Sir Keir Starmer willing to break the rules to let expelled Blairite friends back into the Labour Party

Sir Keir Starmer has called for Alastair Campbell to be allowed back into the Labour Party after he was booted out for backing the Liberal Democrats.

Starmer said the party should instead focus on tackling anti-semitism as he signalled he would readmit Tony Blair’s former communications chief.

Mr Campbell, an avowed opponent of Brexit who was Downing Street director of communications under Mr Blair, was expelled from Labour last May after he revealed that he had voted for the pro-EU Lib Dems at the European elections.

The Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer, a supporter of the Blairite run ‘People’s vote’ was seen as the main protagonist behind the vote losing second referendum. A policy that lost 52 Labour leave voting constituency’s. The Brexit policy that caused both the so-called Red wall collapse of the Labour Heartlands and Labour losing the 2019 general election.

The Shadow Brexit Secretary added: “Alastair is a constituent of mine. And he was a long standing Labour member, a huge contribution to the party. I think we need to get past this whole question of chucking people out and expulsions, etcetera.

“The cases we should concentrate on are cases, for example, of anti-Semitism or other racist behaviour within the party.

“And I use Alastair’s case an example to say, if you can be chucked out of the party, almost straight away, for supporting another party at a [euro] election, surely you can be chucked out of our party in an absolutely clear case of anti-Semitism, and the mismatch was huge there.”

Starmer a former DDP prosecutor seems not to care for Labour party rules. According to Labour Party rules, any member “who joins and/ or supports a political organisation other than an official Labour group or other unit of the Party” will “automatically be ineligible to be or remain a Party member”.

Sir Keir Starmer also conveniently forgets that as Labours communication guru Alastair Campbell carried our a clear Antisemitic campaign in the national newspapers

“As Downing Street director of communications, Alastair Campbell’s New Labour campaign against the Welsh Jew Micheal Howard is a full on anti-semitic trope.”

The campaign caused outrage and controversy over two election posters, one of which depicted opposition leader Michael Howard and shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin, who are both Jewish, as flying pigs.

Protests resulted in the withdrawal of the poster and another depicting Howard with a swinging watch, interpreted to be Jewish characters Fagin from Oliver Twist or Shylock from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Spin chief Alastair Campbell, has been revealed as the force behind the ‘flying pigs’ and ‘Shylock’ posters, which had been attributed to the party’s ad agency TBWA\London.

This was the extent of the outrage by New Labour.
Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, who is Jewish and a vice-chairman of the Labour Friends of Israel, said the poster showing Mr Howard looking like a Shylock or Fagin figure was unacceptable.

“I think it is very insensitive,” she said. “I do not think it is deliberately anti-Semitic but we should not have such posters.”

Harry Cohen, another Jewish Labour MP, said he did not believe there was any intended anti-Semitism but that those responsible had not thought hard enough that they might cause offence.

“We should concentrate on pushing the positive messages that Labour has to sell.”

Fraser Kemp, Labour’s deputy campaign co-ordinator, said Mr Howard was a link with economic failures of the past and that Labour had a right to highlight his record.

Denying charges of anti-Semitism, he said the use of the fob watch was intended to show that the Tories would hypnotise people into thinking they would create a better economy, when the reverse would be the case.

“The common theme is that the Tories are trying to con you,” he said.

Today that poster and the inferred remarks would be a case for expulsion from the Labour Party and if Starmer gets his way it would be expulsion without due process.

Starmer’s idea of unity seems to be returning the party back to the Blarites.

With Sir Keir Starmer as Labour Leader Tony Benn’s dire warning would be a reality

“If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxist, the media -having tasted Blood-  would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public.

Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed of the National agenda. 

But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.” -Tony Benn

Sir Keir Starmer also omits to add that as an DPP prosecutor he decided that Julian Assange should not be bailed but jailed not the Swedish authorities as previously thought.

Just as Julian Assange fights extradition by the Trump administration in the court in Belmarsh, Sir Keir Starmer has weighed into the debate on the side of the US government.

In his interview with the Huntington Post Starmer takes a thinly-veiled swipe at Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell over his support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Mr McDonnell has spoken out in defence of Mr Assange, who is being held on remand while the US tries to have him extradited over the publication of hundreds of thousands of confidential American military communications in 2010.

The Shadow Chancellor has rowed in behind the Wikileaks founder, saying he is in the centre of “a major political trial in which the establishment is out to victimise an innocent”.

Assange’s legal team have been arguing that the Extradition Treaty is being abused in the pursuit of Trump’s ‘war on investigative journalism’. Jeremy Corbyn questioned Boris Johnson on the case in a recent prime minister’s question time. Even Johnson had to admit that the Treaty is ‘unbalanced’.

In an astounding intervention in this debate Sir Keir Starmer has managed to repeat the arguments of the US prosecution and give a more resounding endorsement of the Treaty than the Tory Prime Minister.

Sir Keir, a former director of public prosecutions said “independent” judges would make a decision on “whether the evidence is there to extradite someone”.

“So all of those in the Assange case or any other case, who say it’s all a big conspiracy are either missing the point that this is an independent judge-made decision or they’re implying that our High Court judiciary is corrupt,” he added.

“And I do not subscribe to that view by a very, very long shot. We’ve got a very good independent judiciary. It’s revered across the world. And we knock it at our peril.”

Sir Keir said: “It’s up to politicians what they want to campaign for or not, but on extradition High Court judges made the decision, they do it in open court with the evidence, and they give recent judgments, you can read the judgments and work out why the judge decided that an individual should be extradited.

“This is not done in secret. It’s not done without evidence, it’s not done without argument both sides have advocates, and then a judge makes a decision, they think the judges got it wrong, you can appeal. It’s a very simple system, it’s very good system, and it should be upheld.”

As DPP, Sir Keir tempered his love of liberty by fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange (a process now making its way through the courts). He flouted legal precedents by advising Swedish lawyers not to question Assange in Britain: a decision that prolonged the latter’s legal purgatory, denied closure to his accusers in Sweden, and sealed his fate before a US show trial. Leaked emails from August 2012 show that, when the Swedish legal team expressed hesitancy about keeping Assange’s case open, Sir Keir’s office replied: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’.

A demonstrable conviction that people who expose war crimes should face prosecution, while people who perpetrate them should not.

As the Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer was asked to comment on reports in The Guardian newspaper that Sweden has “not got a view at all on bail”.  LINK

The decision to have Julian Assange sent to a London jail and kept there was taken by the British authorities under the ruling of the The Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer and not by prosecutors in Sweden, as previously thought, the Guardian has learned.

It had been widely thought Sweden had made the decision to oppose bail, with the CPS acting merely as its representative. But today the Swedish prosecutor’s office told the Guardian it had “not got a view at all on bail” and that Britain had made the decision to oppose bail.

A spokeswoman for the Swedish prosecutor’s office, Karin Rosander, told AFP the decision to oppose bail was “a decision of the British prosecutor and that is what the British prosecutor’s office has confirmed to me.”