Serious. Diligant. Hardworking. These are some of the qualities that have been attached to the new Labor leader Keir Starmer. These attributes address the way in which he manages things but do not provide a clear definition of the essence: his ideology and politics remain somewhat vague. The Guardian said: yes, he is vague, but one thing is certain, he is not a populist.
Starmer, it seems, is preoccupied, before anything else, with uniting the party that was made to resemble many coexisting parties, hardly coexisting, by its previous leader Jeremy Corbyn. This preoccupation also extends to regaining labor bases in Scotland and Wales, and also in England, which populists have grabbed.
Maintaining a taxing and spending agenda and pledging to uphold some just targets of Corbynism, such as abolishing tuition fees and increasing taxes on the richest 5 percent, represent continuity with the previous period. Starmer said the rich should pay their "fair share" to build the post-Corona society. Also, in the shadow government, he handed over the education portfolio to the leftwing Corbynist Rebecca Long-Bailey who competed with him in the leadership race as the Corbynist candidate and came a very distant second. He won a big victory, receiving 56 percent of the vote. Among those who supported him was the largest labor union in the country, Unison (1.4 million members). This gives him cover worker-wise.
But the Corbynists are generally uncomfortable. Most of them have been removed from the shadow cabinet, and they are fearful of the party falling into the hands of the "centrists". Some newspapers spoke of moves to establish a "socialist campaign group", a lobby inside the party supervised by John McDonnell, the chancellor in the previous shadow cabinet and Corbyn's most prominent accomplice in shifting the party leftward. Some of them dread: Starmer is another Tony Blair - "London's posh MP" and "A right-winger dressed in leftist clothing".
Some of their worries are perhaps justified. The current shadow cabinet includes 15 Fabians, representing a return to one of the springs from which the party flowed: a return to the group that was established in 1884 and whose members are among its founding fathers.
Starmer apologized to the Jewish community. He vowed to uproot the anti-Semitism that had festered during Corbyn's leadership. He brought Ed Miliband, the former party leader, back under the spotlight. He handed him the energy, business and industry portfolios. Miliband is involved with the ''Green New Deal,'' an environmental grouping that cuts across countries and parties.
The Foreign Secretary post went to Lisa Nandy, who had criticized Corbyn for refusing to condemn Russian actions and called on her party to take a radically pro-remain position. He appointed Annelies Dodds chancellor; her public life started in the European Parliament, and she mostly works on combating tax evasion. Nick Thomas-Symonds, who was named Home Secretary, is a biographer of Clement Attlee, his role model. Attlee won a sweeping electoral victory against “war hero” Winston Churchill in 1945 and then built the welfare state. It has also been said that Starmer will stop the defamation campaign against Tony Blair, which had escalated in Corbyn’s era.
Kier Starmer was born in 1962 and has been a member of parliament for Holborn and St. Pancras in London since 2015. His father is a hand tool maker, and his mother is a nurse (she got sick at a young age). The parents named him after Keir Hardy, the party's first leader. The family background is thus Laborite in both its economic situation and its political choices. However, the young Keir benefited from the relative class mobility of the 1970s, which the Thatcherite eighties could not shut down completely.
With his seriousness and hard work, he graduated from some of the best universities in the country (Leeds then Oxford). He became a brilliant human rights lawyer and, as such, was appointed a member of the Queen's Counsel in 2002, and in 2008 he became the Director of Public Prosecutions. As a reward for his roles, he was knighted in 2015; the title “sir” turned into a source of bewilderment when he became Labor leader.
Those experiences took the acrimony out of his socialism. Parliamentary legislation, therefore, took precedence over struggle in the factories, also addressing some non-economic issues (human rights, euthanasia and same-sex marriage).
Politically, two defeats and a victory shaped Starmer: the thunderous defeats took place in 1983 under Michael Foot and in 2019 under Corbyn, while the landslide victory occurred under Blair in 1997, which kept the Conservatives in opposition for 13 years (the longest ever period they spent in opposition). The two defeats were linked to the preeminence of ideological purity, and the victory was linked to the preeminence of pragmatic politics. Blair convinced Brits that the party had become "new". Foot and Corbyn reminded them of the Industrial Revolution.
So, parliamentary victory became the priority. When asked which Labor leader he hoped to emulate, he replied: Harold Wilson. The latter brought the party back into power in 1964 after 13 years in opposition, and his name was associated with modernization, promising "a new Britain ... forged in the white heat of technological revolution''.
The unity of the party was always the goal that needed to be achieved to win the election. Although Starmer was anti Brexit and for a second referendum, he avoided provocation to preserve the party's unity. On the other hand, to block Brexit and the populists, he endorsed limitations to immigration without touching the "free movement of labor."
He is pragmatist of the "soft left", not an ideological Corbynist of the hard or, rather, thorny left. He will lead his party to the next elections in 2024 as such, keeping in mind that the country, after the coronavirus, will inevitably be different from what was before it. Parties and programs will also be different.
