As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer travelled with security officials to meet US counterparts – the second time he appears to have colluded with US in ‘national security’ extradition
Yesterday, Julian Assange was freed, after years of wrongful imprisonment and captivity, and flew to Australia after agreeing a ‘plea deal’ with the US government over espionage charges that should have been laughed out of court when the only significant US witness admitted under oath that he had been lying the whole time.
Now is a good time to remember that when Starmer was (a deeply unpopular) Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and Assange was fighting attempts to extradite him to Sweden as a staging post for extradition to the US, Starmer flew to the US for secret talks with authorities in Washington, accompanied by security officials, as Declassified UK later uncovered. The Crown Prosecution Service destroyed all records of Starmer’s discussions – as it did with records showing what he knew about serial rapist Jimmy Savile:
This was not Starmer’s only example of grovelling to the US on extradition. When the US wanted autistic hacker Gary McKinnon after he had hacked its servers looking for information on UFOs, Starmer told the Americans he would ‘do everything’ to ensure the extradition went ahead – and flew in fury to bow and scrape to Washington after then-Home Secretary Theresa May quashed it.
Starmer has been described as a ‘long-time servant of the British security state’ and has relentlessly backed moves to protect state agents from even such crimes as rape and murder, his attacks on environmental and human rights protesters, his support for immunity for soldiers who murdered civilians in Northern Ireland and more and his refusal to oppose laws allowing the state to persecute journalists. He has never spoken out against the even more relentless US pursuit of Julian Assange, despite the collapse of the US case when its main witness admitted lying all along.
Scratch a Labour right-winger and the Tory beneath is revealed in a heartbeat. Starmer’s coat of paint is micron-thin, but what lies beneath is if anything even more sinisterly authoritarian and craven than the blue Tories, a reality that bodes ill for the UK if he gets into power.
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