The Socialist Alternatives Project & Keir Starmer 1986-2024. The dialectic of timely historical research
On Monday May 20th 2024 Benjamin Schoendorff spoke at a socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. As many seminars are now it was on Zoom and the attendance while fairly modest was fully engaged.
Schoendorff was the Editor of a magazine, Socialist Alternatives, for which a young Keir Starmer wrote and helped to run.
Schoendorff spoke about the Socialist Alternatives project. A magazine was produced that focused on red-green politics and orientated first around the 1980s Labour left and then the Green Party. The project had sprung out of one part of orthodox Trotskyism around Michael Raptis (Pablo) but as Schoendorff made clear it was very much seen as post-Trotskyist and an attempt at movement rather than party building.
One participant was a young Keir Starmer. Starmer seemed to have been involved with the Militant while at Leeds and initially at Oxford. However Schoendorff noted he made an easy transition to the rather different left politics of Socialist Alternatives.
While such changes are far from unknown they are usually accompanied by lengthy disavowals of the individual’s previous positions. This was not the case with Starmer.
Schoendorff noted that he had rather liked Starmer but remained puzzled how the person he knew then had ended up as Labour leader in 2024. One conclusion perhaps relevant to 2024 was that Starmer did not have strong political views but assimilated to whatever milieu he found himself in.
Reading extracts from a new book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund about Labour’s July 2024 Election victory, Get In, (Sunday Times 2nd February 2025) I was struck by a reported view of Tony Blair that Starmer’s politics didn’t really come from anywhere except they were ‘vaguely progressive’.
The extract, while containing much that might be summarised as entertaining but not strictly verifiable stories, does also underline an already existing view that Starmer is much more a professional lawyer than a politician and in particular someone with a political sensibility.
That still doesn’t account for Starmer’s North London 1980s
Running the seminar in May was a gamble. May is exam time in the academy and when not raining provides nice early evenings for a beer or meal. Sitting in Room 301 at the Institute of Historical Research or viewing Zoom on a screen suggests a less attractive experience.
I did ponder running the seminar in the Autumn term- in October 2024 but thought this might be a little close to a long projected November election.
As it happened it was two days before the 2024 Election was called.
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