Sir Keir Starmer presides over perhaps the most authoritarian British government since the early 19th century.
He jails people for saying the wrong thing, demands digital ID, cancels jury trials. Yet he does it all in such a cack-handed way that the effect – as so often with Leftists – is more gauche than sinister.
Consider the collapse, this week, of his attempt to annul elections in 30 local council areas where Labour expects to do badly.
The whole thing was, in equal measure, outrageous and ungainly. When Labour postponed a handful of local polls last year, it at least had the excuse that the authorities involved were disappearing through re-organisation.
Encouraged by the muted objections to that deferral, it then announced the cancellation of 30 more, covering 4.5 million voters, overwhelmingly in councils where Labour is likely to be walloped.
It was only a legal challenge – fair play to Nigel Farage for bringing it – that made ministers back down, by some counts Starmer’s 14th U-turn since the election.
It used to be said that Italian fascism was tempered by the incompetence of Italian officials, but Mussolini had nothing on our British klutzes. We are what a police state would look like if it were run by Inspector Clouseau.
Consider some of the things that Starmer has done, or tried to do, in the 19 months (can it be only 19 months?) since the election.
Sir Keir Starmer presides over perhaps the most authoritarian British government since the early 19th century
First, there was the free speech clampdown – accompanied by the early release of actual criminals.
People were sentenced to months behind bars (Lucy Connolly served more than a year for a post on X) while violent offenders were let loose ahead of schedule.
Labour might argue that these decisions were out of its hands, that the courts were interpreting old statutes – notably the 1986 Public Order Act – in draconian ways.
But the decision to pick a fight with online platforms was Starmer’s alone. Almost the first thing he did on taking office was to threaten Elon Musk with legal action over the Southport riots, which had been exacerbated by the belief that the authorities were covering up details of the attack so as to deflect anti-immigrant feeling.
Musk was always bound to win any such fight – not only because X is more popular than Labour but because, on the issue of free speech, British public opinion is closer to Musk than to Starmer.
Yet, in his dim, plodding way, Starmer keeps picking quarrels. ‘No social media platform should get a free pass when it comes to protecting our kids,’ he declared three days ago when discussing a proposed ban on under-16s using social media. ‘That’s why I’m taking action.’
Does anyone believe that this is really about ‘protecting our kids’?
Starmer doesn’t like Musk or his platform – and wants to do everything he can to hobble them.
I predict that Starmer will eventually back down in his battle against Musk, having achieved nothing in the meantime except to give this country an even worse reputation than it already has for censorship.
We are what a police state would look like if it were run by Inspector Clouseau, argues Lord Hannan
Dislike of independent media platforms is, of course, the hallmark of every illiberal regime. Starmer might not be able to lock up dissident journalists, Putin-style. Still, it is distasteful and un-British to see our own politicos respond to revelations of financial irregularities by seeking to smear the reporters concerned.
It emerged this month that Labour Together, the organisation that helped make Starmer leader of his party, had done the political equivalent of hiring a private investigator to tail the journalists who had exposed its failure to declare £730,000 in donations.
A PR company was paid £36,000 to dig dirt on the two journalists involved, apparently with a view to smearing them as Kremlin dupes.
Chillingly, its report dwelt on the fact that one of them was Jewish.
Predictably, that investigation backfired, and the people who commissioned it – one of whom is now a Labour minister – are themselves being investigated by the Cabinet Office.
We see the same pattern over and over again. Starmer tries to be iron-fisted and ends up being ham-fisted.
Consider his abolition of jury trials for all but the most serious crimes. Jury trials have been one of our strongest guarantees against tyranny, a way to ensure that the law is the property of the people rather than an instrument of state control.
As David Lammy put it when he was Opposition justice spokesman in 2020: ‘A jury trial gives people the final say on the guilt or innocence of their fellow citizens.
‘It entrusts the public to make life-changing decisions, rather than merely leaving it in the hands of lawyers.’
Almost the first thing Starmer did on taking office was to threaten Elon Musk with legal action over the Southport riots. Musk was always bound to win any such fight
That, though, was before Lammy got mixed up in this most inept of governments.
The irony is that Starmer sees himself as a defender of individual freedoms.
It is sometimes said that he has no convictions, but one belief has motivated him at every stage in his life, whether as the editor of a Trotskyite newspaper, as a Corbyn yes-man or now as a hapless prime minister: namely his belief in human rights.
As he told his biographer, Tom Baldwin: ‘There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer.’
Yet, here he is, gaily scrapping a thousand-year-old protection of our liberties. If, that is, he actually goes ahead.
It is just as likely that he will again back down, as he did over his plan to impose Chinese-style digital ID cards, thereby empowering government officials to ruin our lives without any judicial process. How are we to explain his inconstancy?
Weakness of character. Starmer says whatever he thinks is helpful at that moment: Jeremy Corbyn is a friend of mine, no he must be kicked out of the party; we will nationalise the utilities, no we won’t; Israel has the right to cut off electricity to Gaza, no it’s a war-crime; we want to rejoin the EU, no we don’t, well actually we might.
Starmer is what he looks like. A turgid man who fancied becoming PM as a late career change and arrived in Downing Street thinking that there would be someone there to tell him what to do.
His realisation that there is no such person explains the fish-on-the-slab expression he has worn ever since.
Last week’s profile by Tim Shipman, based largely on interviews with Starmer’s own assistants, revealed his stunning lack of purpose or curiosity.
Here is a typical excerpt: ‘There was a meeting at Chequers one Friday recently to discuss plans for the next phase of his premiership.
‘Junior aides had been asked to draw up a statement of Starmer’s values. When one of them asked what the Prime Minister thought they should be, a senior aide replied: “Don’t worry, he’ll go along with whatever I put on his desk.”’
What are we to make of the latest tinpot move, namely his attempt to rig the franchise in Labour’s favour?
As well as removing the remaining hereditary peers from Parliament, he has introduced a Bill that would automatically enrol voters, opening the door to fraud, as well as giving the vote to 16-year-olds who Labour treats as minors in every other context.
As with everything Starmer does, it is both illiberal and incompetent, as if Brezhnev were being interpreted by David Brent.
Perhaps the only comfort is the lesson from history that dictators who overreach can find themselves dragged from power with surprising swiftness.
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is President of the Board of Trade