It’s time for Starmer to choose: is he a lawyer or a leader?
The international, rules-and-rights-based order is crumbling in the face of Trump’s brute force. This leaves career human rights lawyer Keir Starmer in an interesting position…
A Venezuelan friend once showed me a small purse made out of folded and woven 100,000 Bolivar notes. These would be sold to tourists for a few dollars as their currency was literally worth less than the paper it was printed on. This is what socialism does. Always and everywhere it humiliates and impoverishes its people. So no City PM reader should be sad to see one fewer Marxist dictator in the world.
What should concern us, though, is what replaces Maduro. Donald Trump has no interest in freedom and democracy for Venezuela. He is only interested in strength. We are seeing the post-war, international, rules-based order crumbling before our eyes and being replaced by what looks much more like a 19th-century model of great power competition.
This leaves Keir Starmer – a former human rights barrister and career scion of the old order – in an interesting position. He is uniquely placed to make the argument that the rules and rights that have given the world decades of peace and prosperity still matter, but must be reformed for the modern era. With his expertise and the respect he commands among fellow leaders, he could take on the ECHR, the Human Rights Act, judicial review and the international law framework that so often seem to undermine British sovereignty. Indeed he has expressed frustration with the complex of regulation, arms-length bodies and consultations that make, in his words: “the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”.
So why then, does he appear to cleave to process when it comes to clear violations of national interests such as the Chagos Islands? It’s of a piece with Labour’s schizophrenic approach to government that we’re doing this at the same time as pledging to deploy peacekeeping troops in Ukraine. Starmer is pushing our troops into the field with one hand and tossing away military assets with the other.
Britain and France have the sixth and seventh most powerful armies on the planet. If strength is what counts now there’s no reason Europe should be sidelined. But succeeding in Trump’s new world requires more than good intentions and procedurals; it demands powerful politicians with a plan. Strength, in this era, comes from the ability to decide and deliver. Starmer deserves credit for stepping up on foreign policy and recognising the hard realities of power, but at home he looks curiously enfeebled. He’s weak within his own party, hostage to factions that equate seriousness with regulation. The result is a domestic agenda heavy on new quangos, reviews and constraints, but light on visible authority. In a world that rewards decisiveness, process without power will not suffice.
It’s time for Starmer to choose: is he a lawyer or a leader?
Alys Denby is opinion and features editor of City PM