Who Is Keir Starmer?

Keir Starmer is the new British Prime Minister after a landslide victory for the Labour Party in the recent election. But who is Starmer and what can we expect from a Labour Government in Britain?

Starmer has been a long time Labour Party member but before becoming an MP he was a Barrister and then Director of Public Prosecutions. As a barrister he served as advisor to the corrupt Northern Irish Policing Board.

He’s an insider of the British state machine.

He was first elected MP for the Holborn and St Pancras constituency in London in 2015. He played a major role in the campaign against so called “antisemitism” in the Labour Party.

This was in reality a campaign by the right wing of the Labour Party to oust left wing pro-Palestine members like Jeremy Corbyn. It was a purge of the left.

Keir Starmer himself is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine at the same time. Recently he defended Israel’s “right” to cut off electricity and water supplies to the people of Gaza. In a 2018 speech to Labour Friends of Israel he said:

“Israel is a nation with a vibrant media, free trade unions and a lively tradition of debate, dissent, and disagreement; As well as the rights won by the struggle of the women’s movement, the LGBT community, and religious and racial minorities. And we oppose those who seek to undermine this.”

This is Israeli propaganda because they only extend the above rights to a narrow band of Jewish citizens. Starmer is a firm defender of Israeli oppression against Palestine and will continue supporting the Israeli terrorist state throughout his term in office.

The Labour Party ran their 2024 election under the banner of “Change”. But what real change can be expected from Keir Starmer? In 2023 he said:

“A hunger, an ambition, that we can seize the opportunities of tomorrow and make them work for working people. But this ambition must never become unmoored from working people’s need for stability, for order, security… We must understand there are precious things – in our way of life, in our environment, in our communities – that it is our responsibility to protect and preserve and to pass on to future generations. If that sounds conservative, then let me tell you: I don’t care.”

He was pandering to Tory voters by basically saying that nothing will change under Labour. Some working class people might have gone back to voting for Labour in the hope that they will actually get “Change”, but they will be sorely disappointed.

In fact Starmer’s vote was lower than previous Labour votes and they won a huge number of seats from the collapse of the Tory right wing vote.

The Labour Party is what the Russian Revolutionary Lenin called a “Bourgeois Workers Party” - It’s a party made up of the conservative trade union bureaucracy, and politicians drawn from the upper and middle class. They act as agents of the boss class within the working class movement.

It claims to act and speak in the interest of the working class, and has support from the working class, but in reality will try to crush working class struggle in the interest of capitalism.

Labour Parties all over the world, including here in Ireland, have privatised public services, implemented crippling austerity and overseen a capitalist system where the rich keep getting richer.

In Britain, as well as here in Ireland, we need a different kind of left. The result of Starmer’s coming betrayals will be to give an opening to the racist Tories gathered around far right figure Nigel Farage.

We need a revolutionary socialist left that will stand in elections but use the electoral front as a platform to lift the hopes and horizons of our class, build united working class struggles and to spread socialist ideas.

That fighting left must be clear that socialist change won’t come through parliaments or the existing state structures but against them and through a working class mass movement that creates our own democracy and fights for a society built in our own interests.