Footnotes to myself

Keir Starmer, by Tom Baldwin

I thought I’d try something new for this post. For years I have been a compulsive compiler of things I’ve read and want to remember. I started doing this after I first heard about commonplace books, and I now have several Word documents that are hundreds of pages long compiled of quotes, notes, phrases, insights, observations and aphorisms nicked from whatever I’ve been reading.

This has been an insanely laborious thing to do; when I first stated out, I would manually type everything into Word, which at least gave you a wonderful bourgeoise sense of productivity; now dictation has made it easier, and being able to copy text from photos is a God-send. But in the long run, it’s made my writing a lot easier; I can half-remember remember something, ctrl+f it and ctrl+c ctrl+p the exact wording – along with the source – into whatever I’m writing. It makes me seem a lot more erudite than I am, and with minimal effort. Who can complain?

But such is the nature of it that a lot has not, perhaps will not, be used. This is particularly true of the notes I take from books, which are often very interesting but simply too large to be used directly.

So what I thought I would do is take those notes and turn them into a substack on the book. Not quite a book review, but not quite a summary either; something a little more like marginalia. Here are the bits I underlined, and here’s why I thought they were worth underlining. Some of it will be thematic, some of it fragmentary, all of it deliberately loose.

I’ll end each post with a short conclusion: what I took away, whether I’d recommend it, and who I think might benefit from reading it. But otherwise, the form will be deliberately loose — part record, part reflection, part experiment.

Let’s see how it goes.

Keir Starmer; the biography, Tom Baldwin

I normally hate political biographies, but I picked up this because I’ve been writing a lot about Starmerism and thought I’d benefit from a close reading of the manager behind the decline. Starmerism is very, very difficult to define, and when reading this you understand it’s more an approach than ideology.

Sarah Hargreaves also witnessed his capacity for work. 'I've never seen anyone be able to study like him,' she says. 'I would always get distracted too easily. But Keir would go up to his room and be at his desk for hour, after hour, after hour.'

By then Starmer knew not only how to study but also what he wanted to learn, describing international law and human rights as 'a revelation' compared to the dry stuff of the first year. In these subjects, he found something fundamental to his belief system even now. He puts it like this: 'The essence of being human, irrespective of who you are, where you come from and what your circumstances, is dignity. It means all people have rights which cannot be taken away. This idea of irreducible human dignity became a sort of lode star which has guided me ever since; it gave me a method, a structure and framework, by which I could test propositions. And it brought politics into the law for me.'

Noted poster Harold Lacey once tweeted that “he does take ‘Law’ as an actual epistemological method”. I believe this.

This isn't a sterile debate from a law library in the 1980s because these folkmoot theories of freedom have taken root on the Conservative right and feed the desire of politicians like Suella Braverman to leave the European Convention on Human Rights or, indeed, Downing Street's description of the Labour leader now as a lefty human rights lawyer' because he opposes its plan for sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Starmer has dismissed such views as based 'on a fundamentally flawed analysis of their origin and relevance to our society. 'England did not "invent" freedom, as some of today's more far-out politicians like to say, nor are the rights we have in the UK part of an exclusive racial birthright,' he says. Instead, he sees human rights as being part of an inclusive patriotic tradition which has helped our country always be 'at the heart' of a debate, from the Chartists in the nineteenth century to the suffragists in the twentieth, about what freedom means.

A particular inspiration for him was the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War when, he says, the world came together to find a way of preventing any repetition of the 'horror of Nazis being able to pass legislation in Germany which allowed them to torture, murder and massacre their own citizens'. Starmer is proud that Britain - and British values - played a big part in codifying these rights for other nations, saying: 'This was a way in which any government could be held to account for their actions, not because they had broken their own laws, but because they had committed crimes against humanity itself. Britain helped ensure that all people all around the world - the weakest as well as the most powerful, those who are different from us as well as those who are the same - have a right to demand freedom.'

He points out that it was a Conservative prime minister in Winston Churchill and the British diplomat David Maxwell Fyfe, a future Conservative home secretary, who helped enshrine human rights into the European-wide convention from which so many in that same party now wish to resile. Later on, as former colonies won their independence, Britain helped them craft constitutions built around this same crucial concept of human dignity, 'because they saw how human rights made them stronger as nations, not weaker.’

Unfortunately, applying law as an epistemological method also brings you here. The idea that British liberty is actually ‘part of an inclusive patriotic tradition’ that lead inexorably to the current system of international human rights - which is respected in former colonies - is as folkmootish as anything Daniel Hannan has written.

The second paragraph is telling, given recent controversies; Lord Hermer was only externalising the internal views the government has of criticism of the existing international human rights system. It is as simple as; the Nazis didn’t have the ECHR… are you a Nazi?

Another story indicating the tension within Starmer as he took his first steps at the Bar is told by someone who later became one of his greatest friends, the barrister Ed Fitzgerald. 'Keir was always very serious and passionately left-wing, someone who found it a bit awkward when he first joined this bastion of privilege. I think he was probably slightly suspicious of me as some sort of awfully posh debauchee. But when the bailiffs turned up to repossess my desk because I hadn't paid my VAT, suddenly I was no longer just a toff but a "victim of oppression". Keir really warmed up to me after that.'

“Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were one of the oppressed!”

As Starmer later wrote: 'The 1998 [Human Rights) Act did not just give legal effect to rights until then only recognised in international law, it also incorporated the principles that had been developed since the Second World War to give dynamic effect to human rights - to make them practical and effective, not theoretical and illusory.”

The HRA did not establish any rights that we did not have before 1998. But since they were not actually written down in a specific law marked ‘Yoomun Rites’, Starmer thinks they didn’t practically exist. Starmer also seems to forget that the International Law he Respects was based on the idea of ensuring citizens of foreign nations the same rights as British citizens had - we did not need to codify our rights, because we held them already.

The new PSNI ended up a model for other parts of the UK, particularly in its emphasis on becoming a 'service', accountable to local people, rather than a police 'force' imposing state power.

Starmer saw his belief in human rights tested in fire. He recalls: 'Different groups of people had different rights, all of which needed to be respected. Loyalists had a right to freedom of expression and assembly by marching, as they had for generations. Nationalists had a right not to have the peaceful enjoyment of their homes shattered by sectarian parades. Local communities had a right not to have rioters setting fire to their cars or businesses. Police officers themselves had a right not to have their lives put at risk unnecessarily. And everybody had a right to walk the streets of Belfast, as in any city of the United Kingdom, free from fear.'

Starmer’s approach to policing is extraordinarily influenced by his time in Northern Ireland. Much of the two-tier approach can be explained if you understand that he views the police as a service and not a force, and that they must be applied asymetrically according to the rights of different communities. And that everybody has a right to walk the streets of Southport, as in any city of the United Kingdom, free from fear.