Why did Keir Starmer lavish praise on an Islamophobic radical-right bigot?

Keir Starmer's decision to laud Alexei Navalny and whitewash his extremist views betrays the arrogance of someone who knows they'll never be held to account by the capitalist interests he serves.

Keir Starmer has issued a statement lauding Alexei Navalny after his death in a Russian prison. I’ll explain why this is deeply problematic, but first a disclaimer to ward off the inevitable accusations that any criticism of a Putin-opponent constitutes Putin apologia.

===Vlad Putin===

I disliked Putin when Tony Blair rushed to St Petersburg in 2000 just weeks before Russian elections to help install the right-wing hardman as Russia’s next leader.

I disliked Putin while Keir Starmer’s advisor Peter Mandelson was conducting dodgy business deals with him.

I disliked Putin when he introduced homophobic legislation and used the 2018 FIFA World Cup to launder Russia’s reputation.

I disliked Putin while his cronies were pumping £millions in dodgy donations into Tory party coffers.

And I’m disgusted by the way so many opponents and dissidents in Putin’s Russia end up getting poisoned, falling out of windows, suffering aviation accidents, and mysteriously dying in prisons.

So if anyone attempts to misrepresent my criticism of Navalny in this article as support for Putin, they’re lying through their teeth. Perhaps because they’re incapable of understanding the old proverb that that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

===Alexei Navalny===

Navalny started out as an extreme-right political agitator who was kicked out of the liberal Yabloko party for his extremist views and his participation in the annual Russian March of far-right nationalists, monarchists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, which regularly featured Nazi iconography and protesters doing Nazi salutes.

In 2007 Navalny made vile propaganda videos, one of which compared Chechens and Muslims to cockroaches, and called for relaxed gun controls in order to shoot them, and in another he dressed up as a dentist to describe immigrant workers as rotten teeth.

When asked about these videos in 2017 by a Guardian journalist, Navalny insisted that he had "no regrets" whatever, dismissed the slurs he used as "artistic licence" and even tried to present his extreme-right videos as positive evidence of his ability to appeal to liberals and ultra-nationalists alike!

Navalny rose to greater prominence by pushing himself to the forefront of anti-Putin street protests in 2011.

After failing in his bid to win the Moscow mayoral election in 2013 on an anti-immigrant platform, and failing to get onto the election ballot in 2018, Navalny switched his focus to anti-corruption campaigning and returned to the street protest tactic (orchestrating protests but not attending them). However despite embarrassing Putin on several occasions, he never really managed to pose any serious threat to his authoritarian rule.

In August 2020 Navalny fell ill on a flight to Germany where doctors found he had been lucky to survive a suspected Novichok poisoning.

Instead of continuing to oppose Putin in exile, Navalny decided to return to Russia in 2021 where he was immediately arrested and eventually sentenced to an effective life imprisonment at the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo.

Despite his unapologetic racism and extremist views, you’ve got to acknowledge Navalny’s bravery in going back to face certain imprisonment and probable death.

===Western media===

Western capitalist media have endlessly repeated the lie that Navalny was "Russia’s main opposition leader" so often that you’d probably be derided as a madman for saying it’s not true, but the fact is that the biggest opposition party is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and their general secretary is Gennady Zyuganov.

It’s as absurd as if Russian media declared a British far-right populist agitator who never managed to get elected, such as former Lib-Dem turned radical-right GB News bankroller Paul Marshall, as Britain’s main opposition leader.

Is it any surprise that capitalist media in the west would erase the existence of an anti-capitalist opposition leader to create the fiction that an Islamophobic far-right populist was Putin’s main opponent, and then dress him up as some kind of saintly representative of liberal western democratic values?

===Keir Starmer===

After the announcement of Navalny’s death, Keir Starmer issued a public statement heaping praise on him, describing his death as a tragedy, and completely ignoring his unapologetic Islamophobia and far-right extremism.

You can only try to imagine the tsunami of capitalist media condemnation if Jeremy Corbyn had ever lavished unqualified praise on such a controversial figure, but Starmer has endlessly signalled his fealty to the profiteering capitalist interests who have looted the British economy into recession, so he apparently gets a total free pass to praise whatever racist, Muslim-hating extremists he likes.

===Julian Assange===

One of the things that makes Starmer’s unqualified praise for Navalny so hypocritical is the fact he’s said absolutely nothing about the political imprisonment of Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison, where he awaits extradition to the United States to face a sickeningly vindictive 175 year jail term in retribution for exposing US and UK war crimes in Iraq.

How can Starmer be so outraged about the imprisonment and suspicious death of a Russian dissident, while having nothing to say about the imprisonment of Assange and his imminent extradition to a country whose secret services plotted to assassinate him?

How can Starmer believe it’s so wrong for Russia to jail and murder political dissidents, when he’s got nothing to say about the dreadful treatment of Assange, or the US plot to murder him?

===Justin Trudeau===

Keir Starmer is far from the only western liberal-capitalist politician to have laundered Navalny’s unapologetic racism and Islamophobia. US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have also both issued statements praising him and whitewashing his extremist views.

Justin Trudeau surely should have learned his lesson after the obscenity of bringing a 98 year old Ukrainian Nazi to the Canadian Parliament, lavishing him with praise, and orchestrating a standing ovation for him.

but just like Keir Starmer, Trudeau seems to think he’s so untouchable that he can praise literal fascists and extreme-right Islamophobes, whitewash their reputations, and expect no pushback or condemnation.

===Conclusion===

Alexei Navalny was clearly incredibly brave to return to Russia knowing that he’d be arrested as soon as he got off the aeroplane, and it once again illustrates Putin’s ruthlessness that yet another of his political opponents has died under dubious circumstances, despite never having managed to pose a serious threat to his authoritarian rule.

However, Navalny wasn’t the liberal saint that the likes of Keir Starmer and Justin Trudeau want to paint him as. He was an unapologetic racist, an anti-immigrant rabble rouser, an Islamophobe, and a man who gladly stood alongside outright fascists and white supremacists when he though it was to his political advantage to do so.

Just because Navalny opposed Putin’s corruption and authoritarianism didn’t make him a good guy, and all these efforts to portray him as some kind of wonderful icon of liberal democracy betray the sickening liberal tendency to align themselves with fascists and extreme-right bigots whenever they think it’s in their self-interest.