‘Starmer called for my prosecution’

Who is the real Keir Starmer and what does he actually believe? The new prime minister has been in Downing Street for a month now, yet many of us are still none the wiser. His champions hail him as a hard-headed pragmatist who is unburdened by ideology. His detractors denounce him as a serial flip-flopper, with no principles or policies. According to historian David Starkey, both views are wrong. Starmer, he argues, does indeed hold some core beliefs – beliefs that should worry anyone who cares about liberty and democracy. Starkey sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers last week to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Fraser Myers: Labour was widely seen to have run on a very thin manifesto, making few concrete promises. But you have argued that its programme is more substantial, and perhaps a lot more worrying, than people realise. Why is this?

David Starkey: Starmer is a believer in the supremacy of law, but, in many ways, that doesn’t actually mean the supremacy of law so much as the supremacy of lawyers. The supremacy of people like him. He believes that human society should be constructed according to rules made by people like him, enforced by people like him, and which prevent anybody else who is not like him from having a say in anything. That’s where we are.

This is done through this strange thing called ‘human-rights law’, which Labour has pinned its colours to. The important thing to remember is that, since the end of the Second World War, human rights have been stood on their head. Originally, human rights were meant to protect the rights of you and me against the state. They were there to make sure there wasn’t another Nazism or another Communism. That’s what they were there for. But there has been an Orwellian inversion, and instead of human rights meaning that everybody has freedom of speech and political participation, they have become the rights of minorities against the majority – and the only entity that can enforce the rights of minorities against the majority is the state.

In this sense, human rights have become deliberately anti-populist. They have become anti-democratic. Starmer represents this attitude. Everything that Labour does, everything that it will do, embodies a particular view of society. This worldview is expressed in the language of ‘public service’, this mysterious thing that actually means the rule of public servants like him. Except Labour are not governing as servants, but as masters.

Despite its history, the Labour Party is no longer the party of the working-class – those awful people in the north of England who are a bit too patriotic, and who occasionally wave the Union flag. The Labour Party abhors these people. Today, what it actually represents is the white-collar public sector and the whole academic quangocracy. Very remarkably, it’s become the party of the new ruling class.

Myers: Labour recently announced its intention to scrap the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. Does this signal a broader threat to free speech?

Starkey: I think this was entirely predictable. Let’s take my own case. I had an incident where the tongue slipped, as it tends to when you say too many things as I do. There were two stages in that business. There was the initial, hysterical cancellation in June 2020. And then, in October, a particularly insane policeman decided that myself and poor little Darren Grimes had committed an offence under Section Six of the Public Order Act, which carries sentences of up to six years in prison. Even The Times, which was not very sympathetic to me, wrote a leader saying that the charge was mad.

At the time, the one public figure who supported that charge against me was Keir Starmer. This is the most terrifying thing about the Labour Party. This is where Starmer and his supporters are a real, genuine, urgent and dangerous threat to free speech. Starmer sees himself essentially as a prosecutor, and it’s worth noting the sort of civil servants his party has recruited. Sue Gray, his chief of staff, invented this extraordinary thing in the Cabinet Office called the Propriety and Ethics team, which allowed her to oversee ministerial and public appointments. This is effectively used as a modern-day Stasi. I know this because I’ve been at the receiving end of it.

Fundamentally, we all need to understand that, at the heart of our government, we have an organisation doing exactly what Coutts bank did to Nigel Farage last year. This department keeps records on you. It notes your activity on social media. It looks at comments that are made about you on social media. It takes anonymous accusations. And it compiles files against you. We in Britain have that. It is something that is at the heart of the whole regulatory enterprise. It has nothing to do with policy. It is to do with the deliberate regulation of speech.

David Starkey was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch to the full conversation here: