Oliver Eagleton
“Thus the Labour Party is a ‘capitalist workers’ party’.”
― Vladimir Lenin
In that country (Great Britain], the ruling class of
which is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before, the
formulae of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary
swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George, appeals
now not to democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property
holders against the working class. In his arguments, no trace remains of the
vague democracy of the ‘Marxist’ Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of
class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war.
The British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is
its distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before
which the most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune
will grow pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat.
Leon Trotsky
“When people write they mostly forget to reach deep into
their selves, to relive the importance and truth of the subject.”
(Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to the Seidels, 1898)
The election of Sir Keir Starmer, to the British state's
highest office, is a mark of acceptance by the British establishment, that
Starmer and his new Labour government will look after their interests.
Oliver Eagleton's new book on Starmer is a useful if politically
limited examination of Starmer’s rise to power. Starmer began his political
career under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Eagleton shows that Corbyn was
instrumental in Starmer’s political development and rise to power.
Incredible as it may seem Starmer began political life with
a reputation as a “lefty lawyer”. He was a member of the Pseudo Left group Socialist
Alternatives.[1] And wrote
articles on the 1986 Wapping Strike. Starmer has been portrayed in the media as
a defender of human rights. But as Eagleton points out, this is a carefully
cultivated image. Starmer early on "was motivated by ambition” and steered
“a careful course between good-cause legal campaigning and collaboration with
the security services”.
When the Haldane Society sent Starmer to investigate
allegations of police brutality in Northern Ireland, Starmer became friendly
with British troops. Starmer's support for the British army and police led to
the extreme right MP Ian Paisley, saying that Starmer “gave us the tools and
the arguments and the defence lines to allow us to say that water cannon are
necessary or plastic bullets are allowed…and all police officers in Northern Ireland
carry a gun… His lasting legacy is that you can have all these accoutrements to
policing provided they meet human rights guidelines effectively, and he
provided…the arguments for doing that and the legal cover to do it”.[2]
During his time as director of public
prosecutions—Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from July
2008. He worked closely with the Tory government and implemented their spending
cuts with great efficiency. But it was during his close collaboration with the
United States government that Starmer came into his own.
As Ian Taylor writes “he also began strengthening the
CPS’s role within the British security state Starmer began to regularly liaise
with the United States National Security Agency and the Specialist Operations
Directorate of London’s Metropolitan Police on CPS “work” overseas. This was
significant given the international “War on Terror” being prosecuted by the US
and Britain. Eagleton quotes an unnamed member of the CPS’s international
division: “We made sure what we were doing was most relevant to Britain’s
international objectives.” This involved “building up the counter-terrorism
capacity of overseas security services” in countries such as Yemen, Somalia,
Kenya and Afghanistan.8 Eagleton also finds evidence that Starmer liaised
regularly with Eric Holder, the attorney general in Barack Obama’s
administration, who advised on “how the CPS could best advance US
counter-terrorism objectives in Africa and the Middle East”. He argues the CPS
under Starmer “agreed to act as a proxy” for the US State Department in
countries “reluctant to accept direct US interference”.[3]
Perhaps the most despicable action of Starmer was his
involvement in the pursuit and prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at
the behest of the US government. Among many attacks carried out by Starmer on
Assange was the overseeing of the destroying of documents relating to the
Swedish government's prosecution of Assange on trumped-up rape charges. As
Chris Marsden relates “It was revealed by the excellent journalism of Stefania
Maurizi that, in 2011, the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then under the
direction of one Sir Keir Starmer, had destroyed correspondence with Swedish
prosecutors relating to Assange. One line which did survive was from a British
CPS lawyer advising Swedish investigators not to question Assange in the UK”.[4]
Starmer’s political career began in earnest in the 2015
general election when he was elected in the safe London seat of Holborn and St
Pancras. Starmer was appointed shadow minister for immigration by Corbyn. Later,
he would be instrumental in the denigration and removal of Jermy Corbyn as a
labour leader.
The recent election of a Labour government with Starmer
as Prime Minister is the culmination of a long process whereby the Labour Party
has now been fully transformed into the UK’s leading bourgeois party. The
current Labour government's share of the national vote was just 33.8 per cent.
Labour takes power with the lowest share of the popular
vote of any incoming government in British history. Thomas Scripps writes “Sir
Keir Starmer takes his place at the head of a Labour government on a collision
course with the British working class. He owes his “landslide” victory entirely
to the hatred with which the Conservative government of the last 14 years was
viewed, the thoroughly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, and the fact
that widespread left-wing sentiment has found no organised socialist
expression.”[5]
Instrumental in Starmer's coming to power were the
various pseudo-left groups. In another article on the World Socialist Website, Laura
Tiernan writes “Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) used its “Marxism 2024:
a festival of socialist ideas” on July 4-7, to promote former Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn as the figurehead for a new pseudo-left alliance against Sir Keir
Starmer’s Labour government. During the election campaign, the SWP called for a
Labour vote, urging “everyone to use their vote on Thursday to smash,
exterminate and snuff out the Tories. Then dance on their grave. These bombastic statements indict the SWP as a defender
of Starmer’s Labour government, which is—no less than the Tories—an open party
of genocide, war, austerity and anti-immigrant racism.”[6]
Suffice it to say this type of analysis is not to be found in Eagleton’s book. Despite Eagleton saying “Starmer and his enforcers in Labour headquarters have taken extraordinary steps to cleanse the party of socialist influence and the opportunities for building a progressive power base within the party…are negligible.” his solution is to “develop multiple groupings, and “then to cultivate this various flora and enable their cross-pollination”. His solution is so vague and thoroughly bankrupt and must be rejected by the working class. Workers must develop a revolutionary solution to the problems they face. Their starting point for a struggle against the Labour government should be a thorough examination of the articles on the World Socialist Website(wsws.org).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Alternative_(England_and_Wales
2. https://isj.org.uk/knight-shift/
[3]
Knight shift: Keir Starmer and Labour’s move to the right -https://isj.org.uk/knight-shift/
[4]
Julian Assange and the fight against imperialist war-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/25/ymiy-m25.html
[5]
Build the socialist opposition to Starmer’s right-wing government!-wsws.org
[6]
Socialist Workers Party “Marxism 2024” festival promotes Jeremy Corbyn as
leader of a “left” regrouping-wsws.org
