One cheer for Starmer in Beijing

Just as the icy waters seemed to be closing over his premiership and the abyss seemed to beckon, Keir Starmer received some praise from an unlikely quarter — the Morning Star.

Admittedly, it wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, but praise it undoubtably was: in his Eyes Left column of 4 February, Andrew Murray gave “One cheer for Keir Starmer”. Murray, a leading member of the Communist Party of Britain, conjured up a somewhat bizarre image: “the monkey at No. 10, furiously pounding at the typewriter of governance for the past 19 months has finally produced, if not Shakespeare, at least a line or two of coherent prose.”

The cause of this unlikely show of support was Starmer’s visit to Beijing. Echoing Chinese state media’s coverage, Murray wrote: “Pragmatism may be entirely useless as a principle for leadership, but occasionally it can land you on the right decision when coupled with a sober recognition of realities. Rebuilding relations with the People’s Republic of China is surely one of those.”

Murray was particularly contemptuous of the Liberal Democrat Daisy Cooper, who, in a Commons speech (or “rant” according to Murray), had raised concerns about human rights and “the unevidenced campaign China is purportedly running to hunt down pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Britain with bounties on their heads.”

“Unevidenced”? The paper and CPB regularly cite Amnesty International when that organisation produces reports they approve of, but not when it writes “Chinese and Hong Kong students studying in the UK, other parts of Europe and North America are being intimidated, harassed and silenced by the Chinese authorities as part of a sinister pattern of ‘transnational repression’”.

Ignored

And if Amnesty is to be ignored, so is the evidence of “Hong Kong Scots” submitted to a parliamentary committee last year: “One of the tactics which Hong Kong authorities adopt to repress Hongkongers residing in the UK is to issue arrest warrants and issue bounties over individuals who expressed criticism against the Hong Kong authorities.”

Then there is the GMB, though that union’s support for Ukraine means it’s already out of favour: “The GMB union is actively lobbying the UK government to protect Hong Kong trade unionists and activists based in Britain from harassment and transnational repression by Hong Kong authorities. GMB condemned the use of bounties and arrest warrants against activists like Christopher Siu-Tat Mung, labelling it an abuse of power and an attack on freedom of association.”

And clearly the BBC’s political correspondent Damien Grammaticas is not to be believed when he reported (11 December 2025) that Carman Lau, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, claimed that letters delivered from China to addresses near where she lives in Maidenhead included her name and images made to look as though she was either naked or in underwear and offering sexual services. Previously, according to Grammaticas, many of the same neighbours had received letters sent from Hong Kong offering a bounty of £95,000 to anyone who would hand Ms Lau over to the Chinese embassy in London.

But concerns like these, according to Mr Murray, are comparable (if only at “a stretch”) to “Lords Palmerston and Melbourne… architects of the opium outrages [who] similarly claimed to be actuated by vital human rights, in that case the right of British drug-pedlars to trade freely whatever any other sovereign power felt about it.”

But, Mr Murray assured his readers, the “bourgeois establishment [is] desperate for stable capitalist growth and profit [and so] there is in fact no major constituency in Britain which gains from confrontation with China, beyond the liberal-imperial humanitarian complex.”

Clearly, Mr Murray reckons he and his comrades are on the winning side for the first time since the fall of the USSR and the “Soviet bloc” in 1989-91: Starmer’s meeting with Xi’s team in Beijing “was between the representatives of a growing power — possibly the most rapidly growing in human history — and those of a shrivelling one.”

Oh yes: I scoured Murray’s piece for the word “socialism” but it wasn’t there, even once.