UK: Labour’s Manifesto Conceals Starmer’s Radical Intentions

The vague policy offering outlined in Labour’s manifesto was clearly drawn up to create as little political fuss as possible. But an increasing number of commentators on Britain’s Right are warning that beneath this ‘centrist’ veneer is a very radical agenda.

Not that there aren’t any notable pledges in the 136-page document, which puts in writing Labour’s desire to give children the right to vote and, as politics professor Eric Kaufmann highlights in The Spectator, opens the door to new discriminatory quotas based on ethnicity and to fresh ‘hate crime’ legislation.

But while the document—and, as if by design, the conversation surrounding it—focuses mainly on tax-related issues, Tim Stanley, who is a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, warns that genuine British conservatives ought to be talking about Labour’s largely undiscussed plans for constitutional change, instead. He wrote:

Labour can raise taxes; the Tories can get back in and lower them. But [Tony Blair’s] New Labour showed that if you tinker with the constitution cleverly enough, the Left will remain in power forever.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens has been banging this drum for some time, too. He has been particularly vocal about another Labour document, A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy And Rebuilding Our Economy, launched by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and former prime minister Gordon Brown at the end of 2022.

This sets out a plan to irreversibly remove huge amounts of power from Parliament and hand it in part to what Hitchens described as “(usually Labour-controlled) local government” and to a new ‘Chamber of the Nations and Regions,’ replacing the House of Lords, which will be “undoubtedly crammed with nationalists and Leftists”—that is, more broadly put, “to pilfer the powers of Parliament and give them to other bodies, less accountable but more in tune with the liberal elite.”

The document also proposes the “embedding” of so-called “new social rights” in the constitution in order to “entrench them against future threats of removal.” Hitchens notes:

Look at what the courts have already done with ‘human rights’, turning them into a pretext for judges to make and unmake the law. Imagine what they might do with this formula.

Historian David Starkey, who earlier this month told The European Conservative’s Harrison Pitt that “what really happened [under Blair’s government] was a sustained campaign to remove power from Parliament,” has also warned that Brown and Starmer’s constitutional proposals amount to “eradicating our traditions of parliamentary government.”

Hitchens says that Starkey is “livid about the way the scheme has been barely discussed.” And Stanley has correctly identified just how difficult—if at all possible—all this change would be to reverse:

If Labour wins, they’ll expand Tony Blair’s constitutional revolution, and it’ll be difficult to overturn. Just as no one wants to come out against an Act with the word equality in it, it’s tricky to argue against local government (“what? don’t you trust the people?”).

Not that any of this should come as a surprise. Starmer is not, as the media and (astoundingly) most of his detractors make out, a ‘centrist.’ He is a “red-green” follower of ‘Pabloism,’ an offshoot of Trotskyism, meaning he is committed to identity politics and green zealotry. He was involved quite seriously in an “obscure” Trotskyist pamphlet called Socialist Alternatives and was also a member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, which was sympathetic to the British Communist Party, not in his teenage years but during his early and middle adulthood.

It was also last week revealed that Starmer ended up in Communist spy files after joining a Czechoslovakian work camp during the Cold War.

It is important to note here that when Starmer was asked by the New Statesman as recently as 2020 whether he was still a “red-green,” he responded: “Yeah.” In fact, he went on to say:

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. Broadly speaking, I think the Labour Party has done that very successfully.

Peter Hitchens says that the important point through all this is that while Conservative governments have “messed up the country,” they have done so “because they are useless and have no ideas.” Labour, on the other hand, “seethes with ideas which will make the country worse by deliberate policy.”