Liz Truss shouldn’t be trusted to hold sharp objects let alone the nation’s purse strings
This argument ignores the fact that many of the pledges Starmer has abandoned are free. It costs nothing to treat trans people with dignity but Labour has gone from promising pro-trans reforms to meeting with anti-trans hate groups, opposing “gender ideology” being taught in schools and promising to segregate trans people into hospital “side rooms”.
It also ignores that, while many of the pledges Starmer has abandoned have short-term costs, they more than pay for themselves in the medium term. It’s the same economically illiterate austerity argument made by Cameron & Osbourne, and we already know how that panned out.
None of these excuses washed with the Labour membership, 31% of whom have left since Starmer became leader.
Starmer, it turns out, never intended to keep his word
In recent years it’s become clear that Starmer didn’t “pragmatically triangulate” or “go on a journey” to the right as his supporters claim. He deliberately hid intentions from Labour members. Starmer fans will no doubt balk at this suggestion, so here are the receipts.
In 2022 the Financial Times’ Sebastian Payne revealed what the Starmer campaign told him in 2020:
Look at those Ten Pledges. There’s not a single one of those that will tie our hands when we’ve won this leadership.
Margret Hodge reported hearing similar, as did Andrew Marr. In 2015 BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg heard this from a Starmer ally:
We’ll have to take them [the Labour left] apart, piece by piece.
Like Payne, Kuenssberg didn’t deign to tell us about this when it would’ve been useful, instead waiting until long after Starmer had secured the leadership. There’s a lesson here for readers of the British press.
Even more damningly Jenny Chapman, the Chair of Starmer's leadership campaign, admitted that his leadership pledges were “not the real Starmer”. Her remarks are worth quoting in full (or listening to if you prefer). They demonstrate contempt for Labour members and, considering how breezily she confesses, an understanding that the membership are now powerless to stop the thousand Keir reich.
What you’re seeing now are Starmer’s politics. Regarding the leadership campaign, no other answer would be believed so yes, there was an understanding of the best issues to talk about if you want to become leader of the Labour Party. It is, by its nature, a very indulgent process. There is permission there to say: “This is the kind of country it would be lovely if it could be” because you’re not actually pitching to the entire country to be Prime Minister.
What do you find most irritating here? I’m torn between the claim that prospective leaders are given “permission” by members to stand on pledges that they have no intention of delivering, and the bit where she pauses to utter "no other answer would be believed," which roughly translates to: “I would continue to lie to you if that were an option available to me”.
2023: Starmer goes to war with the membership
Despite Starmer’s pledge to “link up our mass membership, unite our party and promote pluralism”, party members who remained saw their position become more precarious and their power wane. Party rules were revise to:
Stop members debating certain issues.
Make it harder for members to nominate future leaders or deselect MPs.
Clarify that “the principle of natural justice shall not apply to the termination of Party membership.”
These are the actions of a leadership who know their politics are unpopular with their members. When left-wing members called these changes a “needless self-inflicted blow to democracy in our party”, Starmer took that as proof that he was doing the right thing. At conference he shutdown a heckler with a pre-prepared put down: “Shouting slogans or changing lives, conference?” For Starmer, the fact that we were angry at his dishonesty was itself proof that we were unserious.
Proposals that received overwhelmingly backing at conference were vetoed by the leadership. Councillors were blocked from standing to become MPs for reasons as petty as the fact they “liked” a tweet about Nicola Sturgeon testing negative for Covid-19. Left wing MPs were suspended and deselected for similarly petty reasons while right-wing candidates with dodgy records were parachuted into safe seats.
2024: Starmer goes to war with his own independent investigator
Starmer’s ruthless right-wing remaking of the Labour Party faced a hurdle when a leaked internal report exposed deep factionalism and a toxic culture within the party, with particularly appalling behaviour coming from Starmer’s wing of the party.
These revelations forced Starmer to commission an independent investigation into the veracity of the report’s claims. That independent investigation upheld many of the findings of the leaked report including:
Misuse of the party’s disciplinary systems by Starmerite staffers. These people were tasked with rooting out bigotry but instead they used their position to systematically “hunt” and expel “Trots” (short for Trotskyite: a derogatory term for left-wingers).
Starmerite staffers confessing that they wanted the party under Corbyn to lose.
Starmerite staffers secretly channelling funds to their personally favored MPs, without the knowledge of the leadership.
“That the messages on the Senior Management WhatsApp reveal deplorably factional and insensitive, and at times discriminatory, attitudes expressed by many of the party’s most senior staff”
Of a Corbyn supporter: “die in a fire” “wouldn’t piss on him to put him out”
Of Dianne Abbott: “repulsive” “angry woman”.
When Abbott was found crying in the toilets in the wake of abuse she’d received a staff member suggested telling journalists of her whereabouts. Another replied that he already had, followed by a wink emoji.
These reports made clarified that many on the right wing of the party will never accept the left-wing of the party, and were refusing to do the jobs for which they were paid. It was these reports, along with candid comments from Starmer’s allies revealing that he never intended to stick to his pledges, that helped me see the extent to which these people had been lying to and laughing at me.
The author of the report that Starmer commissioned later accused of him not engaging with its findings:
It’s not, in my view, a sufficient response to say that was then, this is now.
In response Starmer tried to gag him by threatening legal action. This bullying behaviour was not a one off: Starmer’s party also wasted an eye-watering £2.4m in a failed attempt to sue former Labour staffers who they accused of leaking the internal report that kicked all of this off. Hubristic, vindictive, inward-looking and wasteful: a far cry from the “professionalised” and “united” Labour Party that I was promised.
Starmer’s Labour Party has learned absolutely nothing from this shameful episode. For example when Starmer said Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza, upsetting many of his members, councillors and parliamentary colleagues, a senior Labour source said the resignations of councillors was a sign the party was “shaking off the fleas”. Another briefed that the crisis was an opportunity to “put the Socialists right back in the box where they belong”.
Gaza is arguably biggest foreign policy crisis of the century yet these selfish parochial freaks see it just as they see everything: as an opportunity to settle internal scores & beat-up the left. As somebody who voted for an believed in Starmer’s promise to unify & professionalise, I find this deeply demoralising.
I could go on. There are too many broken pledges, rightward lurches and lies to choose from, but I think you get the idea. Keir Starmer is a liar. He will betray you and gaslight you while he does it. If, after reading this, you vote for his Labour Party on Thursday 4 July, then you only have yourself to blame for what happens next.