Finishing the Job: Starmer the Pabloite
This is the tale of three men, a Russian, a Greek, and an Englishman, separated in time but united by doctrine. The first was Jewish, born Lev Bronstein, although he is better known to history as Leon Trotsky. After leading the Red Army to victory in the Russian Civil War, Trotsky became Lenin’s right-hand man, and after Lenin’s death was left as a rival to Stalin for leadership of the new Soviet. Stalin exiled Trotsky in 1928 and, after travelling rootlessly through Turkey, France, and Norway, the exile settled in Mexico. In August, 1940, an assassin dispatched by Stalin attacked Trotsky with an icepick. Whether or not the killing was quite as dramatic as that portrayed in the 1972 movie The Assassination of Trotsky, starring Richard Burton as the Russian and Alain Delon as NKVD agent Frank Jacson, is one for the historians. Trotsky survived the initial attack, but died in hospital days later, reportedly saying at the last that, “I think Stalin has finished the job he started”. Trotskyism, however, was still very much alive.
The second of the main proponents of Trotskyism was a Greek, Michalis Raptis, who was born in 1911 and later took the pseudonym Michel Pablo. Heavily involved in Greek Trotskyism, Pablo was also exiled, in 1936 when Greece fell under military rule, although he and his wife escaped and made their way across Europe to Paris. There, when France was occupied by the Nazis, he continued his work for the Trotskyist cause. After the war, he became General Secretary of the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in Paris in 1938. After Pablo’s death in Greece in 1996, where his funeral was a state affair, he was perhaps best remembered for the political concept of “entryism” (like neocons joining the GOP and moving it to the left on social issues.
The third man is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Keir Starmer. Although he is leading the Labour Party, and thus the country, in an increasingly authoritarian fashion, it might seem excessive to place him in the lineage of Trotsky. As a term of abuse for those seen to be on the political hard left in Great Britain, “Trot” has always been just behind “Bolshevik”. But Starmer’s past is the subject of two mysteries. Firstly, what is his connection with “Pabloism”, and, secondly, why is virtually no one in the British media talking about it?
The 1980s saw Starmer in his twenties and entering on a career in the law, his choice of guildsmen consistent with his political leanings. He became Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers rather than the alternative, the Society of Labour Lawyers, and there was one major difference of opinion between the two organizations. The latter did not approve of what was occurring and had occurred in the Soviet Union, while Starmer’s favored professional body very much did, this schism going as far back as the 1940s. As well as his fledgling legal career, Starmer also turned his hand to political journalism.
The International Marxist Tendency was a Parisian Pabloite group whose British chapter was named Socialist Alternatives. A magazine of the same name was published from 1986 to 1987 and was co-edited by Starmer. Pablo himself was among the contributors and, in its five issues, eight articles were penned by Britain’s future Prime Minister.
Starmer’s program for the redefinition of socialism had as its center of gravity trade unionism, but Socialist Alternatives also introduced a new political perspective, highlighting the potential for new and supposedly oppressed societal factions to bolster the socialist cause. The new socialism, the magazine and its co-editor held, “will necessarily have to be rooted in the anticapitalist alliance of all the emancipatory movements.” Looking to broaden the potential socialist base, Starmer foreshadowed his and Labour’s current abandonment of the White working class, insisting that “the working class exists beyond its historical base amongst white, male workers”. “Today the challenge to the status quo comes from protest movements which are not singularly based on class but represent a wide variety of social groups”, he wrote. These groups seem very familiar in modern Britain, comprising “environmentalists, tenants associations, ethnic minorities, feminists, gays, nuclear disarmers etc.”. This is an obvious deviation from Marxism. The workers were, at least nominally, championed by the Communists, whereas Starmer and his cabinet have made their hatred of the White working class in Britain absolutely clear, and these new “marginalized” groups are favored by today’s elitist, metropolitan Labour Party in a way its old base is not. When not running a Pabloite magazine, however, Starmer found time to experience socialism at ground level.
In 1986, in his mid-twenties, Keir Starmer attended a Communist work camp in what was then Czechoslovakia. This was at the height of the cold-war clampdown on free speech, and playwright Václav Havel was among those jailed for speaking out against Communism. This has echoes in contemporary Britain, where the issue of freedom of speech — and criticism of government policy in particular — is a hot-button topic. One union not favored by the British Government is The Free Speech Union, founded by journalist Toby Young, who report the following:
Pubs and other customer-facing businesses may ban discussions on contentious topics, such as Christians expressing deeply held beliefs about sex and marriage or feminists defending women’s sex-based rights, to avoid breaching Labour’s proposed workers’ rights reforms, the UK’s equality watchdog has warned.
The “rights” supposedly being defended are those of hospitality-industry workers not to be offended, which is held to be tantamount to “harassment”. No clear definition of “offense” exists in British law.
The Left-wing establishment in Britain has provided covering fire for Starmer and his Pabloite past. In a laudatory puff-piece on Starmer four months before the General Election that, while it didn’t exactly sweep Starmer and Labour to power, at least allowed him to pocket the keys to 10 Downing Street, Labour stalwart Andrew Marr discusses Starmer via a hagiography written by the dubious Tom Baldwin. There is no mention of Starmer’s dalliance with the hard Left, instead jumping straight from his taking up the law to his becoming DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions), and even then neglecting to mention the Muslims he defended and which are now causing a stir among Starmer’s critics. Baldwin also makes much of Starmer’s supposedly financially impoverished childhood, growing up as was claimed in a poor part of the county of Surrey.
This is fanciful, to say the least. Starmer grew up in Oxted, a town I knew well as I grew up at the same time a few miles away, and Oxted hosted our nearest cinema. We knew it as the town where the rich kids lived. As a matter of fact, I was at school with Starmer, a year above him at Reigate Grammar School in the same county, having gained my place by virtue of an examination-based scholarship. It is a great surprise to me that such a conservative school could have produced such a radically Left-wing Prime Minister. Starmer also mentioned ad nauseam during his election campaign that his father was a toolmaker, invoking images of back-breaking hard graft wielding a farrier’s hammer in some infernally hot workshop. In fact, Starmer senior — with whom the current PM had a cold and distant relationship — owned a tool-making company. This type of class-based cosmetics is familiar in British politics, but what of the more salient chapters of Starmer’s past outside these feeble attempts to bracket him with the working class he so reviles? Why are the British mainstream media almost entirely uninterested in the radical socialist past of its current, controversial Prime Minister?
In an article from 2020, when Starmer was the front-runner for the Labour leadership, The Daily Mail quoted an unnamed Labour MP as calling today’s Prime Minister a “posh Trot”, as well as referencing Socialist Alternatives, but the paper has kept quiet on the subject since. So much for the MSM.
Also in 2020, an article from the hard Left dismissive of Starmer’s past associations actually describes accurately the MSM’s oblivious stance towards the PM today:
Was Keir Starmer a Trotskyist? Or a follower of Michel Pablo and therefore a ‘Pabloite’? Is there a difference? Indeed, who was this ‘Michel Pablo’ and what on earth is ‘Pabloism’?
Does anyone care?
Indeed. The piece goes on to describe Pablo’s approval of the success of Mao and Tito, and the notion of “client states” inspired a concept which links Pablo to Starmer:
This led to [Pablo] putting forward an idea of ‘deep entryism’ (entryism ‘sui generis’ [‘of a special type’]) where Trotskyists would join mass Communist Parties and seek to influence their development without revealing their politics openly.
Rather than a “mass Communist Party”, Starmer chose Britain’s Labour Party.
And what of the British right-of-center politicians, such as they are? Professor Matt Goodwin is a near-permanent fixture on Right-of-center British media, and is becoming a force within Reform UK, whose political star is very much in the ascendant, and at whose party conference Professor Goodwin recently spoke. Professor Goodwin goes after Keir Starmer personally — a national pastime at present — from about 13:00 in the video, and since his academic background is in statistics, he is tethered to facts and figures in a way rare in the political class. If any man was going to expose Starmer’s Trotskyite past, surely this was Professor Goodwin. And he didn’t mention it. That the Prime Minister of the UK was formerly connected with hard-Left doctrine ought to be a serious weapon, particularly for a party eclipsing the Tories. One wonders what the media response might be were Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform and himself tipped as a future Prime Minister, found to have been an avid reader of Julius Evola.
The only British journalist even to have mentioned the fact that Starmer was or had been a Pabloite, and so by extension a Trotskyite, is the veteran writer Peter Hitchens, the surviving younger brother of the late Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens becomes more curmudgeonly as he gets older and more jaded politically, but he is evermore forthright. The reason he gives for the media’s radio silence on Starmer’s radical political past is a simple one:
They don’t understand it. Most people who write about politics in this country are politically illiterate.
This is unlikely to lead to many lunch invitations from journalistic colleagues, but Hitchens does understand both his profession and politics. In particular, he understands Trotskyism because, in his youth, he was himself a Trotskyist, a fact he has never tried to conceal and which gives him his insight into Starmer.
Starmer is portrayed in the British press as “boring”, but he is psychologically fascinating. Asked his favorite book or poem in an interview, he seemed slightly surprised at the question, and said he had neither. What kind of person doesn’t have a favorite piece of literature? There is something autistic about the man, as though he doesn’t function at the human level, but instead as a sort of AI program. Peter Hitchens describes the PM as “an extremely dogmatic person”, which is accurate as far as it goes, but he is more doctrinaire than simply dogmatic, and this makes him absolutely suited to the hard Left.
Contemporary Britain is, of course, a very different place from the Soviet Union. One of the main points of difference between Trotsky and Stalin was that, while Bronstein favored a period of capitalism in order to bring down that very edifice, Stalin did not. Starmer seems to be with Stalin in despising capitalists. The rich are now leaving Britain at record levels due to his policies, with millionaires exiting the country in 2024 at a level 150% higher than that of 2023.
Starmer is not the first PM in recent history to have fallen under the spell of Trotsky. Tony Blair, whose New Labour began the project of which the Starmer administration is the continuity version, was himself drawn to Trotskyism after reading the first volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biographic trilogy of the Russian, as a 2017 Guardian article revealed:
‘Here’s this guy Trotsky who was so inspired by all of this that he went out to create a Russian revolution and changed the world. I think it’s a very odd thing – just literally it was like a light going on,’ Blair told Reflections with Peter Hennessy on Radio 4.
While Starmer has always been branded a “Corbynite”, or a follower of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader prior to his tenure, seasoned watchers of British politics will recognize Blair as the PM’s true mentor. It may still be that a torch lit in Soviet Russia, kindled in Greece and Paris, and one that so illuminated Tony Blair, has been passed on to Sir Keir Starmer, and may not be extinguished before the job is finished.
I don’t suppose Goodwin’s omission was a “deliberate” oversight.
Political career-archaeology has both advantages and limitations; e.g. Tony Blair (noted here) and Harold Wilson. The latter, briefly, was a Russophile, became a personal friend of the Kosygin family, and known to the GRU by his codename OLDING. People can change opinions, while others can maintain a basic principle through several changes of party; e.g. Oswald Mosley, Winston Churchill.
To judge a man by his actions or inactions is what matters most, and “Three Tier Stalin” stands condemned by just by the past 7 months.
Ever seen the movie A Clockwork Orange?
When I read about Trotskyists like Starmer, I am reminded of the scene in the movie where the State tries to “rehabilitate” the anti-social protagonist of the film. “Alex” is strapped into a chair, donned with a headpiece that pins his eyeballs open, and forced to watch violent, pornographic scenes while he is simultaneously drugged with a substance that makes him nauseatingly ill.
There is no hope of “rehabilitating” anti-social politicians like Starmer. But I would love to strap him into a chair as Alex was, and force him to watch re-enactments of every violent, sadistic act his hero Trostky ever committed or ordered.
He’d be strapped in for a very long time. Which would be more effective for protecting society from him than any act of rehabilitation.
Agree
The Jews also congratulate, but not Prof. MacDonald
to his birthday, but themselves to another lucrative
business at the expense of easily seduced American
fools. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64818
Wishing you a happy birthday Professor Macdonald xxx. 🎂
“And what of the British right-of-center politicians, such as they are? Professor Matt Goodwin is a near-permanent fixture on Right-of-center British media, and is becoming a force within Reform UK, whose political star is very much in the ascendant, and at whose party conference Professor Goodwin recently spoke. Professor Goodwin goes after Keir Starmer personally — a national pastime at present — from about 13:00 in the video, and since his academic background is in statistics, he is tethered to facts and figures in a way rare in the political class. If any man was going to expose Starmer’s Trotskyite past, surely this was Professor Goodwin. And he didn’t mention it.”
Perhaps Matt Goodwin didn’t want to give the colorless bore any more color than it deserves?
Starmer went through the entryist Left on his way to the bigger game. In doing so, he left his past behind, except perhaps his homosexual past which probably was a part of his going via that route in the first place.
Therefore I wouldn’t see any great significance in that past for Starmer’s present. He’s now a direct instrument of the Globalist revolution of Finance Capital/”Larry Fink” which has swept the West, able e.g. to double all prices almost instantly if a suitable pretext exists and indeed it did because they saw to that too.
Queer Starmer, a vicious foot-stamping, raving Quare?
Keir Starmer – Probable Quare? – Certainly not!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v80GFZKzlCE
Look, it’s this simple, you either organize the way the Muslims do and resist, or watch your daughters be raped as you go extinct.
Theyre not going to let you (us) vote your way out of this.
As an aside, I beat the shit out of a Paki once who assaulted me, knowing full well that i would probably be thrown in jail, fortunately nothing happened. As a white man who is of mostly English extraction, i fully understand the British psyche. You need to stop what if-ing and just call their bluff. You cant think your way out of this, but fortunately Muslims are cowardly wretches; do what you must, and dont get caught. Pour encourager les autres, etcetera.
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Rio killed Trotsky.
The name Frank Jacson was false, an assumed identity among several others used for his cloak and dagger business.
Thank you.
Latest news from the land of King George III:
Nigerians unable to speak English are recruited to staff our overcrowded prisons.