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April 04, 2020The British Labor Party has chosen lawyer and MP Keir Starmer as its new leader, ending Jeremy Corbyn's leadership which has continued since 2015. The party congress did not take place and the announcement was made with a statement press and a pre-recorded speech. Deputy Starmer, exponent of the center-left wing of the opposition party, will be Angela Rayner.

Starmer chose two sentences to fire the first day of post-Corbyn. The first is a micro-self-portrait designed to be inscribed in marble: "I am a person who cannot simply look beyond when he sees something wrong". The second is an apology for Labor's inability to eradicate from his ranks "the shame" of the accusations of anti-Semitism: "In the name of the party I am sorry, and I promise that I will eradicate this poison along with its roots". Two sentences that summarize the heart of the challenge of this convinced Europeanist, champion of human rights and at the same time pragmatic realist: uniting a deeply split party and marking a clear break from the ultra-left line of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, blown away in the last election.

A challenge that goes hand in hand with that, potentially devastating, of the coronavirus emergency. Yet the 57-year-old ex-shadow minister for Brexit, named baronet thanks to his commitment to human rights, seems to have written the fate of Labor: when he was born, his parents chose his first name in honor of the legendary founder of the Labor party Keir Hardie, former secretary of the Scottish mining union from 1886 and then president of Labor until 1908. Instead - elected by 56.2% of the approximately 500,000 members of the party clearly detaching the antagonists Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy - Starmer is a relatively new face on the British political scene: one of the five children of a nurse and toolmaker has been a human rights lawyer for years with the idea of ​​"changing the system".

The bones were made with a famous case in Britain, the 'McLibel case' which saw the giant McDonald's lash out against two environmental activists who had questioned their management practices, a commitment that led him to appear in the documentary that Ken Loach created on the story. A cause that lasted 10 years, which did not end with the defeat of the planetary giant of the hamburger, but ended with the extension of the right of expression in Great Britain. After that the passage as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, in practice the Prosecutor General of England, where the idea was to change the system 'from the inside' (even at the cost of some controversial decision). And, starting from 2014, the leap into the political arena, when he ran in the ranks of Labor in the electoral district of Holborn and St. Pancreas, being elected to the following year's elections with over 17 thousand preferences.

Today, the British media point out that the differences between Starmer and Corbyn could not be more evident: if the latter was the polarizing character who had managed to conquer the party by electrifying the young vote with an ultra-left program and then ended up crushed in the double squeeze of the accusations of anti-Semitism against Labor on the one hand and of an "ambiguous" position towards Brexit on the other, Starmer is the man "without enemies", as the Guardian says, one whose belief is " the unity of the party ", not the ideological battle. So much so that already in 2016 the first disagreements began to manifest with the then head of the party: appointed shadow minister for immigration, Starmer resigns in open opposition to Corbyn's leadership arrangements, only to then return to the shadow government as responsible for Brexit. The problem is that in this capacity his line was certainly clearer than that of the Labor leader: a hard-hitting Europeanist, the former rights lawyer was in the forefront in asking for a second referendum on whether or not the UK left the United Kingdom. EU. The idea was to unite the party, but perhaps contributed instead to the electoral disaster of last December having ended up driving away the northern Labor strongholds, fiercely pro-Brexit.

Today, however, the scenario has already radically changed. Starmer's adventure does not start under the best auspices: on one hand the pandemic is overwhelming the British economy, on the other the future relations between Great Britain and the EU must be negotiated, and this with a Labor that is weak and divided like never before. For his election posters Starmer chose an inscription that sounds like a poster: "I have spent my whole life fighting against injustice and opposing the powerful". The question is whether the new leader will succeed where Corbyn has failed: get the better of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and bring Labor back to government. That today, due to the invisible enemy of the coronavirus, the paradigms of politics have profoundly changed, it shows that he understood it well: his election, said Starmer, "comes at a time different from any other moment in our life" and therefore the Labor "will engage constructively" alongside the BoJo government. Unthinkable, just a month ago.