Keir Starmer is not a centrist candidate — in fact, there isn’t one
(Shutterstock)
You can’t win an argument when your premises collectively generate a contradiction. Labour’s Brexit contortionism committed it to one of two Brexit outcomes: remain in the EU versus effectively remain in the EU. In either case, it would have been legally impossible for a Corbyn government to enact its stated domestic agenda, as that agenda, on issues such as renationalisation, was in conflict with EU law. Over the last two years the party has capitulated to its Remain element with no acknowledgement of the logical consequences of that surrender for the rest of what it wanted to do.
And who was the prime mover in this gradual capitulation? Step forward Sir Keir Starmer, now seen by some as the favourite to inherit the shop-soiled crown. It would be presumptuous of someone like me to break into the private grief and offer the Labour membership any advice; but I’m going to do it anyway.
There seems to be an argument doing the rounds that goes something like this: we are no longer Leavers or Remainers, our imminent technical exit from the EU has dissolved the distinction. Sir Keir’s status as contortionist-in-chief will no longer apply after January 31. Or if it does, then it does so in a benign sense, in that he might be the only candidate capable of bending the party back in the direction of electable centrism.
The argument is fallacious for (at least) two reasons: a technical exit from the EU reconfigures, rather than ends, the Brexit debate; and Starmer’s “centrist” credentials are undeserved.
The Prime Minister’s improvement of the May Treaty is perhaps the best he could have negotiated, but it amounts to little more than a loosening of the straitjacket. The next stage of the disengagement process is the hard bit. The Johnson Treaty/Political Declaration includes many mechanisms of effective-Remain. Some of these are well hidden, but others are there in plain sight for the vanishingly small number of people prepared to read the relevant texts.
These mechanisms beckon fondly to those for whom the EU fulfils an almost spiritual need; they are standing invitations to the likes of Starmer that there is mischief to be made. The Shadow Brexit Secretary and leadership contender is unlikely to decline those invitations.
This is what will happen in the next few months: the Remain movement will dishonestly claim that it has disbanded when, in effect, it will merely have morphed into the Re-join movement. The strategy will be to dust off the scare tactics in which they are so well versed and redeploy them during the negotiations over our future relationship. The village economics of “crash-out-if-no-deal” will be recalled to duty in order to seek an extension to the “transition” period, which they will use in order to prevent us from transitioning to anything other than interminable quasi-membership.
Starmer, assuming he swerves a possible Labour NEC putsch and is elected, will drag the arguments of the last few years into this new context. Given the Prime Minister’s majority he may well be unsuccessful. But the voters of Grimsby will see very quickly what he is up to, and the “loan” they have made to Boris Johnson will be extended until the election after next — at least.
Secondly, there is nothing “centrist” about Starmer. The Left has been successful in establishing as an orthodoxy that the redistribution of wealth is, necessarily and in itself, a good thing and that all problems in some way must reduce to the need for more “investment”.
The Left is rapacious and has now decided that redistribution of wealth is not enough, that there must also be a redistribution of virtue. It is for the state to decide what people can and cannot say, or think. Starmer is an avatar of this species of leftism.
At some point there will be a reckoning, as people become fully alive to the fact that to be compelled to be polite is not to be polite, but is an attack on those spontaneous relations between people which make real decency possible.
So my advice, I guess, boils down to this: if you’re a Labour member then vote for whoever you want, obviously. When all the candidates are awful it cannot be a mistake to favour one over the others. But if you are voting for Starmer on the basis that his Remain fanaticism has been curtailed by the Johnson victory, and that he is the centrist that you need in order to become electable, then can I gently and respectfully invite you to reconsider and to pick one of the other awful candidates instead?
