Starmer is still an enemy of democracy

What do you call a government that cancels elections, cracks down on free speech and curtails the right to trial by jury? Illiberal? Authoritarian? Autocratic, even? Because until a screeching u-turn yesterday, Keir Starmer’s Labour government was hell-bent on all of the above.

The UK prime minister has now conceded that local elections in 30 English councils will actually have to go ahead in May, reversing an earlier decision to delay them to 2027. Had the elections been cancelled, 4.6million people would have been deprived of their right to vote for their local councillors. Elections in five county councils – West Sussex, East Sussex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Surrey – would have been delayed twice, with councillors there serving seven-year terms. Such a denial of democracy would have been unprecedented in peacetime.

The ‘official’ reason given by the government for delaying local elections was that many of the seats up for grabs will soon be abolished. Under a planned shake-up of English local government, new unitary authorities will replace the current two-tier system of district and county councils. But this was never a compelling reason to cancel elections. As the Electoral Commission warned, the bar for postponing elections needs to be ‘very high’ and that Labour’s excuses were nowhere near ‘sufficient’.

Of course, by now every man and his canine companion knows the real reason Starmer was so eager to postpone these elections: he was running scared of the voters – and especially of Reform UK. Polling by JL Partners suggests Labour could now shed half of the council seats it’s defending in May, and lose majority control over around 10 councils. In the areas where elections were almost postponed, Reform is polling at 28 per cent, with the Tories on 21 per cent and Labour facing a humiliating 17 per cent.

That these elections will now go ahead is certainly a relief, but the threat to democracy from Labour is far from over. After all, it was only thanks to Reform launching a legal challenge – which government lawyers conceded they were bound to lose – that these democracy-dodging tactics have been stopped in their tracks. Starmer may have backed down, yes, but he has not suddenly discovered some hitherto-hidden democratic principles. And aside from the u-turn on local elections, Starmer’s war on the hard-won rights of British citizens is roaring ahead at pace.

Among the most egregious plans is the PM’s ‘Brexit reset’. Starmer likes to present this as a pragmatic, progressive attempt to seek closer, more amicable ties with our European neighbours. In truth, it involves the wholesale transfer of decision-making powers from the UK’s elected parliament to the unelected bureaucracy in Brussels. It is a brazen attempt to roll back the EU referendum result – the largest democratic vote in British history.

Then there is Labour’s assault on jury trials – a liberty so ancient it was enshrined in Magna Carta. That great foundational text of English liberty states with absolute clarity: ‘No free man shall be seized or imprisoned… except by the lawful judgement of his peers.’ But perhaps we are not free men in Starmer’s Britain?

Certainly, our freedom to speak has been beaten to within an inch of its life. Thirty people per day are arrested in England and Wales for saying things online that police deem ‘grossly offensive’ – that’s 12,000 arrests per year, more than America was arresting at the height of the first Red Scare. Meanwhile, the Online Safety Act – passed under the Tories, but implemented and embraced by Labour – has blocked vast swathes of the internet from British eyeballs, including social-media posts about gender ideology and asylum hotels, a speech in parliament about the rape gangs, and an irreverent article about the plummeting popularity of the Christian name ‘Keir’. Without the right to speak freely, the liberty to debate and test ideas (or simply to take the piss out of politicians), we have democracy in name only.

None of this should surprise us, of course. As Labour’s Brexit spokesperson in opposition, Starmer led the elites’ reactionary crusade to overturn the Leave vote and crush the democratic aspirations of 17.4million people. His illiberal, anti-democratic instincts even came to the fore before he even entered politics. As director of public prosecutions, between 2008 and 2013, Starmer weakened the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. He pursued ‘speech criminals’ in the courts with particular zealotry, from Paul Chambers, accused of telling a joke on Twitter, to 30 journalists who were later all found innocent, mostly from the Sun. Then as now, free speech and liberty withered on Starmer’s watch.

Luckily for us, Starmer is not nearly wily or dogged enough to make good on all of his worst, anti-democratic impulses. The local-elections u-turn reminds us that while he may be authoritarian, he is also mercifully inept. We are blessed to be lumbered with such a useless enemy.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.