Careerist and reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Starmer Project. By Oliver Eagleton. Verso. 2022. £12.99

Just as we’ve become used over the years to all those tedious historiographies of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Union that claimed it would have been alright if wasn’t for a particular bunch of malcontents and traitors who somehow ruined it all, so today we have the Corbynistas. And in particular, here we have Oliver Eagleton (son of Terry) to tell us that Sir Keir Starmer is the new political antichrist and that he is never to be forgiven for undermining The Messiah, aka Saint Jeremy Corbyn. Furthermore, in this craven mission the swine apparently enlisted John McDonnell and a whole list of other Judas-like characters.

There is some useful research and journalism in this book (Eagleton writes for The Guardian periodically). But it is all filtered through such a thick distorting prism that you are left almost feeling sorry for Starmer, political careerist and reformist though he is.

There are four chapters that logically flow one after the other to mirror Starmer’s career: The Lawyer, The Politician, The Candidate and The Leader. Because it suits his purposes, Eagleton rather downplays Starmer’s early time in the 1980s in and around a Pabloite Trotskyist sect, though his time as Director of Public Prosecutions sees him seemingly held personally responsible for almost literally every legal decision at the time that Eagleton dislikes. You strongly suspect the truth lies somewhere in between that narrative and the one of the pious, upright human-rights lawyer that Starmer still likes to project.

But either way, this misses the point – as does much of the book. Eagleton lists the key features of what he calls ‘The Starmer Project’ thus:

‘1) a ‘values-led non-antagonistic election strategy; 2) an unsparing crackdown on the Labour Left, seen as more dangerous than the Conservatives; 3) an Atlanticist authoritarian disposition, combining intervention abroad with repression at home; and 4) a return to neoliberal economic precepts, overseen by Blairite leftovers’ (p.186).

But using this same categorisation, what was the leftist Corbyn project this replaced and was – in part – a reaction against? Arguably:

1) a ‘values-led’ but utopian and incoherent election strategy, doomed to predictable defeat and recrimination; 2) an unsparing crackdown on those elements in the Labour Party who knew how to win elections (ie, by telling the working class what it wants to hear); 3) a quasi-Leninist disposition, combining active or tacit support for repression abroad with intervention at home; and 4) a return to state capitalist economic precepts, overseen by Trotskyist and Stalinist leftovers.

Eagleton – like Corbyn and many on the Labour Left – has a yearning against injustice that is commendable. However, he misunderstands the party he supports. The Labour Party exists to win elections (without power it is nothing) and to then enact mild reforms that can ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalist society – or at least try to. Starmer stands foursquare in this tradition; the Corbyn mirage was that you could somehow more radically transform capitalism with its profit motive and market economy through leftist sloganeering combined with a Biblical proportions wish-list of largely unrealistic promises. This is not something that has ever worked – anywhere, in any country.

Some of what Eagleton says about Starmer hits home, but it is so skewed and partial at times it is not entirely reliable. Indeed, the abiding impression is that the book rather deceives by selection, and is significantly the worse for it.

Dave Perrin