U$A

Zero-down mortgages are back sparking fears of being the new subprime loans which caused the 2008 market crash

Story by Mike Bedigan •  THE INDEPENDENT UK

A new “zero-down” mortgage program has sparked concern of fueling another housing bubble given its similarities to the disastrous subprime loans that contributed to the 2008 housing market crash.

The programs, announced two weeks ago and offered by United Wholesale Mortgage, allow qualified borrowers to receive up to $15,000 in down payment assistance.

The interest-free loan program does not require monthly payments and aims to “help more borrowers become homeowners without an upfront down payment,” the company said.

However, experts have warned that the programs – which, according to company, have already proved incredibly popular – could backfire on homeowners should the US housing market begin to cool, and prices begin to drop.

To qualify for the loans, borrowers must be at or below 80 percent of the Area Median Income for the property they are buying, or one borrower must be a first-time homebuyer.

The assistance loan, given as a second lien, offers flexibility in repayment and must be paid in full by the end of the loan term or when the first lien loan is paid off - for many homeowners, that would be at the end of 30 years of paying their mortgage.

“UWM’s 0% Down Purchase program is going to change the game this purchase season,” UWM chief executive Mat Ishbia said.

“No other wholesale lender in the country is offering this, meaning independent mortgage brokers now have a significant advantage with consumers and real estate agents. Thousands of borrowers are sitting on the sidelines because they don’t have a downpayment – this program removes that barrier.”

However, one of the risks of prospective homeowners paying no down payment, is that they will begin with no home equity – i.e the current market value of a home, minus any liens such as a mortgage.

Should house prices begin to drop, borrowers could find themselves owing more than the home is worth on repayments. This could lead to a failure to comply with the mortgage terms, known as being in “default.”

Further problems could arise if the homeowner needs to sell the property quickly, but are unable to repay the second mortgage.

Patricia McCoy, a professor at Boston College Law School and former mortgage regulator, told CNN that scenario is “exactly what happened” during the subprime crisis, when millions of homeowners were unable to make payments and went into default.

The housing bubble that popped around 2006 was fueled in part by a boom on the amount of subprime mortgages, and adjustable rate mortgages being offered.

A subprime mortgage is generally a loan that is meant to be offered to prospective borrowers with impaired credit records. The higher interest rate is intended to compensate the lender for accepting the greater risk in lending to such borrowers.



A new “zero-down” mortgage purchase program has sparked concern within the industry, due to similarities with the disastrous subprime loans that contributed to the 2008 housing market crash (AP)© Provided by The Independent

Jonathan Adams, an assistant professor at Saint Joseph’s University teaching real estate finance, said the zero-down loan program has “all the features that made subprime bad,” noting that those who qualified for the program are likely to suffer when home prices are falling.

“One of the lessons of the subprime crisis was that you are not doing any favors to borrowers by making it too easy to borrow,” Adams told CNN.

The company rejected the concerns over potential fallout from its programs, saying that borrowers must still go through strict underwriting guidelines.

“People who make these claims are uneducated about the current state of the industry,” Alex Elezaj, the company’s chief strategy officer, told CNN. “In today’s environment, UWM is responsible for underwriting the loan, which gives us confidence that these are high quality loans.

“This is a huge positive. It’s helping consumers and is a great win across the board.

“Think about all the people who are renting and would love to buy a house, but they face this roadblock of coming up with $10,000 or $15,000 for a down payment. This eliminates that.”

 

Joseph Stiglitz and ‘progressive capitalism’

28th May 2024Leave a Commenton Joseph Stiglitz and ‘progressive capitalism’

“If an economy is made more equal, would it stop future slumps under capitalism or future Great Recessions? More equal economies in the past did not avoid these slumps. Progressive capitalism is an oxymoron in the 21st century.”

By Michael Roberts

The liberal leftist economist and Nobel (Riksbank) prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has another book out to proclaim the benefits of what he calls ‘progressive capitalism’. The Road to Freedom is a play on the title of Friedrich Hayek’s infamous book, The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, which claimed that government intervention into the ‘freedom of markets’ would cause shortages and misallocations of resources and eventually to the end of democracy and freedom in a dictatorship a la Stalinist Soviet Union. John Maynard Keynes expressed his agreement with Hayek after reading his book. He wrote to Hayek that: “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement.”

But Stiglitz certainly does not. For him, Hayek’s claim that ‘free markets’ mean freedom for the individual really means ‘freedom for the wolves and death to the sheep’ (Isaiah Berlin). Free markets are designed to make profits not to meet the social needs of the many. “Externalities are everywhere,” Stiglitz writes. “The biggest and most famous negative externalities are air pollution and climate change, which derive from the freedom of businesses and individuals to take actions that create harmful emissions.” The argument for restricting this freedom, Stiglitz points out, is that doing so will “expand the freedom of people in later generations to exist on a livable planet without having to spend a huge amount of money to adapt to massive changes in climate and sea levels.”

For Stiglitz, the enemy of human freedom is not capitalism as such, but ‘neoliberalism’ which has bred soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”

Stiglitz has argued before in previous books that it is not capitalism that is at fault but the decisions of governments and their corporate backers to ‘change the rules of the game’ that had existed in the post-war period of managed capitalism. The rules were changed to deregulate; to privatise; to crush labour unions etc.  But Stiglitz never explains why the ruling elite felt it necessary to change the rules of the game.  What happened to swing the post-war rules into the neoliberal ones?

Anyway, Stigliz reiterates his call for the creation of a “progressive capitalism”. Under the rules of this form of capitalism, the government would employ a full range of tax, spending, and regulatory policies to reduce inequality, rein in corporate power, and develop the sorts of capital for social needs not profits like ‘human capital’ (education), ‘social capital’ (cooperatives), and ‘natural capital’ (environmental resources).

Stiglitz does not want to get rid of capitalism but to regulate it, so it works for the many (sheep) over the few (wolves). “We need environmental regulations, traffic regulations, zoning regulation, financial regulations, we need regulations in all the constituents of our economy,” he writes. But Stiglitz is either naïve or applying sophistry here.  The history of regulation is a history of failure in controlling capitalism or making banks and corporations apply policies and investment in the interests of people over profit.

How can anyone not see that, after the global financial crash of 2008, or the subsequent financial scandals galore; or the failure to stop or regulate fossil fuel production and finance? Regulation has not stopped regular and recurring crises of production under capitalism, whether in the imagined ‘progressive era’ of 1945-75 or in the neoliberal era since.  Stiglitz has nothing to say on this.

Indeed, he almost recognizes that his policy proposals of taxing the rich, regulating finance and the environment and increasing public spending to achieve progressive capitalism are not likely to be adopted by governments and big business.  But when asked that, maybe, the only real alternative to achieve human freedom is a revolutionary transformation of the economy and society, he replied at a LSE presentation of his book, that revolutions are violent and risky and so should be avoided in favour of gradualist change.

His answer reminds me of Geoff Mann’s comment in his excellent book, In the Long Run We are all Dead, “the Left wants democracy without populism, it wants transformational politics without the risks of transformation; it wants revolution without revolutionaries”. (p21).  Stiglitz really echoes Keynes who once said, “For the most part, I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.”

How would regulation and more equality deal with the impending disaster that is global warming as capitalism accumulates rapaciously without any regard for the planet’s resources and viability? Programmes of redistribution will do little for this. And if an economy is made more equal, would it stop future slumps under capitalism or future Great Recessions? More equal economies in the past did not avoid these slumps. Progressive capitalism is an oxymoron in the 21st century. And even Stiglitz doubts that it is possible to achieve.

---

• Michael Roberts is an economist and author, you can follow Michael Roberts’ blog on Facebook and YouTube.
• This article was originally published by Michael Roberts’ blog The Next Recession on May 13th, 2024.

NEVER WERE PRO LIFE

Red states are using the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade to expand the death penalty

Death penalty states want the Supreme Court to throw out its precedents and allow the execution of child rapists

By AUSTIN SARAT
SALON
PUBLISHED MAY 25, 2024

Ron DeSantis | Prison Cellhouse interior (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Even as support for the death penalty wanes across the country, Republican governors, led by Florida’s Ron DeSantis, are signing into law legislation expanding the death penalty.

Earlier this month, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a bill authorizing the death penalty for aggravated rape of a child. The law goes into effect on July 1. Lee’s decision makes Tennessee the second state, following Florida, to apply capital punishment to cases where no one is killed. A third red state, Idaho, is now considering similar legislation.

These laws, as the Death Penalty Information Center explains, “contradict longstanding Supreme Court precedent holding the death penalty unconstitutional for non-homicide crimes.” In fact, they are intended to tee up a case allowing the Supreme Court’s conservative, activist majority to overturn long-established precedent, just as it has done in other high-profile cases.

What the Supreme Court did in overturning its own precedents when it allowed states to prohibit abortion, has sent a clear message and prompted Tennessee, Florida (and maybe Idaho) to defy its long-established precedents in the area of capital punishment.

Proponents of the new laws hope that the court will extend the reach of capital punishment. They also hope to put death penalty opponents on the defensive by painting them as soft-on-crime defenders of child rapists.

Death penalty opponents must work hard to avoid falling into that trap. Their best political strategy, though it might not be a winning legal strategy, will be to say that the court should respect its own precedent rather than mounting a full-fledged campaign to explain why child rapists should not be put to death.

Before looking more closely at the Tennessee law and the political strategy behind it and the others, let’s recall what the Supreme Court has said about using the death penalty for non-homicide cases like rape.In a 7-2 decision handed down in 1977, the court found that capital punishment was “grossly disproportionate” to the crime of rape. Justice Bryon White, who wrote the majority opinion in Coker v. Georgia, turned to history to help explain that judgment.

“At no time in the last 50 years,” White said, “have a majority of the States authorized death as a punishment for rape. In 1925, 18 States, the District of Columbia, and the Federal Government authorized capital punishment for the rape of an adult female. By 1971, … that number had declined, but not substantially, to 16 States plus the Federal Government.”

That situation changed dramatically in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia striking down the death penalty as then applied. Subsequently, more than 30 states reenacted their death penalty statutes, but few reauthorized it as a punishment for rape.

As White explained, it “should also be a telling datum that the public judgment with respect to rape, as reflected in the statutes providing the punishment for that crime, has been dramatically different. In reviving death penalty laws to satisfy Furman's mandate, none of the States that had not previously authorized death for rape chose to include rape among capital felonies.”

White recognized “the seriousness of rape as a crime.” As he put it, “It is highly reprehensible, both in a moral sense and in its almost total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy of the female victim and for the latter's privilege of choosing those with whom intimate relationships are to be established. Short of homicide, it is the ‘ultimate violation of self.’”

Still, White insisted that “in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public,…(rape) does not compare with murder, which does involve the unjustified taking of human life…. The murderer kills; the rapist, if no more than that, does not…. We have the abiding conviction that the death penalty, which ‘is unique in its severity and irrevocability,’ is an excessive penalty for the rapist who, as such, does not take human life.”

Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice William Rehnquist, who dissented in Coker, accused the majority of “engraft(ing) their conceptions of proper public policy onto the considered legislative judgments of the States.” They branded the decision to bar the death penalty in rape cases “very disturbing.”

Three decades after Coker, in a case called Kennedy v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that ruling and extended it to cover the rape of a child. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a five-justice majority, conceded that “Petitioner’s crime was one that cannot be recounted in these pages in a way sufficient to capture in full the hurt and horror inflicted on his victim or to convey the revulsion society….”

But he argued that “in determining whether the death penalty is excessive, there is a distinction between intentional first-degree murder on the one hand and nonhomicide crimes against individual persons, even including child rape, on the other. The latter crimes may be devastating in their harm, as here, but ‘in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public,’… they cannot be compared to murder in their ‘severity and irrevocability.’”

Justice Samuel Alito, in a blistering dissent, said that he found it incredible that that death could never be an appropriate punishment “no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be.”

Understanding the political danger of supporting the court’s decision, in 2008 both of the major party presidential candidates, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, condemned it. “I think,” Obama observed, “that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that… the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution."

This brings us back to the present.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The fact that Kennedy and the other justices in the Kennedy v. Louisiana majority are no longer on the Supreme Court(Alito and two of the other dissenters remain) has not been lost on the people now openly defying the Coker and Kennedy decisions. They have also been spurred on by court’s increasingly cavalier attitude toward its own precedents. Nor has the political danger that Obama recognized for those who openly oppose the death penalty for child rapists escaped notice.

Tennessee State Sen. Jack Johnson, who sponsored the bill, highlighted that both when he wrote in an op-ed he wrote last month in The Tennessean. Setting the political trap, he asked “Was the life of a rapist more valuable than the life of an innocent child who will be permanently scarred forever? In Tennessee, the answer is no.”

“Child rape,” he continued escalating the rhetorical stakes, “is the most disgraceful, indefensible act one can commit, leaving lasting emotional and psychological wounds on its victims. As a legislator, and more importantly, as a human being, our responsibility to protect the most vulnerable comes first.”

Critics of this legislation, Johnson continued, “argue that the death penalty is an unjustifiable punishment and ineffective. However, in cases where a rapist is preying on the vulnerability of a child and inflicting permanent harm on them, a severe form of justice is the consequence they must face.”

Johnson was even more direct in talking about the difference the Supreme Court's composition might make when a challenge to the Tennessee law reaches the court.

“All five justices who supported the 2008 opinion are no longer members of the U.S. Supreme Court (Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer). Three of the four justices who authored the dissenting opinion are still sitting justices (Roberts, Alito, and Thomas). Given the makeup of the current court, there is a strong possibility that Kennedy v. Louisiana could be overturned.”

As Johnson put it, “I feel very certain that the Supreme Court believes there is a strong, compelling state interest to protect children, and we believe this Court will support Tennessee's efforts."

He may be right.

What the Supreme Court did in overturning its own precedents when it allowed states to prohibit abortion, has sent a clear message and prompted Tennessee, Florida (and maybe Idaho) to defy its long-established precedents in the area of capital punishment. As Johnson made clear, they are banking that the court will now allow death penalty states to expand the reach of capital punishment.

Doing so would not only be a backward step in the ongoing effort to end the death penalty in this country, but it would also be another sign that, as former Justice Thurgood Marshall once noted, “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court's decision-making.”


By AUSTIN SARAT is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution." His opinion articles have appeared in USA Today, Slate, the Guardian, the Washington Post and elsewhere.

ICYMI

2024: People Starve As The Rich Get Richer

BY GRAHAM PEEBLES

 MAY 24, 2024
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Image by Hennie Stander.

Earning enough to pay the rent or mortgage, cover utility bills and travel costs, buy food and have the occasional coffee is impossible for many. But its not hard for everyone, is it; there are a small number of people living among us who don’t have to worry about the bills, are not troubled when food prices increase or rents balloon.

They are the rich and the obscenely rich. On the surface they look like the rest of us, but they live in a completely different world to the one most of us inhabit. A pristine space of privilege and political influence, for in our corrupt world bereft of principled political leaders, money and power are bedmates.

The statistics around wealth and income inequality are manifold and horrifying.

There are, according to Forbes more billionaires in the world than ever before; 2,781 individuals with fortunes in excess of $1Bn (up 141 on 2023), of which 14 are ‘centi-billionaires’ i.e. fortunes over $100 Bn. Mostly the super rich are men, Oxfam record that, “Globally, men own US $105 trillion more wealth than women.”

During the last ten years, (which saw the 2008 financial crash, Covid and the Ukraine/Russia) the collective wealth of this tiny shiny gang has increased by 120%. As Forbes puts it, “Even during times of financial uncertainty for many, the super-rich continue to thrive.” At the same time, on the same planet, as the hyper rich drown in money and stuff, around five billion people around the world are poorer now than they were in 2019.

The poorest everywhere are women, people of colour (“in the USA, the wealth of a typical Black household is just 15.8% of that of a typical white household”) and marginalised groups; the same sections of society coincidentally that were most severely impacted by Covid.

Remember all the talk during the pandemic of a socio-economic reset, of tackling social injustices, creating fairer more integrated ways of working and living etc, blah, blah blah. Well, Oxfam reveal that, in subsequent years while “average real wages of nearly 800 million workers have fallen” across 52 countries, the worlds billionaires are $3.3Tn richer than they were pre pandemic……and their wealth has grown three times faster than the rate of inflation.”

Unimaginable wealth for a tiny number of individuals while the majority of humanity live in varying levels of poverty or economic hardship. “The wealth of the world’s five richest billionaires has more than doubled since the start of this decade, while 60% of humanity has grown poorer.” ‘Trickle down economics’ (“gush up” as Arundhati Roy rightly describes it) is a dystopian fantasy peddled by those who are swimming in cash.

In parallel to unprecedented concentrations of wealth, the corporations that many of these individuals lead or own have also been making unprecedented profits. Oxfam: “148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion…in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 per cent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021.”

Record profits as the majority are struggling to feed themselves, are in many cases falling into debt and destitution, whilst being told to ‘tighten their belts’, by obnoxious, often wealthy, politicians beholden to corporate leaders.

Virtually all profits are dished out to shareholders, with companies refusing to pay their staff properly; less than 0.5% “of over 1,600 of the world’s largest companies “pay their workers a living wage.” Corporate greed knows no limits, nor the level of worker exploitation.

Corporate political power fuels inequality not just by shareholder payouts, but by keeping wages low, avoiding paying taxes, absorbing and running public services and feeding climate change.

Multiple inequalities

In addition to growing inequality within countries, the gap between the Global north and the Global south is also increasing.

There are various forms of inequality that flow from the underlying cause, financial inequality: climate change, political influence, housing, access to the arts and internet, good health care and stimulating education among others.

Under the socio-economic system of the day, all is dependent on money. Financial hardship/poverty places individuals and nations in a position of disadvantage, making it impossible for example to live in a comfortable home, eat a balanced healthy diet, to attend a good school, visit art galleries and the theatre, access the internet; travel, have a voice that is listened to by the political class.

The systemic cause of this madness is of course the inherent injustice/s sewn into the DNA of the pervasive socio-economic model. The more extreme, the more fundamental the form of capitalism becomes concentrations of wealth intensify and narrow, inequality increases, democracy flounders, social divisions and anger grow.

Since the 1990s, thanks largely to that fanatical duo, Thatcher and Reagan, and intensifying year on year, the socio-economic paradigm has moved from twilight to utter darkness. Neo-Liberalism or Market fundamentalism, has expanded its reach, until it now dominates virtually all areas of life, in almost every corner of the world.

The Paradigm of Greed and Destruction champions excess; sufficiency, simplicity and moderation are dismissed. Everything is seen as a commodity, including health care, education, and people, to be monetised, exploited to the last drop and profited from. Everyone is regarded as a consumer, every nation, city or village analysed as a potential marketplace.

It is a deeply materialistic, extremely crude, albeit complex way of organising society, that humanity is enthralled too and entrapped by. Obsession with objects and sensory experiences has resulted in mankind being divorced from him/herself, from the natural world and that underlying reality, which we call god. It is choking the life out of humanity, poisoning the planet and driving climate change.

Yes, the underlying cause of climate change and ecological vandalism is consumerism, therefore greed. Not consumerism within poor developing nations (including China) of course, but relentless irresponsible consumerism in rich western nations (US leads the pack by some margin), particularly the richest members within these societies. “The richest 1% globally emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity [roughly 5.4billion].”

It doesn’t have to be like this

Keeping the masses poor, physically exhausted and emotionally drained, whilst concentrating wealth into the pockets of the already rich is not a new game of course. As Priya Sahni-Nicholas of the Equality Trust explains, “The super-rich have spent centuries diverting wealth into their hands, making our democracy less responsive to people’s needs and damaging our communities. The result is we [society/nations] are poorer, sicker, less productive, unhappier, more polarised, and less trusting.”

The values of the market are destroying communities and literally making people ill – physically and psychologically (and of course the two are inter-twinned). These insidious tools of control create the conditions for all kinds of conflict, individually and collectively. They fuel tribalism, deny/pervert democracy, encourage corruption, and make peace impossible. All of which is by design; the last thing the ruling elites want is a contented happy, and well informed populace.

Despite the dogmatic rhetoric from politicians of all colours this is not the only way to live, the only option. We can change this, and if we are to prosper.

At the heart of any re-imagining must be that simple attitude and action that parents routinely encourage in their children, – Sharing. We need to learn to share; fundamentally to share the essentials required to live – water, food, shelter; share the knowledge, information, and technology. Ensure everyone, irrespective of income has access to good quality health care and stimulating education, and begin to create a just world where trust can blossom, differences dissolve and relationships form.

Sharing is the first step of such a shift. If introduced as a guiding principle it would have a profound impact, not just in the way basic needs are met, but in the collective consciousness. It would facilitate a kinder, fairer, society and allow a space to open up in which stress could gradually dissolve. The mechanisms for building sharing into the machine could easily be designed and introduced, if, and of course its a colossal if, the political will was there.

In parallel with structural simplification, purpose needs to be rediscovered and actions cleansed. Humanity must – or potentially face extinction – move away from the relentless pursuit of material, sensory pleasure, which demands constant stimulation through consumption, and therefore, ensures perpetual discontent and environmental catastrophe, to a quieter, simpler mode of living.

This may sound ridiculously ambitious, and given the determination by corporations, the exceedingly rich and weak politicians with vested interests, and public apathy, it may well be. But unless purpose is re-imagined, and unless ‘root and branch’ economic ‘reform’ takes place, the social-economic-political divisions will not just continue, they will intensify, and the unbelievable extremes will become normalised, baked into everyday life and everyday politics.

This is the time for such a move; everything is in a state of collapse; all the forms, all the systems and, in societies throughout the world, particularly the West, many of the people are falling apart. If not now, when?

Graham Peebles is a British freelance writer and charity worker. He set up The Create Trust in 2005 and has run education projects in Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and India.  E: grahampeebles@icloud.com  W: www.grahampeebles.org

General election 2024: Read first Keir Starmer speech and key messages of Labour campaign to ‘turn the page’

Keir Starmer
22nd May, 2024


Tonight the Prime Minister has finally announced the next General Election.



A moment the country needs – and has been waiting for. And where, by the force of our democracy power returns to you.



A chance to change for the better. Your future. Your community. Your country.



It will feel like a long campaign – I’m sure of that. But no matter what else is said and done. That opportunity for change is what this election is about.



Over the course of the last four years – we have changed the Labour Party. Returned it once more to the service of working people.



All we ask now – humbly – is to do exactly the same for our country. And return Britain to the service of working people. To that purpose.



We offer three reasons why you should change Britain with Labour.



One – because we will stop the chaos.



Look around our country. The sewage in our rivers. People waiting on trolleys in A&E. Crime virtually unpunished. Mortgages and food prices – through the roof.



It’s all – every bit of it – a direct result of the Tory chaos in Westminster.



Time and again, they pursue their own interests. Rather than tackling the issues that affect your family.



And if they get another five years, they will feel entitled to carry on exactly as they are. Nothing will change.



A vote for Labour is a vote for stability – economic and political. A politics that treads more lightly on all our lives. A vote to stop the chaos.

Two – because it’s time for change.



Our offer is to reset both our economy and our politics.



So that they once again serve the interests of working people.



We totally reject the Tory view that economic strength is somehow gifted from those at the top.



Over the past fourteen years – through all the crises we have had to face – sticking with this idea has left our country exposed, insecure and unable to unlock the potential of every community.



But a vote for Labour is a vote to turn the page on all that. A vote for change.



And finally, three – because we have a long-term plan to rebuild Britain. A plan that is ready to go. Fully-costed and fully funded.



We can deliver economic stability. Cut the NHS waiting times. Secure our borders with a New Border Security Command.



Harness Great British Energy to cut your bills for good. Tackle anti-social behaviour.



And get the teachers we need in your children’s classroom.

But most of importantly of all, we do all this with a new spirit of service.



Country first, party second.



A rejection of the gesture politics you will see in this campaign, I have no doubt from the Tories and from the SNP.



I am well aware of the cynicism people hold towards politicians at the moment.



But I came into politics late, having served our country as leader of the Crown Prosecution Service.



And I helped the Police Service in Northern Ireland to gain the consent of all communities.



Service of our country is the reason – and the only reason – why I am standing here now – asking for your vote.



And I believe with patience, determination and that commitment to service there is so much pride and potential we can unlock across our country.



So – here it is – the future of the country – in your hands.

On 4th July you have the choice. And together, we can stop the chaos.



We can turn the page. We can start to rebuild Britain. And change our country.


Thank you.


Keir Starmer is Labour leader and MP for Holborn and St Pancras.@Keir_StarmerView all articles by Keir Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer: The one-time ‘lefty lawyer’ with his eye on No 10


Sir Keir Starmer (Stefan Rousseau/PA)
By Gavin Cordon, PAToday at 10:36


Three years ago Sir Keir Starmer seriously considered throwing in the towel after seeing Labour crash to a humiliating defeat in the Hartlepool by-election.


A little more than a year into the job as party leader, even allies were questioning whether he had what it took to return them to power after the Tories romped home in the formerly safe Labour stronghold.

The setback was compounded by a series of losses in council elections taking place in England the same day.

The Blairite former minister Lord Adonis suggested he was no more than a “transitional figure” without the “political skills” needed to make it to the top while critics on the left were openly gloating.




Sir Keir Starmer emerges from his home following the Hartlepool by-election. He considered quitting following Labour’s defeat (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Badly bruised by the result, having made repeated visits to campaign in the constituency – “I felt like I had been kicked in the guts” – he told aides that it was a “personal rejection” and he had to go.

In his hour of darkness, his wife, Victoria, was among those who rallied round and persuaded him to carry on.

Having pulled round from that “near-death experience”, and dragged his party back to the brink of electability in the process, he is now preparing for the final push that could see him become the UK’s next prime minister.

But while his trademark grey quiff has become a fixture at Prime Minister’s Questions, he remains in the eyes of many voters an unknown quantity who has yet to define what he truly stands for.

An avid football fan – he is an Arsenal season ticket holder – he may now be challenging for the top honours, but like the team he supports he has struggled to shed the “boring” tag.

A one-time “lefty lawyer” from north London, he has been depicted by opponents as the epitome of a self-satisfied liberal metropolitan elite, remote from the concerns of ordinary voters.

However he grew up in very different circumstances sharing a cramped, ramshackle “pebble-dash semi” with three siblings and a mother who was seriously ill for much of his childhood.



Keir Starmer when he was the director of public prosecutions (Lewis Whyld/PA)

When he stood for leader in the aftermath of Labour’s crushing 2019 general election defeat, he ran on a leftish platform with commitments to renationalise water and energy and scrapping university tuition fees.

He has since been accused of systematically abandoning his principles, dropping key policies one by one, as he has tacked steadily to the right.

To his supporters, he is a pragmatist utterly focused on taking Labour back to power, believing real change cannot be achieved from the impotence of opposition.

And while some on the left have cried betrayal, his critics in the party have been largely sidelined as it recovered to establish a commanding lead in the opinion polls.

A late entrant to politics after a high-flying legal career – including a five-year stint as director of public prosecutions – Sir Keir has seemed to some too “lawyerly” and buttoned up to connect with voters.


His friends insist that such a characterisation is unfair, saying that in private he is warm and engaging, whether propping up the bar, pint in hand, at his local or cooking a meal at home with his family.

A recent biography by journalist and former Labour spin doctor Tom Baldwin cast new light on his apparent reticence in public, describing a difficult childhood growing up in straitened circumstances in the Surrey commuter-belt town of Oxted.




Sir Keir Starmer with Jeremy Corbyn during the 2019 General Election campaign (Jonathan Brady/PA)

Named after the first Labour leader, Keir Hardie, his father, Rodney, was a toolmaker and his mother, Jo, an NHS nurse who suffered from a rare condition which left her with a debilitating form of rheumatoid arthritis normally associated with someone much older.

In constant pain, it meant that for much of his childhood she was in and out of hospital – an experience that was to have a profound effect on him.

At the same time his younger brother, Nick, suffered from learning difficulties, leading to fights at school as Keir and his sisters sought to defend him from bullies.


His father meanwhile was a distant, uncommunicative figure who banned the children from listening to pop music or watching TV shows such as Tiswas or Starsky And Hutch and who hated Margaret Thatcher.

It was only after Rodney died and he discovered a scrapbook of press cuttings he kept chronicling his career that the adult Sir Keir finally understood the pride his father had taken in his achievements.

Difficulties at home did not stop him doing well at school – passing the 11-plus to gain a place at Reigate Grammar School, while his prowess at sport and music earned him the nickname “Superboy” from his siblings.




Sir Keir Starmer demonstrates his football skills during a campaign visit to Glasgow (John Linton/PA)

Determined to break away from his small town background, he won a place at Leeds studying law – a course chosen largely to please his parents – making him the first member of his family to go university.

He drove there in a battered Morris Minor, paid for by a summer spent “punching holes in metal” for his father.


He was at times uncomfortable in his new surrounds – while fellow students talked knowledgeably about which branch of the profession they hoped to follow, he realised he had never even met a lawyer and had little idea of what they did.

Typically he responded by simply working harder than anyone else, his efforts being rewarded with a first honours and a place at Oxford on a postgraduate degree course in civil law.

He was also becoming increasingly involved in politics, helping run Socialist Alternatives, an obscure Trotskyite magazine, and writing articles earnestly proclaiming Karl Marx was “of course” right over the way to achieve real societal change.

After being called to the bar in 1987, three years later he was among an idealistic group of progressive lawyers who formed the Doughty Street chambers, specialising in human rights with half their cases either paid for by legal aid or free of charge.

Mr Starmer, as he then still was, was soon involved in advising the so-called McLibel Two, a pair of environmental activists who famously took on McDonald’s in a marathon David v Goliath defamation case.


He also made repeated trips to Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean and Africa to represent defendants facing the death penalty, work which helped win him a “QC of the year” award, and drew up legal arguments against the Blair government’s 2005 invasion of Iraq.

At the same time, he belied the conventional “lefty lawyer” image by serving as an adviser to the Association of Chief Police Officers and newly formed Northern Ireland Policing Board, and in 2008 he was appointed director of public prosecutions.




Sir Keir Starmer and deputy leader Angela Rayner (Danny Lawson/PA)

The Tories are reported to have compiled a dossier on his time at the Crown Prosecution Service with a view to embarrassing him during the election campaign, although his supporters remain confident he has nothing to fear.

In 2022 Boris Johnson was forced to row back on a claim that Sir Keir failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile for child sex abuse after even some Tories were angered at the then prime minister’s attempt to make political capital of the issue.

Among the notable decisions he was involved in were the charging of cabinet minister Chris Huhne for seeking to evade speeding points and the fast-track prosecutions of offenders following the 2011 riots in London and other English cities.


It was only after his term of office – for which he was awarded a knighthood – came to an end in 2013 that he turned seriously to politics.

In 2015 he was elected MP for the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras only to see the party suffer its second general election defeat in a row.

He was made a shadow home office minister by new leader Jeremy Corbyn, but was among a wave of frontbenchers to resign in the wake of the tumultuous aftermath of the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU.

After Mr Corbyn saw off the ensuing leadership challenge, Sir Keir – an ardent Remainer – agreed to return to the fold as shadow Brexit secretary.

Pressed subsequently by Tories about why he had done so when he had discarded so much of Mr Corbyn’s left-wing agenda, he claimed he had a duty to help mitigate the effects of withdrawal, fighting to keep open the option of a second referendum.





Sir Keir Starmer with his wife, Victoria, following his 2021 Labour Party conference speech in Brighton (Andrew Matthews/PA)

Not all were convinced by such arguments, but his stance did nothing to damage his prospects within the party.

Following Mr Corbyn’s resignation after leading Labour to its worst result in more than 80 years in the 2019 election – fought on Mr Johnson’s pledge to “get Brexit done” – Sir Keir quickly emerged as the overwhelming favourite to replace him.

One of his first pledges on being elected leader was to rid the party of the “stain” of antisemitism which had taken hold under his predecessor.

He soon revealed a ruthless streak when Mr Corbyn complained that a damning report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission had overstated the problem by sacking him from the Parliamentary Labour Party – an ultimate act of distancing.

His start as Labour leader was overshadowed by the Covid pandemic while the party’s rise in the polls has owed much to the Tories’ implosion, first with Mr Johnson and the “partygate” scandal and then Liz Truss’s calamitous whirlwind premiership.


His allies however insist that credit must also go to his forensic examination of Mr Johnson’s handling of the pandemic and the reassurance he was able to offer in response to the financial chaos created by Ms Truss.

After the nadir of Hartlepool, he has systematically strengthened his grip, with a string of by-election victories while steadily moving to claim the political centre ground, promoting a clutch of Blairites in last year’s shadow cabinet reshuffle.

His hold over the party was underlined by the relatively muted response to his decision finally to drop a flagship £28 billion “green” investment pledge, seen as too easy a target for Tory claims of Labour fiscal profligacy.

If that seemed to some overly cautious, the biggest challenge he has had to face in recent months has come from the war in Gaza, which prompted a series of frontbench sackings and dismissals over his reluctance to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Away from Westminster, Sir Keir’s passion for football runs deep: at the age of 61 he continues to organise and play in regular eight-a-side matches with a group of old north London friends.

On the pitch, he is described as a highly competitive, box-to-box, midfield dynamo: his supporters will be hoping that he has the drive to propel him all the way to No 10.