Be careful what you wish for! Sir Keir Starmer may seem boring and staid, but underneath the sharp suits and bland demeanour lies a Pabloist revolutionary who could do immense harm to Great Britain

By MARCUS STEAD

Modern-day elections are won and lost in medium-sized towns. The big cities, usually heavily-reliant on the public sector, higher education sector and third sector for employment, are where many of the safe Labour seats can be found. Rural areas usually vote Conservative. But the medium-sized towns are where the key election battles take place.

The reasons for this are easy to understand when we look at the demography of these towns. There has been a huge surge in the number of people using the railways in the last 30 years, but this has nothing to do with the supposed ‘success’ of privatisation, and everything to do with the reality that people need to commute far greater distances to get to their place of work than in the past due to the high cost of housing in cities.

Indeed, Christian Wolmar’s book British Rail – The Making and Breaking of Our Trains rightly points out that, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, British Rail was actually very well run, unfairly maligned and then ruthlessly broken up and privatised.

For those wishing to start a family in a decent-sized home big enough for a dining table, and a proper garden for parents to relax in and children to play in, living in a town within commuting distance of a city is their best hope.

The longer-term residents of these towns have a slightly different set of experiences. The manufacturing jobs that disappeared in the 1970s and 80s have never really been replaced. There are only so many jobs in the local supermarket. The ‘big time’ employer in the town, whether it be coal, steel, quarrying, potteries or something else, have been lost without anything comparable in terms of employment levels taking over.

The voters in these towns could once have been relied upon to vote Labour, but with changing demography and a changing Labour Party, people were more open to the possibility of voting for somebody else by the time of the 2019 election.

Most of these towns were solid Brexit-supporting territory at the time of the 2016 referendum. There was no single reason for this, but it can be put down to a combination of factors. The impact of uncontrolled mass immigration was one big reason, but it was not the only one. In the more fashionable parts of London, uncontrolled mass immigration means a ready supply of cheap nannies and waitresses in trendy restaurants. In the medium-sized towns, it means pressure on the available housing stock, the suppression of wages and problems with community cohesion.

These differences in viewpoint were borne out on social media in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum. Within hours of the result being announced, social media was awash with apparently-educated younger people living in the big cities (especially London), with lots of funky, BBC-esque opinions making references to ‘thick northerners’, the ‘racist north’.

It was also not uncommon for these people to make hateful comments about older generations, including their own grandparents, and it was all-too-typical for them to say that many Brexit voters would be dead soon. In reality, the majority of voters in ALL age groups over 45 voted Leave. It is also worth pointing out, as I did in this article in November 2016, that a very large number of middle class, educated people voted Leave. Bitter remainers who still don’t accept the result of the referendum eight years later like to peddle the myth that Brexit voters were poorly-educated older people who have often since died. The truth is altogether different.

All age groups above 45 voted Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum

Concerns about the impact of uncontrolled mass immigration were not the only reason people in these medium-sized towns voted for Brexit. There were many other reasons, not least the lack of democracy and accountability in the EU’s institutions. But no matter what their reasons, the one overriding factor is that life in these towns just isn’t very good. Wages are stagnant; police officers are nowhere to be seen unless there’s a Pride march on or somebody has used the wrong pronouns; it is virtually impossible to get a GP appointment; the bins don’t get emptied often enough; the local schools are lousy; waiting lists for operations are too long; the local park is dirty and lots more besides.

And this is where Labour got into trouble. In Jeremy Corbyn, Labour was led by someone who people in these medium-sized towns did not see as a British patriot.

Mr Corbyn represented Islington North, the very epitome of trendy, metropolitan opinion. Mr Corbyn’s voters in his own constituency are very much the middle-class public-sector workers, the LGBTQIA+ woke activists with pink hair on one side of their head, shaved on the other and a pin in their nose, the hipster with the beard and the checkered shirt, the kale and avocado eaters, the Glastonbury festival-goers and so on. In other words, their world view is an enormous distance apart from those in the medium-sized towns.

The people of these towns should not be regarded as Thatcherites. They are patriotic Brits, and they rather like the ‘big state’ – reliance on state benefits in these areas are high, they like their ‘big ticket’ infrastructure projects, they are fairly socially conservative and aren’t very big on issues around ‘identity politics’ that Mr Corbyn and his followers spent a lot of time obsessing over.

Mr Corbyn abandoned a lifetime of Bennite euroscepticism to appease his backbenchers and trade union paymasters. In doing so, he lost many old admirers and gained few new ones. The people of these medium-sized towns voted Leave and they meant Leave. In 2017, they reluctantly gave Mr Corbyn the benefit of the doubt, but after two further years of his attempts to delay, frustrate and water down the Brexit they voted for, they were willing to break the habit of a lifetime and give somebody else a try.

They became the ‘red wall’ and took a punt on Boris Johnson. They sort-of-knew his character flaws, they knew he wasn’t ‘one of them’ in terms of class or background, they knew his personal life was chaotic but they chose to ignore it, but in Mr Johnson (who they affectionately referred to as ‘Boris’) they saw someone who made a clear commitment to implementing the Brexit they had voted for more than three years earlier.

Within weeks of Mr Johnson’s election victory, he was faced with the challenges brought by the pandemic. To begin with, not much was known about the virus, how it was transmitted, or where the balance was to be struck between protecting public health and allowing economic and social activity to continue.

It is easy to forget this now, but in those early months of 2020, there was a huge amount of public goodwill towards Mr Johnson. This only began to break down some time after Easter when revelations about Dominic Cummings’s rule-breaking and the misdemeanours of others came to light.

That is not to say that Mr Johnson did not make serious mistakes during this time. All too often, his addresses on TV, and particularly at press conferences, sounded like rallying cries to the Eton Second XV rugger team rather than calmly and precisely-worded addresses to a nation at a serious time. He could and should have also taken the opportunity to suspend devolution to prevent the opportunists Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford from making up silly rules to be different from England purely to make themselves look important, at a time when the public needed clarity. Once the pandemic was over, and if the pandemic had been well-handled by the Westminster government, the opportunity could have been taken to hold referenda on reversing devolution. Alas, that opportunity was lost.

A big turning point in the change of public opinion came in June 2020, when a far-left mob toppled a statue of philanthropist Edward Coulston in Bristol as part of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstrations. This sent a dangerous message to the public: If your mother, your child, or even your dog is dying, you cannot stay with them because of Covid restrictions – that’s a sacrifice you’re expected to make, but if you feel angry about the statue of a man who died nearly 300 years ago, feel free to be part of a large mob that tears it down and throws it into a river.

It was at the point of the Colston statue incident, and the protests about the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, somewhere few activists could actually point to on a map, that public cynicism about the rules substantially increased.

In the end, Mr Johnson was brought down by the ‘what can I get away with?’ attitude to life that he had demonstrated many times in the decades before, and, it has to be said, that attitude is shared by many of his social class.

Few of us who saw Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021 will forget the sight of the late Queen, sat alone, away from her family at the service for her husband of 74 years. As she so often did, Her Majesty led by example. Yet we now know that the night before his funeral, Downing St staff held a party that included wine being thrown on walls, fights among staff and the swing in the garden was broken. The ‘what can I get away with?’ attitude of that particular sect was in action.

Mr Johnson was ultimately brought down by a mixture of Partygate, Wallpapergate, the Owen Paterson affair and the Chris Pincher affair.

We should be careful not to overpraise Mr Johnson. Yes, he got Brexit done, and the deal was a rather good one overall, albeit at the expense of throwing Northern Ireland under a bus. The vaccine rollout was efficient. He prevented Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister – we should not underestimate the importance of this, since Mr Corbyn is now a convicted antisemite, and he is also a danger to national security, having described Hamas and Hezbollah as his ‘friends’.

But by the same token, Mr Johnson was every bit as committed to ‘green politics’ as Labour has been in recent years (possibly due to the influence of his modish, metropolitan wife Carrie), and he failed to make any meaningful progress at all in terms of ‘levelling up’, namely, repaying the faith shown in him by voters in medium-sized towns and making the country less London-centric.

What followed was a farcical period in which Liz Truss failed to grasp the golden rule of politics – know how much ‘room for manoeuvre’ you have. Margeret Thatcher understood this – she was instinctively cautious, especially in in her first term (something that is now often-forgotten), and only took on the big battles with the mining unions and others later on when she was properly-situated to do so.

The country’s finances were in poor shape before the pandemic, but the lack of economic activity from early 2020 until the end of the pandemic mean the levels of national debt are now eyewatering. Rishi Sunak’s hands have been tied to a certain extent, but there is a sense that he and the people around him either do not understand how to make the most of the freedoms the UK now has, or, perhaps more to the point, they lack the will to properly use them.

For example, there is nothing to stop the government from targeting a constituency in a red wall seat with high unemployment and telling any company that opens an office or factory there employing at least 800 people that they will pay no business rates or VAT for five years. This would have been illegal under EU law, but it is now perfectly possible. It also creates a win-win situation in that it takes people off the unemployment register, meaning they are in work and paying taxes, and after five years, the company will have a skilled, experienced workforce in the area and are likely to stay when the time comes for them to start paying VAT and business rates.

Mr Johnson could, early on, have abandoned the expensive HS2 vanity project and instead committed to a high-speed rail line, for a fraction of the cost, connecting the great northern cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Bradford, making it feasible to live in one city (or any of the medium-sized towns in between) and work in another. As things stand, journeys across the Pennines on rail and other forms of public transport take an absurdly long time. Linking the great cities of the north by high-speed rail would have created a population base equivalent to London and a rival economic powerhouse could have been born. But that opportunity has now been lost.

The problem facing people in the medium-sized towns is easy to articulate and can be summed up in a few sentences: The Labour Party ceased to care about people like them long ago. Labour has, for some time, been the party of Islington. As a result, the people in ‘red wall’ seats did something that would have seemed unthinkable even a few years earlier and voted Conservative. Now, they have every reason to feel let down.

That was simple enough to explain. But there is no reason whatsoever to believe that a Labour Party led by Sir Keir Starmer will in any way solve the problem.

Sir Keir’s seat, Holborn and St Pancras is within walking distance of Mr Corbyn’s Islington seat, and while he is better at camouflaging his true beliefs more professionally than his predecessor, there is every reason to believe he is every bit as dangerous.

Let us start with the obvious. Sir Keir is as keen on ‘identity politics’ as his predecessor. Sir Keir cannot answer very basic questions such as: Can a woman have a penis? (Correct answer – no). How many genders are there? (Correct answer – two). And what is a woman? (Correct answer – an adult female).

This picture of Sir Keir ‘taking the knee’ alongside his foul-mouthed deputy leader Angela Rayner could and should be used as an electioneering tool by the Conservatives, accompanied by the word ‘Really?’ in big letters. But it is unlikely they will have the courage to do so.

Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner take the knee

Sir Keir’s track record when he was Director of Public Prosecutions saw him turn a blind eye to Pakistani grooming gangs abusing underage children – in other words he was putting ‘community cohesion’ before child safety; In October 2009, police interviewed four women who said they were attacked by Sir Jimmy Savile decades earlier when they were 14 – one might reasonably expect that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) would have been closely involved in checking that the case was being handled properly – Sir Keir was ultimately responsible for the obviously-wrong decision not to prosecute; he could also have assessed why the Post Office (which as a publicly-owned institution has the power to bypass the CPS and bring its own prosecutions) was accusing so many postmasters with long track records of honesty and integrity of serious fraud and theft – Sir Keir appeared totally disinterested in the possibility that there may have been a serious fault with the Horizon computer system. We now know the devastating consequences of this decision.

But what motivates Sir Keir Starmer? What is the driving force and ambition behind him? You probably will not like the answers, but it does reveal rather a lot about a man who on the surface seems bland, uninspiring and clinical.

It is always worth asking anybody with ambition to hold public office the question, “What is your moral authority in life?”

We all have a moral authority, whether we realise it or not. For some of us, that authority is the Bible or other religious text. For others, they do whatever suits themselves. For others, their authority is popular opinion – they see what’s popular at any given time and align themselves with it because they want to be seen as part of the ‘in crowd’. But what is Sir Keir’s moral authority?

Lots of politically-active students say and do silly things when they are in their teens and early 20s. Getting a proper job, receiving your first tax bill and starting a family are usually accompanied by important steps towards political maturity. But not always.

To answer that question, we need to turn the clock back to 1930, 32 years before Sir Keir was even born. A body called the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers was formed to provide legal support to the then-Labour government. Clement Attlee was among its early members.

In 1949, there was an explosive split in the society due to Communist sympathisers infiltrating it. Anti-Communist socialists had tried to break the Haldane Society’s Communist links and narrowly lost a secret ballot.

Almost all senior Labour lawyers in the Haldane Society, including then-Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps and future Lord Chancellor Gerald Gardiner broke away and formed the Society of Labour Lawyers. This was the body most Labour-supporting legal professionals chose to belong to from this point onwards, and it was from then affiliated to the Labour Party, whereas the Haldane Society’s formal links to the party were cut.

Fast-forward to autumn 1989. Sir Keir Starmer was 27 years old, and, as a young lawyer, he was listed as the Haldane Society’s secretary in the organisation’s official magazine. At the time, it was sympathetic to the British Communist Party.

The Cold War was still in progress, and a list of upcoming resolutions for the forthcoming annual general meeting included: Welcoming Soviet peace proposals; urging the Labour Party to adopt a non-nuclear, non-aligned (ie non-NATO) defence. Sir Keir remained a member of the Haldane Society until 2008, when he was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions and his membership would have constituted a conflict of interest. He was, by this time, in his mid-40s.

In 1986-87, Sir Keir was editor of a magazine called Socialist Alternatives, a turgid, dry publication sympathetic to Trotskyism. The magazine was preoccupied with sexual politics and green issues. Do you get the impression Sir Keir might not have changed very much beneath the smart suit? Keep reading.

In the 1980s, Sir Keir was known as ‘red-green’. He had the opportunity to denounce this in 2020 when he was interviewed by New Statesman interviewer Patrick Maguire, who asked Sir Keir if he was still a ‘red-green’, to which he enthusiastically replied “Yeah!”. He had the opportunity to distance himself from his past, but he did not do so.

Sir Keir’s mindset has been heavily-influenced by a Greek revolutionary who died in 1996 called Michalis Raptis, who liked to be known as Michael Pablo, and developed an ideology called Pabloism. Raptis/Pablo was originally a Trotskyite, but adopted a more modern creed, and his followers were called Pabloites.

Later on in the same interview with the New Statesman in 2020, Sir Keir said: “I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.

“The big issue we were grappling with then 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.”

There you have it. A Starmer government would do nothing to stop the pushing of gender and identity politics in the police, the civil service, the schools, the NHS, what’s left of the armed forces and all public institutions. It would very likely be greatly enhanced. He would also go further and faster on green dogma, such as the hugely-damaging ‘net zero’ targets which are the cause of much unnecessary economic misery.

Between 2017 and 2020, Sir Keir voted no fewer than 48 times to frustrate, delay and preferably block Brexit in the House of Commons.

While I do not believe that a Starmer-led government would attempt to take the UK back into the European Union any time soon, there are good reasons to believe that they would fail to seize the opportunities and flexibilities Brexit brings for economic growth, and would instead try to align us with Brussels to as large an extent as they think they can get away with it.

A few clues can be found in these screenshots from the current Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy. The first of which came just days after the 2016 referendum.

Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy tweeted this just two days after the 2016 Brexit referendum

Indeed, Mr Lammy has attended the meetings of the secretive Bilderberg Group more than once in recent years, which strongly implies he is willing to obey his puppet masters by following the globalist agenda.

Beyond Sir Keir’s obsession with green issues and identity politics, there is little cause for optimism, and a Starmer-led government would very likely be similar to the New Labour years, albeit more intense – he has no qualms with sharing a platform with Sir Anthony Blair.

Sir Anthony Blair and Sir Keir Starmer

A Starmer-government would mean more uncontrolled mass immigration, more meddling in family life, and higher taxes.

‘Fiscal drag’ is going to be one of the big issues in the years ahead for taxpayers. The current Conservative government has committed to freezing the Personal Allowance (currently 20p in the pound for earnings above £12,750), Higher Rate (currently 40p in the pound for earnings above £50,270) and Top Rate (currently 45p in the pound for earnings above £125,140) until 2027/28.

In other words, as wages rise as a result of inflation, people will be paying a lot more income tax. Low earners who currently pay no income tax at all will be doing so. People who are only moderately well-off will be dragged into the Higher Rate. In fact, it is already happening.

In 1991/92, just 3.5% of UK adults (1.6 million) paid the 40% Higher Rate of income tax. By 2022/23 11% (6.1 million) were paying Higher Rates, with that figure set to reach 14% (7.8 million) by 2027/28.

In the 1990s, hardly any nurses and just one in 16 teachers paid the Higher Rate, by 2027/28 more than one in eight nurses and one in four teachers are set to be Higher Rate taxpayers. This marks a seismic shift in our tax system and on the amount of money in people’s pockets. There is no indication whatsoever that a Labour government would reverse this.

Sir Keir has little to offer to those who believe in national sovereignty, a low-tax economy, the traditional family, law and order, proper education, free speech, freedom and personal responsibility. Or to put it another way, he has nothing positive to offer those who live in ‘red wall’ seats. They have every reason to feel betrayed by the Conservatives, but Sir Keir is in no way the solution.