STARMER PROFILE : Preview

As you know folks, I'm doing a deep dive into Starmer. It's a lot more work than I had initially envisioned but I'm determined to get it done because I know how important it is to a lot of people. It doesn't help that my JustGiving page for donations to support this research has disappeared. I'm chasing this up with JustGiving as we speak and will keep you all posted.

Right now, I'm going through his voting history and working through news articles over the last 8yrs since (he was elected MP for Holborn and St Pancras in May 2015). The news articles are allowing me to create a interesting timeline of events and statements following the progression of his political career and it's beginning to show that Starmer has always been an extremely ambitious man and doesn't seem to care who he stabs in the back to get what he wants. I'll then start to look at the work he did as head of the Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

To give you an idea of what to expect, here's an eye opening Guardian article from March 2017..

24th March 2017 : Guardian article : Decca Aitkenhead interviews Starmer.

Right at the start, Decca makes a bold assessment of Starmer’s reasons for going into politics.. “If he didn’t believe he would one day move into No 10, I doubt he would be there at all.” She goes on to describe an ambitious man in private, if not in public. She notes that he stood down as a junior shadow minister to back Owen Smith’s leadership challenge but then re-joined the front bench, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, after Corbyn was re-elected. Starmer tells Decca that he rejoined because “Brexit is so important, it would have been neglect of duty to simply sit it out,” and he felt “the right thing to do is to get behind the leader.” However, Decca points out that he’s a ‘passionately pro-EU campaigner’, with a constituency that voted heavily to remain. She notes, also, that things became even more problematic for Starmer when Labour imposed a three-line whip supporting the Tories’ Brexit bill, so now Starmer is supporting legislation he doesn’t believe in for a leader he didn’t want in the first place.

Decca describes Starmer’s office at Portcullis House as “brutally tidy” and in “military-grade order” and remarks that his “clutter-free desk suggests a severity of discipline I doubt I’d have guessed had we met somewhere else, and it looks like of evidence of ruthless purpose.” Starmer tells her that he has come to accept the referendum result but is now determined to “fight over what version of the future we want… If this goes the way I hope it will go, and will fight for it to go, there will be in due course a new treaty that is the EU-UK treaty. Something that, while it’s not formal membership, reflects our belief that we do things together with our EU partners; we don’t sever and walk away from them.” It’s clear from this statement that Starmer saw his role as one of Brexit damage limitation.

The second half of this article sounds more like a bid for leadership and it’s worth noting that he making this pitch barely 11 weeks before the 2017 general election. In his pitch, Starmer openly criticises Labour (and therefore the Corbyn leadership) for failing to make a winning case for remaining, or offering a meaningful vision of a future. He then prattles on about how, during his time as immigration minister, he spoke to people all over the country who all told him that Labour needed to have a skills agenda. He’s in full leadership campaign mode at this point, talking about what “Labour’s vision” should be and his ideas for “a future-looking Labour programme.” He talks about how it should be possible to improve public service with less money and how he wants to improve the criminal justice system, as well as his long term strategy to stop kids from underprivileged backgrounds ending up in prison. According to Starmer, that’s the way forward for Labour if they want to win elections.

It’s almost as if this supremely ambitious man already has his sights set on the top job and he’ll do, and say, whatever it takes to clear a path to number 10, including stabbing Corbyn in the back and help to throw a general election. Lets face it, the 2016 leadership challenge proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that the majority of the Labour membership were solidly behind Corbyn, so, it had to be clear to the Labour right, that the only way to remove Corbyn was to sabotage the general election. Starmer's leadership pitch, weeks before an election, suggests, at best, that Starmer was expecting Corbyn to lose the election and, at worse, it was a naked attempt to undermine the Labour election campaign with an aim to remove Corbyn, thus creating an opportunity for himself.

Decca then reveals that Starmer was also about to deliver a big speech at Chatham House on the party’s future direction and she rightly asks, if he’s serious about shaping a new path for Labour, who are the colleagues that he’s discussing his ideas with. Not surprisingly, Starmer names no names. Instead he tells her that his support is “across the party” and that he discusses new ideas with “various colleagues around in the PLP.” Decca concludes “The identity of his collaborators is never disclosed, but from his cagey evasions one thing is perfectly clear: they do not include Labour’s leadership.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/24/keir-starmer-labour-brexit-interview