How Stmerer moved from the honorable left to the racist right

British leader’s opinions on the great questions of our time tend to change at any time, motivated by electoral convenience.

It has been almost a year since British Prime Minister Keir Strmer led the Labor Party in one of the biggest crushing victories in modern history.

The reason for triumph is easy to understand. Britain endured 14 years of degradation and despair under a series of incompetent and corrupt conservative governments. The British people expected the Starmer Labor Party to restore decency, honesty, administrative capacity and national pride.

It didn’t happen. Ten months later, Starmer is consolidated as the deeply unpopular leader of a despised government.

Good judges doubt that Strmer can keep his chair in Holborn in the next election, let alone bring the labor party to a second victory. As dissatisfaction grows among labor parliamentarians, some begin to wonder if Stmerer will be able to survive as a leader until the next election.

The reasons for this collapse are not difficult to find. Starmer promised a new integrity in public life. Instead, he was dragged into a series of small scandals, demonstrating, at best, a miserable judgment and, at the worst, depravity.

He is almost as dishonest as Boris Johnson, and that really says a lot. The Labor Party was unable to restore solid economic management or revive a stagnant economy. As Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the unfortunate David Lammy can be generously described as completely outside his reach, while Starmer’s insistence on selling weapons to Israel in current circumstances challenges understanding.

This week’s migratory disaster is a specially useful case study. Shows why Stmerer is such a bad prime minister.

Serious alarm

There are serious problems with the system, and a white book on migration is certainly necessary. Not all proposals of the Interior Secretary, Yvette Cooper, are devoid of merit.

The main problem is stmer. The words he used to justify the new measures against migrants were dishonest, cynical, inflammatory and racist.

The prime minister said to journalists, “I’m doing this because it’s right, because it’s fair and because that’s what I believe.” But he said exactly the opposite in the recent past.

Candidate for the leadership of the Labor Party for five years, Stmerer insisted that “we have to defend the benefits of migration,” adding that Britain does not use migrants as “scapegoats” and that flaws in public services “are not the fault of migrants or people coming here.”

Now Stramer is echoing Enoch Powell, who notoriously introduced racism into British politics in 1968, with the statement that migration is making Britain a “island of strangers.”

It is very good when a young man without world experience reconsides his worldview. But Stmerer is in the sixties. He has already walked around. Therefore, it is a source of great concern that he now adopts a set of new opinions on almost every great questions of our time.

When Starmer applied for the leadership of the Labor Party, he promised to end the tuition, increase taxes on those who earn the most, return “rail, mail, energy and water services” to public property, place human rights at the center of foreign policy and defend the free movement of people. He also insisted that former labor leader Jeremy Corbyn was his friend.

It is perfectly reasonable – in fact, a sign of moral strength and intellectual capacity – reevaluating their opinion when the facts change. The Strior problem is that the facts have not changed.

The defense of the Renationalization of our public services is, in fact, stronger today than when Stmerer defended it five years ago. The same applies to increased taxes on the rich. Economic and human arguments in favor of free circulation are as powerful today, when Starmer seeks to prevent her as they were when he defended migration five years ago. Human rights matter even more today, in the midst of the massacre in Gaza, than when Starmer promised to place them at the center of foreign policy.

Dangerous standard

Stmerer is, in short, a disaster. There is no worldview, consistency or intellectual analysis. Your opinions on the big questions of our time tend to change without explanation or warning, and at any moment.

This unstable behavioral pattern would be really worrying in anyone who occupies a position of responsibility-and is scary, and even dangerous, in a prime minister.

But there is a reason for Stmerer’s political and moral ramblings. This is well explained in a powerful and well -informed book by the investigative journalist and anti -corruption researcher Paul Holden, which will be released later this year.

In “The Fraud: Keir Stmerer, Labor together and the British Democracy Crisis,” Holden does not try to give meaning or clarity to the tragic emptiness of Strmer’s policy. This would be an impossible task. But he convincingly argues that behind intellectual and moral chaos exists, if we carefully analyze a very pathetic consistency.

Holden explains that Starmer, because he has no convictions, defines himself in the terms imposed on him by his political opponents. In the election for the leadership of the Labor Party, Strmer saw his main opponent as Rebecca Long-Bailey, defender of the labor left, and systematically copied her policies. Once established as a leader, Strmer knew he needed to defeat Conservatives of Rishi Sunak – hence the constant turn to the right.

Now as Prime Minister, Stmerer is keeping an eye on the next elections, where he perceives Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage as an imminent threat. Holden argues that, just as he has changed his policies to the left to defend himself from Long Bailey, Starmer is now moving to the far right to position himself to the battle against Farage. As Farage is Powell’s political heir, it is natural for Stmerer to adopt Powell’s language.

I read a copy of early test of the book of Holden. It beautifully elucidates the trajectory of Strmer, from the honorable left to the racist right of British politics, from Long Bailey to Farage, in just five years. As a result, the Stmerer Labor Party joined Kemi Badenoch conservatives and Farage’s reform in the battle for a small group of racist voters.

A vast space opened in the center of the ground for a party ready to defend honesty, decency and humanity in our public life.

Originally published by Mee on 15/05/2025

By Pedro Oborne

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s responsibility and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.