The Socialist Alternatives Project & Keir Starmer 1986-2025. Beyond Ripping Yarns
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 2025 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, (Times 2-4th 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 book’s largely unevidenced ripping yarns, are entertaining and like much that would be found in an old style paper diary column, having enough of the truth about them to be possibly true, don’t really get to the root of the Starmer enigma.
Jason Cowley, former Editor of the New Statesman, and well connected in Labour circles, has reviewed the book in the Sunday Times (9th February) and suggests that the core of it is the Morgan McSweeney story. McSweeney provided the political organisation Starmer lacks. A note of caution, which won’t be sounded in the media, is that McSweeney was the manager of Liz Kendall’s bid for the Labour leadership where she got 4.5%. In respect of the July 2024 Election it might be speculated that Labour would have won without McSweeney’s strategy, given how hated the Tories were, but perhaps not as big
The book does at least underline an already existing view that Starmer is much more a professional lawyer than a politician and in particular someone with a lack of political sensibility.
McSweeney however whose ideas, or lack of them, is a standard Labour right-winger. The Labour right has been bereft of ideas on how to change the world for the better or even make sure it doesnt get worse since at least the 2008 financial crash. That was a key reason why Jeremy Corbyn had the appeal he had, he did some have ideas.
Starmer is not a charismatic leader and at the July 2024 Election this was sold as an alternative to the excitements of Truss, Johnson et al. The problem here is that particularly with Trump the world has becoming exciting
Starmer’s support for Arsenal, rarely factored in, suggests he is keen on winning, in whatever way works. His personal politics may not exactly mirror some of this (who knows) but that is of only marginal relevance. He is doing a job
That still doesn’t account for Starmer’s North London 1980s btw. I was there myself in the same North London Borough and you don’t really forget.
Leave a Reply