FES BRIEFING LABOUR AFTER CORBYN Paul Mason April 2020 AT A GLANCE Keir Starmer was announced as Labour’s new leader on 4 April 2020. A career human rights lawyer, his political strate­gy has been consistent since the 1980s: a socialism based on justice and wealth redistribution, a commitment to interna­tionalism and a vision of the Labour Party as a vehicle for all oppressed and exploited sections of society. Starmer’s pitch to Labour’s estimated 580,000 active members is an end to factionalism: his base includes activists from the Corbyn camp, the ›soft left‹ and some veteran Tony Blair supporters. However, his policy commitments have been seen as unspe­cific, and much depends on what Labour’s different factions and interest groups prioritise. If Labour are to win under Starmer, the long-term route back to power involves finding a narrative that can unite socially-conservative former indus­trial communities and the so-called ›new working class‹ around a single project. WHO IS KEIR STARMER? Starmer was born in 1962 to a skilled working class family in southern England. He joined the Labour Party while a teenag­er and was active on the left during his early years as a lawyer, giving free legal advice and aid to striking printworkers, sea­farers and anti-Poll Tax rioters. In the mid-1980s, Starmer was on the editorial collective of Socialist Alternatives, a magazine originating in the former Trotskyite current led by Michel Pablo, which had evolved to­wards a politics that would be described in the German con­text as ›red-green‹. In an interview with Labour’s left-wing icon Tony Benn, Starmer argued for Labour to be refounded as a ›united party of the oppressed‹ rather than simply repre­senting the old, industrial proletariat. 1 From 1987 to 2008 he pursued a successful legal career as a barrister in the human rights field, for example fighting against the death penalty in the Caribbean. In 2003, he published a high-profile legal opinion that the Iraq war was unlawful. 2 In 2008 he was appointed by Gordon Brown as Director of Public Prosecutions(equivalent to Germany’s Generalbundes­anwalt). In this office he pursued a liberal and progressive agenda, and received a knighthood on his resignation in 2013 ›for services to law and criminal justice‹. At the 2015 election he became a Labour MP, winning the safe central London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras. Starmer’s position under Corbynism was as a critical and oc­casionally rebellious ally, but from a different political tradi­tion. He represents a distinct political strand within the La­bour left tradition focused on rights, justice and social liberalism. This tradition is strongly rooted in the multi-ethnic urban communities which have become Labour’s new base. He joined the anti-Corbyn ›coup‹ after the Brexit referendum in 2016, but after this failed he was quickly readmitted to Corbyn’s front bench team, where he led Labour’s policy on the Brexit negotiations until today. STARMER’S EMERGENCE AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CORBYN Starmer consistently demonstrated independence from Cor­byn as a member of the shadow cabinet, though never break­ing collective responsibility. During the anti-Semitism crisis (Spring 2018 onwards), Starmer publicly called for Corbyn to take a tougher stance against left anti-Semitism. 3 Likewise on Corbyn’s reputation-damaging response to the poisoning of 1 https://britishpabloism.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/ socialist-alternatives-v2-no1-april-may-1987.pdf 2 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/ mar/17/foreignpolicy.iraq1 3 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/26/keir­starmer-hits-back-at-mccluskey-labour-antisemitism-remarks 1