WITHIN the first week of the General Election campaign, Keir Starmer told us he was a socialist. Meanwhile, he continued his purge of socialist and left-wing parliamentary candidates from his party.

Then the Labour leader said wealth creation would be his number-one priority in government and that people want the politics of the centre ground and not the “extreme” of the left.

Starmer’s strange version of socialism is where he says he not only “puts the country first and party second” but also places “the country in the service of working people”.

Readers of The National would no doubt rightly say that rather than putting the country in the service of working people, Starmer is intent on keeping working people in the service of the country. Effectively, that means in the service of the already rich and powerful.

READ MORE: Analysis shows what Labour's cuts plans could buy for Scotland

One sort of socialism, actually far better described as social democracy, is defined in terms of having a commitment to public ownership – or at the very least the collective provision of public services.

This is to put people before profit so that need and not greed rule the roost. Starmer has made the pledge to phase out the private ownership of the rail franchises in England by returning them to public ownership – but precious little else.

For others, socialism is defined as the mass of the population, the working class, owning and controlling the wealth and power – called the means of production, distribution and exchange – in society for their benefit.

Starmer was once briefly a socialist of this sort, of a Trotskyist hue, in the mid to late 1980s when he was editor of the Socialist Alternatives magazine.

It was produced by an organisation which was the British section of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. But especially when, as the saying goes, “a week is a long time in politics”, that was a very, very long time ago.

Countless people have consequently – and correctly – since pointed out Starmer is not a socialist. Yet, tantalising, they have not said what they think he actually is. Red Tory or even Blairite re-run are not very helpful epithets or sobriquets.

That is even though Starmer clearly supports the abolition by Tony Blair of Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution in 1995. This was: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry … [on] the basis of the common ownership of the means of production’ But, by contrast, saying Starmer is a social liberal – and, therefore, not even a social democrat – is very apt.

So, social democracy is defined as using the state to intervene in the processes of the market to make its outcomes far fairer for workers (through public ownership, regulating capital, controlling prices and the like).

Unlike socialism, social democracy is not about abolishing the free market or indeed capitalism itself. Social liberalism is defined as growing the economy to raise more taxes to pay for minimal social welfare in terms of things like health and education.

It is a softer version of neoliberalism, where market forces are allowed to run wild and inequalities of wealth, income and power widen.

Social democracy, guided by the likes of John Maynard Keynes’s economic thinking, would see taxes most heavily raised on the rich when the economy is growing so that this money can be spent when the economy is shrinking. The point here is to reflate the economy through public spending.

It is clear then that Starmer – and Rachel Reeves (below), the likely new chancellor of the exchequer – do not subscribe to this.

“Sound money” and “fiscal responsibility” are their watchwords, translated then into “there is no magic money tree” and “the taps will not be turned on”.

Effectively, this means not increasing public spending, which is so badly needed in so many areas of society after austerity and cutbacks for the last 14 years at least.

But what is just as bad is Starmer and Reeves’s pledge that the “change” that is needed and that only, they say, Labour can bring about is “stability”. That means stability of economy for the capitalists to make their profits, which will only increase inequalities in our society.

There is absolutely no sense that Starmer will reveal his so-called true socialist colours once he has the keys to 10 Downing Street. What we are seeing right now is what we are going to get on July 5.

All this would make his parents turn in their graves given that they named their son after Keir Hardie, the Scots founder and first leader of the Labour Party in 1906.

READ MORE: Row as Scottish Labour candidates quoted for FREE campaign services

Many would venture that Starmer’s middle name of Rodney is a more appropriate one. Remembering the character played by Nicholas Lyndhurst in the long-running television comedy series, Only Fools and Horses, Starmer could be said to be something of a “plonker”.

Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and author of Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero (Manchester University Press, 2024)