The most extreme measure in the entire Labour Party manifesto of 2019 – and this is a high bar – was a pledge that Keir Starmer ought to have disavowed explicitly on day one of becoming leader.
It committed a future Labour government to ‘conduct an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy to understand our contribution to the dynamics of violence and insecurity across regions previously under British colonial rule.’
This planned wallowing in national self-abasement was, to my mind, clearly conceived as a precursor to a demand for the payment of reparations by Britain for the excesses of empire. That such an unpatriotic measure made it into the Labour manifesto was a sign of the grip that practitioners of extreme identity politics had upon the party.
The fact that Sir Keir did not use the honeymoon period following his landslide leadership victory to dump it suggested that he agreed with it.
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