Starmer’s Labour is not moderate or safe – and here’s the hard evidence
WHAT will a Keir Starmer government be like? If the polls are true, the voters do not care. They have decided that election day will be a few hours of fun, during which they can kick the Tories. I can sympathise, having despised the Conservative Party for two decades. But shouldn’t they wonder just a tiny bit about the next five years, and the possibility that a Starmer government could in fact be considerably worse than what we have now?
I’ve warned before about Sir Keir’s dogmatic past, which he neither conceals nor disowns. He belonged, in his adult life, by clear choice, to bodies of the very hard Left. He is fervent both about the green ideology, which will condemn us to darkness and poverty, and about the radical sexual politics which make him so hard to pin down on the transgender issue.
Given the chance to step back from this in a friendly interview by a Left-wing magazine, he was asked if he was still a ‘redgreen’. Sir Keir enthusiastically responded: ‘Yeah!’ He stated: ‘I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.’ Why not take his word for it?
He explained: ‘The big issue we were grappling with then [in his 20s] was how the Labour Party, or the Left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality – feminist politics, green politics, LGBT – which I thought was incredibly exciting, incredibly important.’
And what about the others? We know that Angela Rayner, Sir Keir’s deputy, is a crude class-warrior who seems to think it is still the 1940s and who calls Tories ‘scum’. But look at the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who is being promoted as a thoughtful, moderate-minded economist.
In a recent speech, the noted Mais Lecture, Ms Reeves duly bored the world with jargon and slogans. But careful watchers noted a couple of flashes of red-hot militancy.
The first was her dismissal of the former Tory Chancellor
Nigel Lawson, who died last year.
Lord Lawson, who I met and interviewed, was a man of piercing intelligence and huge experience, whether you agreed with him or not. But Ms Reeves brushed him off with scorn.
Janan Ganesh, an acute commentator for the Left-wing Financial Times, thought it was a bit much. He said: ‘In a speech of amazing gracelessness, Nigel Lawson, the reforming Chancellor of the 1980s, was credited with almost nothing.’
But who did she praise? She singled out the eccentric Cambridge economics professor, Joan Robinson, who died in 1983, saying: ‘As Joan Robinson understood when she wrote 60 years ago, economics is not just about quantitative models and abstract theory – it is about values, rooted in political, philosophical and moral questions about human nature and the good society.’ We have to assume that Ms Reeves writes this stuff herself, or at the very least approves it before delivering it.
Who was Joan Robinson? As a person she was a fine old British Left-wing eccentric, sleeping each night in a freezing hut at the bottom of her garden, breakfasting on yoghurt long before that was fashionable and allowing birds to pluck out strands of her long grey hair to build their nests.
But Joan Robinson had another side. She was in fact a long-time Maoist – a keen defender of the Chinese tyrant and mass-killer Mao Tse-Tung. During and after many gullible tours of Mao’s empire, she defended or excused its unhinged, ruthless Cultural Revolution, its economically catastrophic Great Leap Forward and much else.
She rowed back a little in later life, but she terribly misjudged these events at the time. Modern study shows the measures she defended were connected sometimes with disastrous famine and sometimes with terrifying repression, and often with both.
SHE was also an enthusiast for the North Korean tyranny, writing an astonishing article for the Leftwing magazine Monthly Review in 1965. She admiringly described Pyongyang as ‘ a city without slums’.
After dutifully listing all the statistics she was fed by the Kim il Sung regime, she concludes: ‘The economic miracles of the post-war world are put in the shade by these achievements.’
North Korea’s young women are said to be ‘studying, driving cranes in the steelworks, or showing off gymnastics in the patriotic mass games’.
Meanwhile, Kim il Sung, founder of this Utopia, ‘seems to function as a messiah rather than a dictator… he gives them a coherent and practicable vision of what they are to be. No deviant thought has a chance to sprout.’ I’ll say.
Hilariously, Professor Robinson proclaims: ‘If professed liberals find all this abhorrent, their duty is plain: let them explain to the people in the South [of Korea] what is happening in the North and leave them to choose what they prefer.’
So here we have Joan Robinson’s values, praised by Rachel Reeves, ‘rooted in political, philosophical and moral questions about human nature and the good society’.
Silly people will now accuse me of saying Ms Reeves is herself an apologist for the appalling Mao and the even worse Kim.
I am not saying this. Modern politicians know very little of the past. I wonder if she even knows about Joan Robinson’s adventures in Peking and Pyongyang.
But I am saying that one of the reasons the Labour Party has so repeatedly and incessantly messed up our economy is because of its sentimental attachment to vast projects of equality and state control. They never work. They are often disastrous.
A speech which dismisses Nigel Lawson and praises Joan Robinson is a worrying sign that we are in for yet another round of that, heaven help us. Yet millions have already decided to vote for it.