Starmer’s Road Ahead: Progressive not socialist
Keir Starmer has published his views of the past and future as a Fabian pamphlet, The Road Ahead:
I don’t think it is all his own work. Philip Collins a rather dull right-wing columnist seems to have been involved. Suffice to say that he neither likes the left or in any way understands it.
That said there is nothing that much that is hugely problematic or indeed interesting here. Starmer prefers the ‘progressive’ of the late nineteenth century rather than the ‘socialist’ of the twentieth. Much as I disagree with Tony Blair and his advisors (like Starmer he was no history man) he did this kind of thing much, much better.
Starmer notes that the standard version of Labour history is well-known, just not by him. Ralph Miliband opened his Parliamentary Socialism(1961) by noting that Labour had always been the most dogmatic of parties, not about socialism but about sticking to Parliamentary rules. That might sum up Starmer’s approach as he mentions no extra-Parliamentary protest at all from Extinction Rebellion to Black Lives Matter but he hasn’t read Miliband.
He talks (page 16) of Labour’s vision of Government working with the private sector. Indeed that was Blair’s vision and it was a disaster. Try public ownership.
I might say more but the whole tone of the document is that of something that Labour could have produced after 1945, in 1959, in 1970, 1979 and so on. In short if Starmer actually did know his Labour history he’d know that this is not something to meet the very serious challenges of the 2020s
Leave a Reply