Keir Starmer’s Coming Revolution is More Radical Than His Opponents Realise

Keir Starmer settled into Parliament in 2015 at the age of 53 for the safe seat of Holborn and St. Pancras. This was not the political debut of a young up-and-comer, but a sort of life peerage given to a stately figure coming towards the end of a long career in public service.

Stateliness: this has been Keir Starmer’s essential quality in political life. Here’s a man who – as the idea goes – has deigned to stoop from the noble and serious pursuits of human rights law and public prosecutions to the seamy world of electoral politics. He’s a little sullied by the place. He is an odd man out, and very deliberately so. People like Keir are brought into politics to clean the place up. A man like Keir would ennoble whatever cause he touched; and there was, duly, no period of hard backbench grind before his elevation to the Shadow Cabinet. Like the Duke of Wellington, who also entered high office as a second act, there’s every impression that Keir is doing this as a kind of favour.

Starmer’s opponents delight in puncturing this image. If it could only be definitively shown that Starmer is simply a politician like the rest, then his public brand would fall away. This is why Rishi Sunak is so quick to charge Keir Starmer with “opportunism”. It’s why the British centre-Right has seized so eagerly on the decision to scrap a £28bn green investment pledge, or quiescence on Gaza, or slightly affected outrage on behalf of Brianna Ghey’s mother at PMQs.

This is a rhetorical method. But it’s also a wish. Those who invoke it live in hope that if Starmer is merely grasping and cynical, then he can be assimilated; he can be dealt with. This steady rubbing off of the varnish relies, above all, on the assumption that there is in fact something basically familiar underneath.

But there isn’t. This is the great trick that has been missed about Britain’s likely next Prime Minister. The stately manner is not a conceit to be rubbed away, but is an irreducible part of Keir Starmer’s whole idea of life and politics. Starmer simply isn’t someone that can be digested into the ordinary rigmarole of Westminster, however much his opponents might wish it.

Here’s another parallel between Starmer and the Duke of Wellington: both men entered politics accustomed to issuing commands and seeing them obeyed. Run the gamut of Keir Starmer’s career and you’ll find a man who has traded not in deals, appeals and backroom manoeuvre – but in moral black-and-white, in iron legalisms and in hard executive power. Starmer’s time at the bar was spent entirely within the domain of human rights law; that is to say, the enforcement of the particular moral dogmas established in 1997 against secular and democratic authority. As Director of Public Prosecutions – an office that is beginning to resemble a kind of parallel Home Secretary – Starmer had broad personal discretion over how the laws of England were enforced, and against whom. This basic tenor held in Westminster, too. Starmer’s only role in ordinary retail politics was Shadow Immigration Minister, which he soon left. His tenure as Shadow Brexit Secretary – his biggest job in Westminster before winning the Labour leadership – was legalistic rather than political: it was Keir Starmer, more than anyone else, who pioneered the idea that Brexit was not even wrong, but simply “unlawful“. His defeat of the Corbynites was similarly litigious; it did not rely so much on any avowed criticism of their ideas (he endorsed most of them during the leadership campaign), but a simple recourse to the party rulebook to purge their ranks.

Everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project – the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 – can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it.

Leave aside the green investment pledges. Look at what Keir Starmer has never wavered on. His constitutional reforms, drawn up by Gordon Brown in ‘A New Britain‘, will give the law courts broad new powers to strike down legislation; will create a ‘rights package’ (including welfare payments to migrants) that is to be put beyond the power of Parliament to abridge; and will give Whitehall a statutory existence – meaning it will become virtually impossible to reform its workings or fire any of its personnel. Starmer will complete the process of franchising out democratic governance to independent watchdogs: energy policy will go to ‘Great British Energy’; low-level offences to ‘community payback boards’; much of the budget to an ‘Office for Value for Money’; and what remains of Westminster health policy to an ‘NHS mission delivery board’. The planned Race Equality Act will tighten existing equalities legislation, which already does so much to constrain elected Governments, and which has created what we now recognise as the DEI bureaucracy. It will further entrench the programme of state multiculturalism from which there is a direct line to the atrocities in Rotherham, Telford and Rochford. Outlets like GB News will almost certainly find themselves censored by a beefed-up Ofcom: Welsh Labour has banned the channel from the Senedd, and worthies like Adam Boulton have already called for such a course.

Starmerism speaks to something deep in modern Britain. It represents the kind of guttural public moralism that’s always lurked in the back of what we might call the post-Diana English psyche. Every time a public figure has traded in this feeling over the past 25 years – every call to ban journalists from following celebrities or Royals around; every proposal to stop treating the issues of the day as ‘political footballs’ and outsource them to an unelected watchdog; every peal against ‘divisiveness’ – they have fed into the vulgar anti-politics that now finds its final expression in Starmerism.

What does Starmerism mean? It is a policy of enforcement. It is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo. It’s no surprise, then, that the cause has taken for its instruments two figures from outside electoral politics: Keir Starmer and Sue Gray. It is, further, no surprise that both of these individuals had a spell in Northern Ireland (the latter, most likely, as some sort of police spy), which, through the Good Friday Agreement, was an early testing ground for the methods of ‘stakeholder’ governance. Under Starmerism, the rule of the judge, of the quango and of the bureaucrat – long implicit – will at last declare itself openly. This is why questions about whether Starmer best resembles Tony Blair in 1997 or Neil Kinnock in 1992 are misleading. He really is something new. What the British establishment wants is an inquisitor, and in Keir Starmer they have found one.

And it’s why the criticisms of him often ring so hollow. To accuse Keir Starmer of being mutable about things like public spending, or foreign policy, or transgenderism, or to crow about a future Labour Government’s lack of ‘fiscal headroom’, is to miss the point entirely. To Starmer himself, these questions are vaguely baffling distractions. Starmerism is a policy of vengeance against the Enemies of Society; its precise position on taxation, disposable vapes or Israel-Palestine is of no moment. For those who wish to oppose Keir Starmer and what he represents, the charge of inconsistency may be a useful one. But it’s an illusion. It does not reckon with the baroque strangeness of Starmer and his project. For his opponents, the salient danger is not that Keir Starmer feigns outrage for opportunistic reasons. The danger is that he really means it.