This week’s Spectator looks at the role Sir Keir Starmer has played in granting the government extraordinary emergency powers to deal with the rise of Covid. The Labour leader appears happy to maintain such restrictions on the right to protest and even tried to bolster his credentials on law and order by backing under fire Met Commissioner Cressida Dick. But Mr S has done some digging in the archives and it shows Sir Keir was not always such a fan of the police. His works from the 1980s and 1990s prior to taking silk as a QC show a strong libertarian-left streak and a disdain for authoritarian justice and a strong executive.
Tony Blair might now be advising his successor but Starmer was not always so receptive to New Labour’s views on law and order. Writing in 1996 in The Three Pillars of Liberty, he claims: ‘Well-meaning elitism was no longer in fashion in the 1990s.
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