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Keir Starmer’s authoritarian past
The UK prime minister has long been a menace to liberty.
Fraser Myers
Deputy editor
2nd January 2025
Keir Starmer’s authoritarian past
This is the script from our latest video polemic. Watch it here.
Keir Starmer once promised that his government would ‘tread more lightly on our lives’. Like so many of his pledges, this one was discarded at the first opportunity. Since taking office in July, prime minister Starmer has proven himself to be almost comically authoritarian.
He has announced new restrictions on our lifestyles. Nanny-state policies clamping down on smoking and vaping, and taking junk-food ads off the TV, have become a bizarre fixation for the new government.
And after the riots last summer, Starmer – on top of calling for hate-speakers to be arrested – vowed to tighten up the rules on what people can say online, by amending the already censorious Online Safety Act.
His home secretary, Yvette Cooper, wants to extend the use of so-called non-crime hate incidents – an Orwellian policing tool that’s used to secretly make records of speech that someone, somewhere, finds offensive.
Meanwhile, Starmer’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has scrapped the last Conservative government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, a law that would have helped to fight cancel culture on campus.
The illiberalism of this Labour government is now impossible to ignore. But should we really be surprised by this? Looking at Keir Starmer’s past, it is clear that he has always possessed an authoritarian streak, stretching right back to his time as the director of public prosecutions.
The prime minister often says he’s proud of his time at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which he ran between 2008 and 2013. But he really shouldn’t be.
As director of public prosecutions (DPP), he bulldozed free speech, trampled on press freedom and weakened the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Starmer has been an authoritarian right from the start of his time in public life.
Our story begins in January 2010, when Keir Starmer QC, as he was then known, had been in post as DPP for 14 months.
Paul Chambers, a supervisor at a car-parts company, was planning to fly to Northern Ireland to meet up with his girlfriend. But his local South Yorkshire airport had cancelled his flight due to bad weather. Chambers posted a message on Twitter to make light of the situation: ‘Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed’, he wrote. ‘You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’
A week later, he was arrested for this tweet – for this obvious joke – by counter-terror police. His home was searched and his electronic devices were confiscated. He was charged and then found guilty under the Communications Act 2003 for sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.
The ‘Twitter joke trial’, as it soon became known, caused justifiable outrage among the great and good. Comedians Stephen Fry, Al Murray and Graham Linehan joined the campaign to have Chambers’s conviction quashed.
Two and a half years and multiple appeals later, the High Court finally overturned his conviction in 2012. The judges accused the CPS of misinterpreting the law – as well as missing the humour behind Chambers’s tweet.
According to reports in the Guardian, the only reason the prosecution ever went ahead was at the insistence of the man who currently sits in Downing Street. It’s alleged that lawyers at the CPS wanted to drop the case against Chambers, but Starmer, their boss, overruled them. Our humourless prime minister was determined to make an example of a man cracking wise online.
When Starmer wasn’t riding roughshod over freedom of speech, he was riding roughshod over freedom of the press. Starting in 2012, he led the prosecutions of 30 journalists, mostly from the Sun, in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.
Most of these journalists spent years on police bail. Their careers were left in tatters. Some attempted suicide. Yet not one of those pursued by Starmer was ever convicted of a crime. Even those who were initially found guilty had their convictions quashed on appeal.
This was the kind of witch-hunt against journalists you might expect to see in China, Russia or North Korea. But it was the man who is now prime minister of the UK who appointed himself as the witch-finder general.
Shockingly, to this day, Starmer has never apologised for this grotesque abuse of power against the press. On the contrary, since leaving the CPS, Starmer has only grown more hostile to press freedom.
Before the General Election, Starmer’s frontbenchers consistently vowed to introduce state regulation of the press. They want to force British newspapers to sign up to a government-approved regulator under the threat of legal blackmail.
With this, Labour would revive a dangerous piece of legislation that was first drawn up by David Cameron’s Conservatives, but was thankfully abolished by Rishi Sunak’s government earlier this year.
Under Section 40, as it’s known, publishers who want to remain free of state control would be forced to pay the legal costs of anyone who decides to sue them – even if the publisher wins the case! It is practically an invitation to meddlesome activists to try to bankrupt whichever publications they dislike.
If Starmer and his minions get their way, Britain’s press would become subject to a level of government interference we haven’t seen since the 17th century, when Crown licensing of newspapers was abolished and the modern free press was born.
Another ancient liberty we tend to take for granted, which Starmer has also had in his sights, is the right to be presumed innocent when facing prosecution. As DPP, he railed against the adversarial system of justice that we have in English and Welsh courts, which demands a high burden of proof before finding someone guilty. It also allows defendants to robustly challenge the accusations of the prosecution. Which is all critical to ensuring a fair trial.
Starmer became particularly exercised about prosecuting historic allegations of child abuse, after the CPS’s failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile. This might not sound so outrageous in theory, but the way he went about it in practice led many entirely innocent people to be brought down by false allegations.
Starmer set about watering down the evidence needed to bring these cases to trial. His guidance discouraged CPS lawyers and police officers from asking common-sense questions about an accuser’s credibility. This had major ramifications that lasted beyond Starmer’s time as DPP.
In 2014, senior officers at the Metropolitan Police announced that they had been tipped off about an historic child-abuse ring operating out of Westminster. The police took the extraordinary step of insisting that the allegations were ‘credible and true’.
It turns out that they were anything but. The allegations were made by Carl Beech, a man who not only turned out to be a fantasist, but also a child abuser himself. Among those Beech falsely accused were a former prime minister, a former home secretary, a former head of the armed forces and several former MPs. These lurid, false claims sparked a £2million police investigation, called Operation Midland. It finally came to an end in 2016, with no charges being made and no evidence uncovered.
These lies shattered people’s lives and destroyed their reputations. One of the accused, Lord Brittan, died before he could be told that his name had been cleared. It seems highly unlikely that any of this would have happened without Starmer’s earlier intervention. He insisted the police believe all accusers. His instinctive distrust of our right to be presumed innocent created a catastrophe for justice.
Keir Starmer may not believe in many things. He may have abandoned just about every pledge he’s ever made – and jettisoned almost every principle he’s ever claimed to hold. But one of the few constants during his 16 years in public life has been his indifference to our most precious liberties. Authoritarianism is in his DNA.
If Starmer lasts for the next four years, he will no doubt vandalise our hard-won liberties once more. Those of us who believe in freedom have one hell of a fight on our hands.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.
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