31 MARCH 2020
Keir Starmer: The sensible radical
The former human rights lawyer aspires to unite not only the troubled Labour Party but the country. But who is he? And what does he really want?
www.newstatesman.com
Pt.1
Born in Southwark, south London in 1962, Starmer was the second of four children to Rodney, a toolmaker, and Josephine, a nurse forced to give up work by Still’s Disease, a debilitating autoimmune condition. He spent his childhood in a ramshackle, pebble-dashed semi-detached home in Oxted, Surrey, where the Starmers kept donkeys in their garden. Devout in their leftism, his parents named their second son after Keir Hardie, Labour’s first parliamentary leader. “When I was at school, at about 13,” he later recalled, “I thought, why couldn’t they have called me Dave or Pete?”
The young Keir inherited his parents’ politics. He spent his teenage years at Reigate Grammar, a selective state school where he took violin lessons with Norman Cook, later Fatboy Slim, and his friends included Andrew Cooper, later a Conservative peer, and Andrew Sullivan, who would make his name as a conservative controversialist in the US. Mention of Sullivan brought Starmer out in a broad smile: they are still in touch. “We fought over everything, Andrew and I,” he said. “Politics, religion. You name it.”
Sullivan was an unrepentant Thatcherite, while Starmer was, in the words of another schoolfriend, “left, left, left”. The pair would begin their debates on the 410 bus to Reigate, and they did not end until they had returned home. Yet Starmer was neither pious nor a dullard. “Keir was rowdy, laddish, wild,” a fellow classmate recalled.
Starmer joined Labour in his early teens and led the East Surrey Young Socialists. At that time, Militant’s tentacles enveloped much of Labour’s youth movement, but Starmer resisted them. According to Jon Pike, an Open University academic and east Surrey contemporary, Starmer had no truck with Bennite Euroscepticism, or the tankies who haunted hard-left meetings. “European internationalism has always been very strong for me,” Starmer told me.
At Leeds University he read law (postgraduate study at Oxford followed) and experienced a deeper political awakening. “I got profoundly interested in human rights: this sense, that meant a lot to me, that the countries at the end of the Second World War had joined together and said, ‘never again’.”
Starmer, an ardent Remainer, made his peace with Brexit at the outset of the leadership campaign. But the pro-Europeanism that has manifested itself through his efforts to soften Labour’s Brexit position – first through his legalistic “six tests”, the device that enabled Labour to vote against Theresa May’s deal – comes from a place of deep conviction.
His politics are continental but are not the “bland centrism” criticised by supporters of Long-Bailey. “He was very much what Europeans would now call a red-green,” said the QC Gavin Millar, who interviewed Starmer for his pupillage in 1987 and later shared rooms with him in a set of Middle Temple chambers run by Emlyn Hooson, the radical Liberal MP who had defended the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Growing up, Starmer had never knowingly met a lawyer: Geoffrey Robertson, another QC and pioneer of the progressive bar, described how he turned up for the interview in a cardigan, was “nervous and awkward”, and “looked about 14”. By then Starmer had moved into a flat above a brothel in Highgate, where he devoted himself to work. Stacked high about his room were boxes of Socialist Alternatives, an obscure and atrociously written Trotksyite pamphlet, for which he was once a co-editor.
The coercive forces of the Thatcherite state were the main targets of his ire, most often the police. In one piece, written from the picket line of the anti-Murdoch, Wapping printers’ dispute, Starmer asked “the question of the role the police should play, if any, in civil society. Who are they protecting and from what?”
He did not hide his politics at the bar. In 1990, Millar, Robertson and Starmer were among 30 barristers who left chambers in the Inns of Court and set up a new, radical practice on Doughty Street, north London. They wanted to break the establishment cartel and defeat the Thatcherite hegemony – unassailable in parliament – in the courts. “He was very interested in environmental politics: public order, protesting, and street campaigning,” Millar said.
Critics say Starmer’s emphasis on his work representing trade unions and environmental campaigners is a selective telling of his legal career, but Millar disagrees: “He would take very, very left-wing positions quite happily in those days. The clients he represented were on the left… He was bona fide. The context tells you why: Thatcherism, the miners’ strike, industrial conflicts, cuts to public sector and welfare budgets. It was a terrible, terrible time. Our reason for being there was to fight it.”
Starmer agrees with Millar’s account.
Is he still a red-green? “Yeah!” Then, as now, he was among those who believed that Labour could succeed only by uniting what Hilary Wainwright, the leftist sociologist and journalist, called the “fragments” of liberation movements (what would now be described as identity politics) with the traditional working class beyond parliament. Or, as Starmer later put it to Tony Benn in an interview for Socialist Alternatives, it needed to become “a united party of the oppressed”.
In that respect, Starmer has more in common with Corbyn than many of his supporters would admit: both are of the extra-parliamentary left, and neither has reversed his views on much. “I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “The big issue we were grappling with then was how the Labour Party, or the left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality – feminist politics, green politics, LGBT – which I thought was incredibly exciting, incredibly important. Broadly speaking, I think the Labour Party has done that very successfully.”
As a young barrister, Starmer devoted his energies to human rights cases, often on behalf of trade unions or against the police. He defended criminals sentenced to death in the Caribbean, where he is still lionised by the legal establishment. He remained an activist advocate, writing extensively on civil liberties for the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, alongside progressive luminaries such as Michael Mansfield and Helena Kennedy. He also worked pro bono for Helen Steel and David Morris – the so-called McLibel Two, whose environmental leaflets prompted a 15-year legal battle with McDonald’s, ending in their victory in the European courts. Starmer, fresh-faced and floppy-haired, appears in McLibel, a 1997 documentary about the pair’s epic struggle. “He was sweet, sincere and obviously super-clever, but self-deprecating and witty too,” Franny Armstrong, who directed the film alongside Ken Loach, told me. “I never heard him discuss party politics, but actions speak louder than words: he spent years working, unpaid, to defend ordinary people’s right to criticise multinational corporations.”
Yet Starmer felt a nagging dissatisfaction. “Gradually, I got frustrated with individual cases, because win or lose, you’re only changing things for the individual that you’re representing,” he said. He turned to strategic litigation, picking and choosing cases in a bid to effect wider changes to the law. “I was still a human rights lawyer railing against the system from the outside.”
Those who know Starmer best were unsurprised by his move to electoral politics. “I feel I’ve always had very deep politics in everything I’ve done,” he told me. “I channelled it into cases, but in the end I came back almost to where I started when I was a teenager: in the end, you can only do it through national politics, which means being in parliament.”
Once a radical whose modus operandi was to muzzle and constrain the state, Starmer was now seeking executive power.
To explain this, he references his time in Northern Ireland, where, between 2003 and 2008, he worked as a human rights adviser to the Policing Board – a body set up under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement to oversee the work of the new Police Service of Northern Ireland, the replacement for the much-maligned Royal Ulster Constabulary. Part of its remit was ensuring that the new police service was genuinely representative of both the Protestant and Catholic communities. It was there that Starmer learned the value of working with the state, rather than against it.
“That really exposed me, for five years, to working on the inside of an organisation… Some of the things I thought that needed to change in police services we achieved more quickly than we achieved in strategic litigation… I came better to understand how you can change by being inside and getting the trust of people.”
In 2008 he became the ultimate legal insider: director of public prosecutions (DPP). His appointment by Gordon Brown’s government came as something of a surprise. Starmer had been no friend to New Labour, as much as he admired its domestic policy. Its authoritarian streak sat uneasily with his civil libertarian instincts. He marched and provided legal opinions against the Iraq War, and challenged New Labour’s policies on welfare and asylum seekers. Nor had he ever prosecuted a criminal case. One of the bar’s most dogged opponents of state power was now responsible for the delivery of criminal justice and 9,000 staff.
He would leave office after his five-year term in 2013 with his reputation in the legal world unharmed and arguably enhanced. At the beginning of his tenure, the Conservative MP Dominic Grieve was among the Tories who censured Starmer after he implicitly criticised David Cameron’s plans to rescind the Human Rights Act in government. By the time Starmer’s term ended, the two had forged such a close working relationship that Grieve, who had since become Cameron’s attorney general, spoke at his leaving party. They would later work together to thwart a no-deal Brexit.
It was at the CPS that Starmer learned – as he puts it to Labour members – “how you effect change across a big organisation”. The contrast with Corbyn, whose closest brush with executive responsibility before his election as Labour leader was the chairmanship of Haringey Council’s planning committee, barely needs emphasising. Yet Starmer’s Corbynite critics question the durability of his principles, pointing to a series of controversial decisions he made in office.
Starmer decided against prosecuting the police officers responsible for the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube having been wrongly identified as a terror suspect following the London attacks of 2005, and of Ian Tomlinson, the London newspaper seller pushed to his death at the G20 protests in 2010. Under his leadership, the CPS charged anti-austerity protesters for staging a sit-in at Fortnum & Mason in 2012; one academic accused Starmer, who once defended the rights of acid house ravers, of criminalising peaceful assembly and protests.
Detractors also note his eye for a tabloid-friendly policy announcement, and the fluency with which he could speak the moral language of the right. A 2013 interview in which Starmer unveiled new prosecution guidelines that threatened welfare fraudsters with up to ten years in prison has haunted his campaign. He has sought to use his legal career to burnish his credentials as a man of firm socialist principle, but his critics believe it exposes him as that most contemptible of Labour archetypes: the class traitor.
His team have preferred to emphasise his decisions to launch prosecutions against News of the World journalists over phone hacking, and against MPs for their abuse of the parliamentary expenses system. Some of his supporters, however, are similarly anxious about the legacy of his time as DPP, namely in his leadership style. “We’ve already had one command-and-control, centralising leader,” said one shadow minister. “We can’t afford another.”
Former CPS colleagues disagree, and recall Starmer as a consensual, collaborative director whose first major decision was to give up his official car, which he believed was an unnecessary extravagance at the height of a financial crisis. “You can criticise him from the left, or the right, or from any particular perspective about a decision to prosecute or not prosecute,” said the barrister Gavin Millar. “That’s what happens: you expose yourself to that. All you can do is temper the role with your understanding of human rights principles, and he did that.”
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