Bill Bowring recalls the early years of an ambitious lawyer.

Keir Starmer was Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers when I was Chair in the early 1990s.

I joined Haldane in 1986, for solidarity. I had been a Labour Party councillor in Lambeth since 1978, and was being prosecuted by Margaret Thatcher for Wilful Misconduct. With my fellow councillors I was fined £160,000 and banned from public office for five years. Like George Lansbury and the Poplar councillors in 1921, we deliberately broke the law, believing that we would join up with other Labour councils, and with the miners, to bring down Thatcher. We were defeated.

Thatcher’s intention was to bankrupt me and my Lambeth and Liverpool comrades, as the Tories had done with the Clay Cross councillors some years earlier. But, with the support of the three big unions, and money collected by us all over the country, she failed to do so.

I had not joined Haldane earlier. It was dominated by the Communist Party lawyers, Stalinists, although John Hendy and others played a magnificent role defending the miners and their union in the Miners Strike, 1984-5. Starmer had never had anything to do with trade unions, and nothing to do with the Labour Party until Frank Dobson stood down in 2014.

Starmer would never under any circumstances break the law. He was not involved in Haldane in 1986. He became a member of the Editorial Collective of Socialist Lawyer in 1987. The late Joanna Dodson QC was Chair, Beverley Lang (now a High Court judge) was Secretary. Starmer first wrote an article in SL in Autumn 1987 – “Beyond Collective Bargaining”. I wrote my first SL article, on the Poll Tax, in 1987-88 – same Chair and Secretary, same Editorial Collective. Starmer became Joint Secretary with Pam Brighton in late 1988, and Secretary in 1989, Joanna Dodson still the Chair. He attempted to change Haldane’s name, so that it would no longer be “socialist” but “radical” or “democratic”. He was defeated at a noisy meeting, which I vividly recall, by the CP lawyers.

I was elected Chair in 1990 with Starmer as Secretary, and this continued through 1991 with Kate Markus as Vice Chair. In Autumn 1990 Starmer wrote an article for SL entitled “Haldane Forth: What Next”, in which he set our his proposals for transforming Haldane into something more like Liberty, with premises, staff, and a charitable Educational Trust making money through CPD (Continuing Professional Development) courses. For several years Haldane had premises, first in Tooks Court, then over Conway Hall. The Educational Trust fizzled out.

In September 1991 Starmer organised and led a successful Haldane mission, fifteen-strong, to Northern Ireland. I have the Report, published in 1992, entitled “Upholding the rule of law? Northern Ireland: criminal justice under the ‘emergency powers’ in the 1990s”. We called for a united Ireland.

In Spring 1993 I was still Chair, Nadine Finch became Secretary, and Starmer became Treasurer. Kate Markus took over from me as Chair in 1995, with Richard Bielby as Secretary.

There were two large summer parties in my house in Brixton/Herne Hill in 1994 and 1995, with Starmer and the others present, and a late night altercation between Starmer and Bielby as to who was more working class. Richard Bielby, a former train driver and barrister, was working class.  

In 1996, Starmer organised and led a large delegation, 45-strong, to the XIV IADL (International Association of Democratic Lawyers) Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. I was IADL Treasurer, and met Nelson Mandela, who was IADL President. There was a reprise of the altercation between Starmer and Bielby.

I don’t think Starmer was ever a ‘socialist’, certainly not a Marxist, although I have PDFs of his articles in the ‘Pabloite’ journal Socialist Alternatives, including in 1987, “Wapping – beyond a defeat”. I never heard Starmer utter the words “Trotsky”, “Pablo” or “Marx”. But then the Labour Party is not a socialist party. It is a trade union party.

Starmer was a good civil liberties and human rights lawyer, and acted pro bono for ten years for the defendants Helen Steel and David Morris, in the McLibel case brought by McDonalds. He became Director of Pubic Prosecutions in 2008 through his work in the peace process in Northern Ireland (contacts he made in the 1991 mission), reforming police and prosecutors. In 2007, before he became DPP, he led me in drafting the application to the Strasbourg Human Rights Court in Carter v Russia, the poisoning of Alexandr Litvinenko by the Russian state, brought by his widow Marina. I won the case at Strasbourg in September 2021, with a finding of murder against Russia.

Starmer was always intensely ambitious. If you had told him in 1990 that he would become Sir Keir Starmer KC, former Director of Public Prosecutions, Leader of the Labour Party, and Prime Minister, that would simply have confirmed his ambition.

Bill Bowring, Colchester CLP, teaches international law and human rights at Birkbeck College. He was a Lambeth Labour Councillor from 1978 to 1986.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Official_portrait_of_Keir_Starmer_crop_2.jpg. Source: https://api20170418155059.azure-api.net/photo/X9dwBvuR.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/X9dwBvuR. Author: Chris McAndrew (1974, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.