James Schneider: Mission-like vocabulary of Keir Starmer has nothing to do with Obama or Mazzucato’s visions [VIDEO]
James Schneider – Progressive International’s PR and director of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the 2024 UK general election – joins Cross-border Talks to offer progressive perspectives on a range of current issues: the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots in the UK, the election results and policy platform of UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, UK-EU relations and the war in the Middle East.
Schneider is deeply sceptical of Starmer’s ability and intention to offer progressive change, and believes that he is merely offering a bit of nuance to the traditional politics of the status quo in the UK – both in the social and economic spheres and with regard to US-UK relations. Asked who was the vanguard of progressive forces in the Middle East, a region taken over by various fundamentalisms, Schneider said that the first ambition and commitment of progressive forces there should be to end the war in Gaza and stop the Israeli war machine.
At the end of the talk, Schneider comments on Corbyn’s political future, pointing to the unrelenting need for the left to organise, mobilise and fight for progressive change, no matter what the circumstances and dire straits.
The entire transcription of the talk is available below the video.
Vladimir Mitev: Welcome to another trans-national conversation that remains true to the search for progressive ways of looking at events in Europe and the world. Today our interlocutor is one of the most important figures in British left-wing circles. James Schneider was the campaign director of Jeremy Corbyn’s general election campaign and he’s also the PR of the Progressive International and founder of the grassroots movement Momentum, which supported Jeremy Corbyn.
We have a number of issues to discuss with him. The Labour Party has just won the elections. The government in the UK is now formed by Keir Starmer. And immediately after the Labour Party took power, there were riots, anti-immigrant riots in the UK. So my first question to James Schneider would actually be what he thinks about that, what is the reason for these riots, given that for a long time the UK was somehow seen as a model for integration and people from immigrant communities? Strangely, these riots started just at the moment when the Labour Party, the left-wing force, won the elections. So does this mean that apart from the rise of a certain change of power with the left-wing coming to the fore, there is also an extreme right wing which is on the rise?
I think we should start with saying what happened over the last month or so because they’ve been mischaracterised as a set of protests. Sometimes they’re reported as being anti-migrant protests and that’s not what we saw. What we saw was racist violence in small pockets that was engaging in racially motivated and often anti-Muslim targeted violent attacks against for example, mosques. Hotels, housing, people claiming asylum who are seeking refugee status were attacked and set on fire, people were pulled out of their cars because of the colour of their skin, an informal checkpoint was set up in one town to prevent anyone who wasn’t white driving down a road. These were not protests that had fringe elements that engaged in this type of racist violence, the racist violence was at the core of them. They started after a horrific stabbing which killed three young girls at a dance class in Southport a town in northwest England. After this attack, it was wrongly stated that the attacker had been Muslim, an asylum seeker or a foreign criminal. None of this was true – the attacker was a 17 year old boy from Wales whose parents were from Rwand, but he grew in Wales which is a part of the United Kingdom and was Christian. The far-right racist organisers came from outside Southport mobilised some people within the town of Southport and attacked the mosque. This set off organised racist attacks on people and mobilisations in other towns and cities across the UK. That was the nature of them.
Given that there is also a conflict going on in the Middle East right now, could we read these anti-migrant and anti-Muslim riots as some kind of echo and interconnection with the contestation that is going on in the Middle East right now and especially in Gaza?
Certainly yes. What we have had in Britain now for 10 plus months is very large mobilisations in opposition to Israeli crimes against the Palestinians and in opposition to our government’s complicity in those crimes through arms sales to Israel and diplomatic cover provided to Israel. We have had a media and politics media political class driven moral panic for 10 months about these protests which, we have been told, are anti-semitic or hate marches. Our own former foreign secretary, the former Interior Minister called them hate marches and said that London was in control of Islamists and anti-Semites. We had this type of ludicrous, completely removed from reality, messages pumped out by predominantly the right of politics, but also from parts of the Labour Party as well, and many of the media, which is certainly interconnected.
You can also see that it is connected because one of the motivating ideas, again completely unfounded in fact, is the idea of two-tier policing. It means that the far right, the street far right like Tommy Robinson, the pundit far right like Matthew Goodwin and the political far right like Nigel Farage and Suella Brotherman and so on have all talked about two-tier policing.
The pro-Palestinian demonstrations, which are overwhelmingly peaceful, are huge, there are fewer arrests at them than there are at an average Premier League football match, very low levels of disorder at all, actually very well organised and very disciplined, were not shut down – and that’s what they wanted to see, to see them shut down, and because when the far right and this racist violence went out to attack, for example, migrant hotels, eventually the police turned up and arrested some people, so they say this is evidence of two-tier policing. The usual reactionary idea that it’s really the powerful forces in society that are somehow being victimised, so of course there are links between these two things, and it’s no surprise that when the far-right riots ran out of steam, that’s when the ordinary people of the country mobilised against them.
So they announced by Telegram and other means a series of sites, which were mainly law centres that support refugees and migrants, but also some accommodation centres that house refugee claimants, and that this was all going to happen simultaneously in, I think, 30 sites. Un a large number of them across London, in Bristol, in Brighton and so on there were huge counter-mobilisations of ordinary people. Huge counter-mobilisations of ordinary people that showed very clearly that the organised violence of the far right is a minority pursuit in Britain, and one of the flags that was waved at those huge counter-mobilisations was the Palestinian flag. It was a symbol for justice.
Now that doesn’t mean that racism, particularly anti- Muslim racism, Islamophobia. muslim racism Islamophobia is restricted to the racist violence of this small minority because it is entirely mainstream across much of our politics and our media, as it has been for well over two decades now.
You mentioned the accusations of anti-Semitism that are made here and there all the time, and I remember that such accusations were made against Jeremy Corbyn during his tenure as leader of the Labour Party. And you also mentioned that there were huge crowds supporting the progressive or Palestinian cause. I also remember that the Labour Party had better results in terms of votes during the Corbyn era, but despite that I have to say that it was Keir Starmer who brought the Labour Party to power and I wonder what lessons, if you like, you draw from the fact that it was not Jeremy Corbyn who won the elections and became the Prime Minister of the UK, but it was Keir Starmer and maybe that means that maybe Starmer did something better in some way?
What happened in the election we’ve just had was a profound rejection of the political class in Britain, only they haven’t realised it yet. The Conservative Party lost over half or about half its vote compared to the 2019 general election, but the Labour Party also lost over half a million votes. We have a first-past-the-post system, so what happened is the dissolution of the right-wing bloc that had come together under Boris Johnson, that had coalesced around Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party, which effectively split in two between the Conservative Party and the Reform Party.
As a result, even though Labour won fewer votes in 2024 than they did in 2019, just under 34% of those who voted in a hugely reduced turnout, only 52% of British adults voted in the general election, Labour won that huge landslide because of the complete collapse of the Conservative Party and in a predominantly two-party first-past-the-post system. They got a huge number of seats, well over 400 seats in a 650-seat parliament, but with a reduced number of votes, a reduced number of votes from an election in 2019, which the political media class said was a historic defeat for the Labour Party, not to mention the 2017 election where Labour got over three million more votes than Labour just won this huge landslide.
I still want to ask you to comment on the programme or the promises or the style of Keir Starmer because he has had some really motivational Obama-style or Mazzucato-style rhetoric on a number of issues. You may remember the book Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato which seems to have had some influence on him, so what are your expectations of both his domestic social and economic programme and his international ambitions.
Keir Starmer’s strategy has been consistent. It is not to challenge the powerful, not to frighten the ruling orders in Britain. When the Conservative Party collapses under the weight of 14 years of rule and most people in Britain are worse off than they were when it began, then the Labour Party campaign… I’m not sure which one you watched if you thought there was anything inspirational or Obama-ish about it. Keir Starmer is probably by his own estimation a very dry and boring public speaker, not like Barack Obama at all, and the Labour manifesto was the smallest in terms of tax and spend changes of any of the parties and of any manifesto for many, many years. It was extremely thin in terms of a programme with very small with very small policies. In fact, the strategy was to say very little and stand next to the Conservative Party which was a burning dustbin and say: do you want to vote for the burning dustbin?
And in the end, most people didn’t vote for either of them, but they voted for Labour more than they voted for the dustbin fire, and so Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister. On the point about Mariana Mazzucato – her mission-led idea hasn’t really made it into Labour’s manifesto or agenda, other than the word mission. Labour has what they call five missions but they don’t really fit together except for one of them, which is clean energy by 2030. Four of the five missions don’t fit the Mazzucato model of a mission and one of them that does on the domestic agenda in its true sense is an attempt to restore respect and consent to the ruling order of things. I think they’re going to struggle to do it, because they haven’t really had any policies to improve the basic living standards of most people since they came in on the economic front. Rachel Reid is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Finance Minister and in fact she’s been extremely orthodox on the economic front. She has announced a series of spending cuts in order to so-called balance the books. There have been no policies put forward and there won’t be any in the immediate future to raise the living standards of the majority. Their programme was based on the idea of growth.
Their idea is not based on any material policies or changes, their bet is twofold, firstly that Labour will be more stable in some respects than the Conservatives and therefore this stability will attract additional investment, which is a pretty tenuous bet. The second is that some mild changes to planning regulation will stimulate perhaps a hundred thousand more homes built over the course of a parliament or perhaps two hundred thousand more homes built over the course of a parliament than the Conservative Party were offering and somehow that will act as a huge multiplier which willunlock other areas of growth in the economy which will lead to higher tax revenues and then more money to spend on public services. Internationally Labour will have a traditional Labour foreign policy. Of course, there have been some areas where they have been at odds with that traditional Labour foreign policy, for example when Jeremy Corbyn was leader or partly under Harold Wilson when he refused to take Britain into Vietnam alongside the US. Our role is to fall in line behind the US and follow their needs.
Britain doesn’t really have an independent foreign policy and Keir Starmer’s aim is to continue that which is not to have an independent foreign policy and in effect fall in line behind the US position.
You mentioned that Keir Starmer is maintaining close ties with the US, but he also seems to be trying to improve relations with the EU. To what extent does his government or the UK have common interests with the EU?
Yes, of course there are, and they are improving relations with Europe, which does not in any way mean a break with US foreign policy imperatives, I mean it’s not as if Germany, for example, in the US has a particularly different foreign policy, this is in the wake of Britain leaving the EU, which was done in such a way as to sever or severely reduce and restrict relations between Europe and Britain, particularly on security and foreign policy issues. The security and defence establishments of Europe, Britain and the US are not in favour of severing those relations, they are in favour of strengthening them. That’s what we’re seeing, we’re seeing some of that in some other areas, and there are movements towards some sensible re-establishment of cooperation in some other social and scientific areas, which is of course welcome, but it doesn’t change the fundamental attitude of the government.
Another issue that Keir Starmer should probably comment on and respond to in some way is the war in the Middle East – the war in Gaza and the tensions between Israel and Iran. It’s a very interesting situation, I think, from a progressive point of view, because of the question: what is the progressive political force now in the Middle East? On the face it looks like there’s a bunch of fundamentalisms, often religiously based gangs, if I may say so. Given that you’re a progressive person as well, what is the progressive vision for change now in the Middle East and who is the vanguard, if there is such a force?
So, first of all, Britain and its role, which is basically to support the US and Britain and the US ally Israel, but to do so a little bit more under the guise of the rule of law, which of course the US throws completely out the window, and so does Israel. Hence the objections that the previous British government had to the request by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant for war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians in Gaza, that has been withdrawn by the new government. Also, a new process has been started, and it’s completely unnecessary, but nevertheless, to determine whether British arms sales are legal because of the clear and indisputable violations of international law that are being committed with the weapons that Britain is providing or the weapons that British parts are contributing to, such as the F-16 and the F-35 fighter jets.
As for the region itself, the primary focus must be on ending what is a genocide, where tens of thousands if not more people have been killed by an occupying power in an area that has yet to be decolonised.
I think the primary objective has to be to break the capacity of the Israeli war machine to continue to displace, deny and destroy the Palestinians wherever they are, and at the moment that’s not happening. There’s not a huge range of powerful progressive actors, as you note, in the region. A number of regional countries have not played a particularly powerful role in trying to support the Palestinians in facing the destruction that they face at the hands of the Israeli war machine and its funders and armour. Particularly in the US, but also in Europe, and in Israel itself, of course, there are a small or very small number of progressive forces that are opposing Israel’s longstanding state policy of annexation, which uses the method of ethnic cleansing under the guise of self-defence. But of course the so-called left in Israeli politics, or sometimes called the centre, wants to pursue very similar policies to the current government, but without saying the quiet part out loud.
The problem for the so-called centre in Israeli politics and some of the more sycophantic parts of the US, UK and European establishments that support Israel is the fact that they have members of their government who clearly say and clearly articulate the genocidal and annexationist and supremacist ambitions that they have for the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea within Palestine itself. Of course, the Palestinian factions have been divided for a very long time and that disunity has set back the Palestinian cause. I know that there have been negotiations recently in China which have helped to bring the 14 factions together at least around a common statement that they want to form a unified transitional government for both Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem before elections and to have a body to manage the reconstruction of Gaza which has been pretty much flattened and destroyed.
However, under the current circumstances of this ongoing destruction, the dynamic is probably towards more desperate violence. I noticed that Hamas seemed to have returned to suicide bombing for the first time since I think it was 2004, but to put that aside for entering the political space in 2005 where they won elections which were then not recognised because the wrong people had won. That of course is worrying, suicide bombs by definition are pretty much indiscriminate, they target civilians and that is wrong, that is a breach. But you can see that as the destruction of Gaza continues, it makes these kinds of reactions, these kinds of wrong and illegal reactions more likely.
Back to your question. The most important thing for the dynamics is to reduce Israel’s ability to destroy and control the Palestinians, because the only way to get to a negotiated solution, whatever that negotiated solution is, requires a change in the balance of power between Israel’s ability to continually destroy the Palestinians. Part of this is now coming from attempts to undermine the Israeli war machine through its international supply chain, part of this is coming from international action, for example Colombia banning coal exports to Israel, and other elements that are isolating Israel’s ability to wreak its devastating destructive campaign on the Palestinians.
At the end of this cross-border conversation I wanted to ask you about Jeremy Corbyn. He has had a really inspiring moment in the history of the Labour Party in terms of bringing hundreds of thousands of new members into the party, but he’s now an independent. I was wondering what the political future or political ambitions of Jeremy Corbyn are in this current situation when he’s an independent member of parliament…
I think the moment is very open now. As I said before, Labour won a loveless landslide, only 52% of British adults voted, only 37% of tenants, those who rent their homes either socially or through the private sector voted, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with our political media class and the economic situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better. We’ve had an enormous squeeze on living standards, so what we’re seeing from Jeremy and others is building power at the grassroots level first.
What we saw in the general election was five independents winning to the left of Labour, which I think has happened three or four times since the Second World War, so it’s a really surprising set of results, and there were a number of other seats where independents won. There were also a number of other seats where the independents came very close, very close to Labour, and that was based mainly on community power, the ability of communities to organise themselves to then take political power. I think what we will see in the coming months is the coalescence of those forms of community organisation in areas where there is already political strength, into some kind of entity that can put the left and progressive forces in a much stronger position. Both to speak to the country now and to intervene in the debates as they take place, to organise with people, to increase their power, to put money back in their pockets and to resist the rise of the far right and to be in a stronger position come the next election.
This could also leave to the left having a greater electoral impact, possibly in partnership or alliance with the Green Party. That’s the current outlook. We’re only a few weeks away from the general election, but there’s a lot of organising going on in progressive spaces and places to bring together all these different elements so that we can have a powerful and coordinated and united set of progressive forces, able of making a difference in the national discourse, socially to improve people’s lives and ultimately electorally to win victories in the political sphere.
Thank you for this talk. During the last half an hour we went through a number of current affairs issues in UK and international relations and thanks to our interlocutor James Schneider we offered a progressive view on them. We invite everyone to follow cross-border talks on their social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Substack, etc. Thank you for joining us this time and see you soon.
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