Tag Archives: Politics

Not ethical leadership: a rocky start to Starmer’s first days in government

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Summary: things can sometimes only get worse.

Keir Starmer’s government prides itself in not being idealistic. “We are not a party of protest!” they declare.

The smug, self-satisfaction that this statement implies might be better sustained if the party were conducting itself with unimpeachable professionalism now that it is in government. But its first 100 days in office have been notably rocky. A survey of this period by the Guardian was headlined, “We all hope it’s teething troubles – but worry it’s something worse.”

Well, I suspect it is something worse.

This thought will likely have occurred to many students of organisations. It will be a particular worry to those concerned, as I have been, with what is required to lead ethically: that is, the struggle to make organisational decisions that optimise life-affirming choices by seeking to protect human rights and advance environmental restoration. 

For me, there seems to be three inter-related structural problems with Starmer’s Labour party that are the root of the Labour government’s shaky start and shady future. The first of these is that Starmer’s Labour party is strikingly authoritarian. 

Everyone who has ever effectively led people in organisations will be aware that sometimes a directive approach is needed. For example, if it is necessary to evacuate a building due to an emergency, it is not appropriate to ask everyone how they feel about that first. It is necessary to point folk to the fire exits and tell them to get out. 

However, Starmer seems to privilege such an approach over more collaborative ones even when there is no compelling need. Indeed, his leadership seems to have a problem with any independence of thought and voice.

The run up to the 2024 general election was marked by accusations of a purge of left wing and pro-human rights candidates, and the parachuting into various constituencies of Starmer loyalists, some of them morally repugnant.

Starmer and his acolytes present this as “discipline” and “strong leadership”. It is a peculiar notion of strong leadership when a leader is afraid to countenance a bit of criticism or consider different perspectives on issues. 

From the longer-term view of organisational health this approach is even more problematic. Because if organisations exclude dissent, they reduce their capacity to think critically, to test ideas and winnow out the stupid or counter-productive ones. 

All leadership teams, no matter how smart, will come up with poor ideas from time to time. But truly smart leaders understand that they need processes in place to guard against such things. The restriction of dissension in Labour undermines the necessary processes.

This leads to a second structural problem which will increasingly emerge for Labour as this government proceeds. The purging of intellectual and philosophical diversity, and the fear of being seen as disloyal that is bred by leadership authoritarianism, will reduce Labour’s capacity to generate new ideas as time and events evolve. This will make it more difficult for the government, and the party as a whole, to right recent wrongs and to respond to the new challenges that will inevitably emerge. 

Both these problems, of authoritarianism and lack of intellectual diversity, are dwarfed by the most fundamental of Labour’s current structural problems: that is its moral bankruptcy. 

This was most starkly on display in the infamous interview that Starmer gave to LBC in which he endorsed collective punishment on the people of Gaza for the attacks on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, something that he should know as a lawyer, is a war crime under international law. Later assertions that Starmer misspoke or was taken out of context are undermined by the fact that in the weeks following this Labour front-benchers, including the crassly cynical Emily Thornberry and the craven Peter Kyle also publicly endorsed their Dear Leader’s position.

There was a softening of Labour’s Gaza position in the run up to the 2024 election, when it looked as if such an inhumane policy might cost it seats as Israel’s apparent genocidal intent became ever more explicit. However, on attaining power, it has, with a few cosmetic changes, returned to its substantially uncritical support of Netanyahu’s far-Right government. Hence Starmer is notably more reticent on the carnage inflicted on Palestinian civilians in comparison with his public anguish over Israeli casualties.

It is in the context of these three structural failures that we should consider the votes in the first 100 days of this government on maintaining the two-child limit on child benefits and cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, these votes look more like a process for the breaking of the human spirit of backbench members of parliament rather than any cool consideration of regrettable financial necessity. 

In bringing these matters to a vote when they did, the Labour leadership sought to purge any residual dissent by demanding that, in the name of loyalty, backbenchers should betray their constituents and their consciences on the issue of the poverty of English people, until now a residual Labour moral value.

Having done this, the thoroughly compromised backbenchers have been truly initiated into the moral bankruptcy that is at the core of the British Labour party. So, all will have diminished credibility if they are ever tempted to mount a future principled challenge to the leadership’s proposals, no matter how stupid or morally repellent those proposals might be. 

Starmer’s Labour may be better than the Tories that they replaced. But there seems to me to be a rot at their heart, the stench of which may soon become overwhelming. 

Old habits, new protests: on the politics of Israel’s allies

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Summary: those who have lost their moral compass will never understand that protest is leadership

Rule of international double standards

Today, it appears that many Western political leaders apply multiple caveats to the principle of the universality of human rights. The result is that rather than rule of international law we seem increasingly to have rule of international double standards. 

This is particularly plain in relation to British, American and German policy towards Gaza. In comparison with their supportive policy towards Ukraine and their outrage at Putin’s war crimes there, in relation to Gaza there is a lack of condemnation for ceaseless attacks upon civilians. On the contrary, the British, Americans and Germans remain publicly and materially supportive of Israeli policy.

The moral black hole at the heart of Western policy towards Israel

British, American and German policy on Gaza appears to be underpinned by a view that Palestinian lives are not equal to Israeli lives and so unworthy of comparable protection. Hence those three governments seem to have decided that it is better to arm and provide diplomatic cover for the far-Right Netanyahu government rather than to uphold the most basic principles of human rights and international humanitarian law.

In the face of the considerable evidence of genocide these governments are deaf to the international protests of conscience, and to the demands of Palestinian and Israeli voices for peace. Instead, they work to maintain the murderous Israeli Defence Forces supply lines at all costs. 

I have heard some try to justify this human rights double standard in relation to Israel by responding to protests with patronising reference to the need for realism, for a “realpolitik” approach to the conflict. This is, perhaps, a notion they may imagine that the protesters do not have the sophistication to properly understand. However, many will know that “realpolitik” is a term that has considerable previous, notably in the hands of Henry Kissinger, as a euphemism for moral vacuity and acquiescence in crimes against humanity. 

Given this many will remain unconvinced that “realpolitik” really is a sufficient justification for the mounting horrors in Gaza and the West Bank. So, why are the US, the UK and Germany so steadfast in their support of a far-Right Israeli government pursuing such a horrendous campaign of violence?

It is worth remembering that Germany was genocidal in Namibia well before the Nazis ever came to power. While relatively democratic, Britain and the United States were also genocidal in the 19th and 20th centuries in relation to, amongst others, Native Americans, Ireland and South Asia. It was democratically elected governments in the US that launched the invasion of Vietnam and the destruction of Cambodia. It was democratically elected governments in the US and UK that unlawfully invaded Iraq. Today it is democratically elected governments in the US, UK and Germany that have facilitated the far-Right in Israel in their indiscriminate slaughter of Gazan civilians. 

So, if we take even a medium-term historical view on these countries, it seems that there is a strain of thinking in those nations’ political cultures stretching from Left to Right that still view war crimes and genocide not as appalling and even unforgivable aberrations, but as legitimate policy options when it is convenient for them or those, however unsavoury, that they deem allies. 

Protest as leadership

It is in this context that the leaderships of the US, the UK and Germany display such an extraordinary arrogance toward those protesting their disgust at their policies. In the UK, along with their gleeful grasping at graft, their contempt towards protesters is a measure of government ministers’ extraordinary sense of entitlement.

But it is the protests of which they are so contemptuous that so often change cultures and countries in the ways in which corrupt politicians can only dream. This is because protest is moral leadership that seeks to make the world a better place by demanding that it become so. 

It is because of protesters that women have the vote, that apartheid has been ended in South Africa, that civil rights have been advanced in the US and the North of Ireland. When many governments have sought to merely manage the status quo – the “realpolitik” – protesters have asserted that this is not good enough and demanded better.

Today protesters understand, as the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement once put it, that “… we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form”.

So, at the end of the day, as Israel’s allies become ever more deeply mired in the murder of children, it is the protesters they disdain who will perhaps contribute most substantially to an end to apartheid in Israel/Palestine and thereby save the souls of their own countries.