This week’s Spectator looks at the role Sir Keir Starmer has played in granting the government extraordinary emergency powers to deal with the rise of Covid. The Labour leader appears happy to maintain such restrictions on the right to protest and even tried to bolster his credentials on law and order by backing under fire Met Commissioner Cressida Dick. But Mr S has done some digging in the archives and it shows Sir Keir was not always such a fan of the police. His works from the 1980s and 1990s prior to taking silk as a QC show a strong libertarian-left streak and a disdain for authoritarian justice and a strong executive.
Tony Blair might now be advising his successor but Starmer was not always so receptive to New Labour’s views on law and order. Writing in 1996 in The Three Pillars of Liberty, he claims: ‘Well-meaning elitism was no longer in fashion in the 1990s. The Prime Minister and his Home Secretary declared their contempt for a well-informed approach to combating crime… For the Labour opposition had adjusted its own stance to the prevailing public mood, encapsulated in its slogan, ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ It seems that the government and opposition parties both calculate in the 1990s on [Lord] Scarman’s ‘fear and prejudice’ among the public.’ Ooft.
He continues in the same book: ‘the denial of voting rights to most prisoners… comes close to violating evolving human rights standards’ and that ‘the disparity between UK law and practice and those standards whenever the security forces are involved is alarming.’ Such views were clearly well formed. Shortly after his postgraduate studies at Oxford, Starmer served on the editorial board of the short-lived periodical Socialist Alternative. His disdain for heavy handed policing is evident here too, such as a critical account of the methods used in the Wapping dispute: ‘It is clear that thorough democratisation of the state is needed, including making the police accountable to the community they are meant to serve’. Elsewhere in the same periodical he speculates on ‘the role the police should play, if any, in civil society.’
Distrust about law enforcement was also evident in the Editor’s Comments of the 1993 tome Justice in Error where he writes: ‘Terrorist incidents produce police anger and frustration and so terrorist suspects are deserving of the utmost protection if mistakes or misdeeds are to be avoided.’ It follows his claim in the introduction: ‘Assertions that the British system of justice is the best in the world or miscarriages of justice are few and far between can no longer be sustained without argument. Criminal justice systems should be judged inter alia, on the number of injustices produced by them in the first place and, secondly, on their willingness to recognise and correct their mistakes. The British system scores badly on both counts.’ He also argued: ‘The right to silence is a fundamental feature of our adversarial criminal justice system [as] it protects the individual from excessive and arbitrary State power.’
Even during last year’s leadership contest, Starmer launched his campaign with a glowing video that opened with his past activism including how ‘Keir defended the print workers at Wapping. He was in the crowd that night when police on horseback charged into the peaceful picket.’
Mr S wonders, in light of his recent statements, just whatever happened to the young Keir Starmer?
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