Keir Starmer Quotes

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If there's a problem, let's know what it is, have an honest conversation, and get on with it.

A newly-released series of video documentaries — The Labour Files — based on material leaked from Britain’s Labour Party revealed how the right-wing within the party mortified the former party leader, the far-left Jeremy Corbyn, costing him his position. The documentary uncovers Israel’s role in orchestrating the departure of Corbyn who had been a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights. Evidence reveals that the Israel Lobby within the Labour Party — supported by other pro-Israel camps in Britain — campaigned against the left-wing Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism. The right-wing party establishment manipulated these allegations to its own political advantage, which eventually led to the election of the pro-Israel Keir Starmer as party leader in 2020. While the future course of Labour’s left wing is uncertain, one thing is for sure — Israel is an apartheid regime. The Zionist lobby has been using hybrid warfare techniques to procure worldwide legitimacy for Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. As the Labour Files reveal, Israel has waged a war of fabricating narratives and counter-narratives. In this sort of warfare with limitless bounds, the only positive that can be drawn is that everyone is a soldier. At a time when great powers have given in to the deceptive Israel lobby and no Muslim state is in any position to challenge Israeli advances in Palestine using conventional methods, we need to focus on building our capacity to effectively counter the Zionist narrative. With the right-wing ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, set to return after elections next month, the plight of Palestinians will only exacerbate. It is high time we stopped blatantly labelling one another as ‘Yahoodi Agents’ and started educating ourselves. The least we can do for Palestinians is continue exposing the pro-Israel elements engaged in the widespread dissemination of Zionist propaganda.

Starmer has found it difficult to escape this cycle of dependence because he cannot comprehend a crucial therapeutic insight: that the subject supposed to know knows nothing. Often, an analytic breakthrough comes when the patient realises that the Other to whom she has delegated her authority (or knowledge, or desire) is illusory: an empty signifier. This revelation allows her to take responsibility for her own desire, which is thereby transformed from a conduit for the Other’s will into what Lacan calls ‘decided desire’ or ‘determined desire’. When her experience is no longer mediated by the subject supposed to know, its possibilities are expanded. Dependence is supplanted by autonomy. And that, for Lacanians, is the real meaning of adulthood, although most adults never achieve it.

Why did Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, assert that Israel has the right to ‘withhold power and water’ from Palestinians, and punish those in the Labour Party calling for a ceasefire?

It is wrong to say that there was no antisemitism in the Labour Party. But it is also wrong to say that every allegation of antisemitism in the Labour Party was true. Questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in the party remain a dificult, but important and necessary, subject for rational debate. The charge of 'denialism' killed this nuance. It demanded that anyone exercising scepticism be ejected from the political and moral community as anti-Jewish bigots - even when the sceptics in question were themselves Jewish.

As the Starmer project repelled paying members and alienated minority communities, the flipside was Labour's renewed openness to lobbyists and big business. After all, someone has to pay the bills. From 2022, onward, lobbying firms assiduously hired party insiders with the aim of influencing Labour policy - and with the hope that doors would open once a Labour Government was elected. This was accompanied by an influx of monetary donations as well as gifts from the super-rich donor class and other private interests. Starmer personally accepted tens of thousands of pounds in luxury holidays, clothing, and other freebies in the years following the Covid pandemic. All of this raised serious questions about how, and for whose benefit, Labour policy is now made.

When McSweeney presented Starmer with his slides describing the composition of the party, he identified 5 percent of the membership as unreconstructed Blairites: the types to defend the Iraq War and the legacy of Blairite neoliberalism. This was, most likely, the same rough 4.5 percent who had voted for arch-Blairite Liz Kendall in the 2015 leadership campaign that McSweeney had directed. What many failed to realise at the time was that the Labour Together Project, and the Starmer Project that would succeeed it, reprented just this marginal 5 percent of the party. If the Labour Together Project operated in secret and crafted a misleading leadership pitch that was unceremoniously dumped upon victory, this modus operandi arguably reflected a clear-eyed understanding that this faction's beliefs, ideologies and political language were deepy unpopular with the Labour members it needed to win over. Implementing this deceptive strategy required a candidate like Starmer; a man who felt no compunction about posturing as a radical during the campaign and then dropping the act once in power.

The party rule book is the apex law of the Labour Party. It forms the binding contract between the party and its members. Everything the party does and is empowered to do, flows from the rule book. The party rule book provides explicit and detailed rules for handling disciplinary cases and puts them in a separate chapter dedicated to this topic. But at no stage is this chapter - Chapter Six - of the party rule book on 'Disciplinary Rules' mentioned or referenced by the EHRC. This is astonishing. The EHRC's investigation was, at heart, an investigation of how the party applied its disciplinary rules to the handling of antisemitism complaints, and yet the EHRC made no reference to the foundational text that established what those rules were. Not only that, it then misconstrued the party's rules in order to ground a finding of unlawful discrimination.

...the EHRC's findings and recommendations triggered a process that has deeply politicised how complaints in the party are handled, a politicisation that found its ultimate expression in the mistreatment of left-wing Jews under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

The Labour Together Project was thus a major hidden hand driving a crisis that would have devastating consequences for not just the British left but also the very fabric of British democracy and those people in Britain who needed a redistributive, democratising government to help them get by. In addition, as I show later, the 'antisemitism crisis' would also frame and haunt the Labour Party's response to Israel's destruction of Gaza.

Admittedly navigating the tough terrain of a lopsided Tory majority, Covid lockdowns, and a vaccine rollout that massively boosted support for the Tories, Starmer nevertheless cut a tetchy and shallow figure. His lauded 'forensic' approach to the parliamentary jousting of Prime Minister's Questions never materialised; instead and in spite of the government's mishandling of the pandemic that led Britain to the highest death toll in Europe, Starmer frequently found himself congratulating Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his party on their leadership. His erratic complaints and oppositional stances were inconsistent and largely seen as opportunistic.; he was quickly slapped with the nickname, 'Captain Hindsight'.