One more for the endless list of betrayals to please the obscenely rich
Yet another of Keith Starmer’s pledges discarded. Image thanks to the Skwawkbox
It’s hard to imagine there were any promises left that Keir Starmer hadn’t already broken, but today he has added another to the list: the pledge to end the tax-perk ‘charitable’ status of elite private schools.
Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves have announced that the schools will now keep their charity status – allowing them and their donors/fee-payers more tax breaks – though as a sop Starmer says he will still charge them VAT if he becomes PM. As if anyone can believe that either.
Every day, Starmer and his toxic cronies show themselves more and more the creatures of the rich – and to be unhesitating in betraying and lying to ordinary people to please billionaires and corporations..
Corporate lobbyists have successfully pushed Keir Starmer’s party to ditch its progressive policies
Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at World Economic Forum, Davos.
Over the summer, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party for the first time articulated a clear vision for government: everything will continue to be awful. Nothing will get better. Hope is for fools. And, most importantly, no one with wealth or power need worry themselves that any of either will be taken from them.
Because despite two-thirds of voters wanting the government to increase wealth taxes, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves last month emphasised that she won’t. And although 63% of Brits think taxes on the rich are too low, Starmer has made clear that he doesn’t want to raise income tax for top earners, saying his driving principle is, rather, to lower taxes. Only 5% think the rich pay too much tax.
Meanwhile, Labour’s £28bn-a-year pledge to invest in a Green New Deal – a plan to boost the transition to a zero-carbon economy – has been cancelled by Reeves, who stressed a need for ‘fiscal discipline’. The policy has wide support among voters, particularly in key marginals in England’s North and Midlands.
A certain portion of the press – both Conservative hacks and Blairite shills – see all this as genius: if Labour steals the Tories’ story, how can Rishi Sunak attack? And in a way, though not the way they mean, they may be right.
Wealth and political power are enormously concentrated in Britain. Since 1945, Labour has only ever got into government when it’s made very clear that it doesn’t intend to challenge the ruling elite.
As we saw with Jeremy Corbyn, our oligarch-controlled media, the City and even army generals won’t allow any suggestion that the party plans to govern in line with the egalitarian desires of the overwhelming majority of voters.
In the battle of a general election, the cultural grip of the UK’s establishment is strong enough to override voters’ policy preferences. Actually doing the things voters want – taxing the rich, renationalising key services and tackling the climate crisis – would mean taking on institutions powerful enough to take you down. Or, at least, that’s what many Labour strategists have effectively concluded, even if that’s not how they would express it.
Of course, you can argue against that. Maybe establishment institutions are losing their grip. Perhaps the Tories would still lose the next election if Starmer stuck to his promise to run on the left.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the Labour leader being such an obvious liar – getting himself elected by his party on one set of promises and then immediately breaking them – will allow the Tories to successfully take him down. But more likely, it will make his first term as prime minister very difficult, and leave a festering anger that the right will exploit.
Cock-ups and corruption
Over the past few weeks, I’ve revealed a series of scandals about Labour.
Most of these stories boil down to at least one of the various C-words that shape so much of our politics: cock-up, conspiracy, co-option, coercion, collusion, corruption, capture, cooperation and class interest. Each is, in its own way, revealing.
In the first story, I showed that the Barnes and Richmond Labour Club had given the central party an illegal donation of just under £600,000. This seems to have been an example of the first C – a cock-up.
The money came from a local Labour club selling a building that had once been used as a social club for members. The club’s treasurer had given the cash to his local party through the national party in order to comply with regulations. But the national party seems to have failed to deliver it: within five minutes of going through their donor list, I could see that they’d broken the rules.
One local Labour club messing up isn’t a big deal. The fact that the central party cared so little about obeying transparency laws that one of its biggest donors in recent years inadvertently broke them, is. For all of Starmer’s emphasis on competence, the party he leads seems not to have invested enough in training its staff in the laws governing political finance.
It’s much harder to see Google as the bad guy when you’ve sung along to Elton John with its team, while tipsy on its tab
When we broke the second story, about Starmer’s freebies, and the third, about Jonathan Reynolds’ trip to Glasto with Google, there was a pretty ferocious reaction online. The word people kept coming back to was ‘corruption’. But I’m sure that, in his mind, Starmer doesn’t think there is any transaction going on; he’s not accepting gifts from the gambling industry in exchange for future laxity with gambling laws. They are just inviting him, he presumably thinks, because they enjoy the glamour of having the likely next prime minister on their arm.
And, the labour leader’s internal monologue might argue, it’s perfectly appropriate for him to hear from and experience the wares of various British industries. In any case, if a politician was selling elements of public policy, they could do a lot better than a four-course meal with fizz in a special box at the races.
A better word for what is going on is ‘co-option’.
Co-option
The social theorist Ralph Miliband – dad of Ed and David – documented how the same thing was done to the very first Labour MPs, a century ago. While some of the establishment was horrified by the arrival of these cloth-capped working-class men in the hallowed halls of the Palace of Westminster, its cleverer figures knew just what to do. They took them out for dinner at their smart London clubs. They introduced them to their wives, and to fine wines. They inducted them into the ruling class.
The consequence was that the first Labour administrations in the 1920s governed very much within the rules set by the establishment they had been socialised into, including pushing through massive public spending cuts after the Wall Street Crash, rather than devaluing the pound. What we’re seeing now is the same process of co-option in post-Corbyn Labour. Only now, it’s not so much co-option into the old ruling class – though we get a whiff of that in Starmer’s days out at the races – but into the glitz of big business: tickets to the Brit Awards, the best seats in the nation’s swankiest football stadiums, the luxury end of Glastonbury.
Part of the message these businesses are trying to convey to Labour folk will be expressed verbally, over sips of champagne or between the amuse bouche and the appetiser. But part of it comes in the setting itself: it’s much harder to see Google as the bad guy when you’ve sung along to Elton John with its team, while tipsy on its tab. It’s much easier to go soft on elites once you feel part of them, to see things from the perspective of a multi-millionaire if you’re watching the football from the premium suite than if you’re cheering from the stands with the fans.
You see a similar phenomenon with sponsored events at Labour Party conference, as revealed by my colleague Ruby recently. Often, these are luxurious affairs – I can still remember the delicious beef and truffle canapés I got from a firm pushing freeports a few years back.
Businesses with policy agendas invest time and money in buying nice things for politicians and their staff because it works – not in the simple transactional way that a word like ‘corruption’ implies. But in subtler, softer ways. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t do it.
Co-operation
Cooperation is important, too. While members of the cabinet have special advisers funded through the civil service, their shadows don’t get equivalent staffing support – and the resources aren’t distributed equally. Some members of the shadow cabinet have just one adviser, funded by the Labour Party, others have whole teams, paid for by major donors.
It’s generally those associated with the right of the Labour Party who seem able to attract the funding of the handful of hedge funders and millionaires who chip in to such things. As a result, they get the researchers and spinners who make them look more competent, allowing them to deliver more, to grow their profiles, to succeed.
In 2018, the party took £700,000 in donations. So far this year, it’s already taken £12m
Peter Kyle, for example, who has recently been appointed shadow secretary of state for science, and who is associated with the right of the party, has been given £50,000 by wealthy financiers over the past year. Jonathan Ashworth, who was shadow secretary of state for work and pensions and who is seen as being on the soft left of the party, got no such donations, and was demoted to paymaster general in the recent reshuffle.
Other recipients of large amounts of private cash include shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper – all of whom are associated with the right of the party. Shadow cabinet members who come from the ‘soft left’ don’t get anything like the same support.
There is no suggestion of impropriety here. Kyle and pals genuinely believe in policies that are good for their banker backers, while Ashworth et al are less keen. But the result is that the one on the side of the super-rich gets to have a super-sized staff team, and the political muscle which comes with it.
This phenomenon is not limited to shadow cabinet members. The Labour Party has changed its policy over the past few months, and has subsequently been richly rewarded with a surge in large donations.
Since becoming leader in 2020, Starmer’s Labour has struggled for money. Membership – and the revenue it provides – has dropped by 170,000 in the past three years, while trade union contributions have fallen by more than a million since 2018.
But the party’s latest accounts, which came out this week, show that the shortfall has now been more than bridged by large donations from rich people and companies. In 2018, the party took £700,000 in donations above the £7,500 reporting threshold (or £1,500 for local parties and the like). So far this year, it’s already taken £12m.
The policies that Labour has ditched in recent months may have been overwhelmingly popular among voters. But they weren’t, it seems, with its wealthy potential donors.
Collusion
It’s not surprising that lots of businesses want to shape Labour policy. Polls show that the party will likely form the next government, and corporations want to make sure it won’t get in the way of their plans to extract as much profit as they can.
In one of its newsletters this week, Politico quotes Alice Perry, associate director at H/Advisors Cicero and a former chair of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, as saying that demand for insider advice on how to lobby Starmer’s team has rocketed since last year. According to the website: “You can’t move in SW1 without meeting one of the new bespoke ‘Labour units’ being set up by lobbying shops or their latest ex-Labour hire.”
The revolving door goes the other way, too. As I revealed earlier this week, at least ten current staffers for shadow cabinet ministers previously worked as corporate lobbyists.
But the revolving door between lobbying agencies and the top of politics is old news. And at least a revolving door means you are either in or out at any given moment. Starmer and his colleagues, however, seem to have found a new way to blur the lines: taking on staff who are still employed as corporate lobbyists – seconded from their usual work to the Labour Party. Much of the shadow cabinet is, in other words, directly collaborating with the lobbying firms trying to sell access to them.
Commercial lobbying exists to help those with money get extra influence over governments. The inevitable corollary is that ordinary citizens will get, relatively, less say. As such, its point is to distort democratic processes, to bend them to the will of capital.
In the dying days of the last Labour government, a string of former cabinet ministers were caught offering themselves for hire as lobbyists. The ensuing scandal contributed to a sense that the party’s time in office was coming to a somewhat sordid end, and coincided with a dip in the polls. But that was after 13 years in power.
If the party is willing to so openly collude with corporate lobbyists when it ought to be fresh faced and ready for office, then voters will hear its message loud and clear: don’t expect anything to get better.
Kier Starmer will be urged to reconsider Labour’s policy on renationalising the energy sector this week by Labour’s biggest financial backer Unite the union.
Billions could be cut from average household bills if the sector was brought back into public ownership, the union has argued, putting an end to the current system which has led to “rampant profiteering” by energy companies.
Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, is to urge Keir Starmer to reconsider Labour policy on nationalising the energy sector since the party leader U-turned on previous plans to nationalise the energy, mail and water industries.
The Labour party has promised to renationalise the rail system and to create a new, publicly-owned clean energy company to push for green energy.
But average energy bills could have been cut by £1,800 last year if the sector was fully nationalised, saving bill payers £45 billion, which is the amount companies made in profit from the UK domestic energy system in 2022, the latest report by Unite has revealed.
Yet another promise shredded as Starmer maintains 100% weasel record
Starmer and a starving child
Keir Starmer has broken yet another promise – maintaining his perfect betrayal record – by abandoning his pledge to scrap the hateful and cruel Universal Credit system through which the Tories have inflicted years of misery and poverty on the UK’s lowest earning and most vulnerable.
Starmer’s Work and Pensions spokesman Jon Ashworth, challenged directly whether Starmer – who has already been mocked this week for claiming he will ‘renew’ the UK after thirteen years of Tory cuts without spending more – would honour his promise to scrap the system that has pushed huge numbers into abject poverty, responded that:
We’re going to reform universal credit … it’s a computer system. We’re not going to go back to the six different benefits that I think it brought together but we are going to reform it.
The lumping together of benefits that were previously tailored to the needs and circumstances of different types of claimant is one of the fundamentally damaging aspects of Universal Credit – and Labour had unequivocally promised to get rid of the whole system and ‘replace’ it with something fit for purpose, to show that ‘Labour is on the side of working people’, millions of whom rely on benefits to top up low pay they are forced to accept while employers fatten profits:
Starmer was asked this week by an interviewer what the point is of voting Labour when he will be no different to the Tories. If there is any difference, it’s an even lower level of trustworthiness. A Starmer promise is not fit to wipe your backside with.
