"Have You Tried Killing The Poor?"
Corruption, incompetence and lies in the Labour Party
Median voter theorem posits the idea that in a two party system, the party perceived to be on the left should move slightly to the right to win more votes, and vice versa. Some of Britain’s more astute politicians have historically used this to their advantage: Tony Blair identified as a centrist and was reticent to raise taxes, appeasing to the right of “Old Labour”; Rory Stewart often intentionally conflates conservatism with conservationism to appeal to a wider audience; and David Cameron supported many policies as Prime Minister that were hitherto unpopular with his party, such as adopting the green agenda and legalising gay marriage.
Unfortunately, when politicians flip flop around chasing the perceived national zeitgeist, they cease to stand for anything at all. The two main parties become almost indistinguishable, as they switch colours like chameleons to try and appease whoever they’re talking to at any given moment.
Killing pensioners for cash
In 2017, whilst Starmer was serving in Labour’s shadow cabinet, the party conducted a report on the winter fuel allowance to see how it could be reformed. The report concluded that means-testing the system could result in the deaths of 4,000 pensioners. At the time, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said that proposals to reform the system were “The single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation.”
In 2022, Starmer tweeted the following:
“Looking ahead to winter is frightening.
I’ve met pensioners who have no idea how they’ll heat their homes.
Parents who will have to skip meals so their kids can eat.
The Tories are too busy fighting each other to notice.
Labour has a plan that meets the scale of this crisis.”
Now, he has decided that he won’t means-test the winter fuel allowance — he will just remove it completely. It seems that his grand plan wasn’t to reduce costs for pensioners, but to just kill them off instead. The elderly tend to vote Conservative anyway. When asked at PMQs to justify this and to release their most recent research on how many would people would be expected to die, he deflected and carried on banging on about the £20bn black hole.
Throughout the lockdowns, Comrade Starmer pushed for harsher and stricter restrictions. He wanted to lock down earlier, harder, mandate mask wearing, and close schools for longer. Championing himself as a protector, he was complicit in destroying enterprise around the country by being too weak to provide appropriate opposition.
Now, it seems that the Labour Party has magicked up another new policy that wasn’t in their manifesto: killing the elderly and disabled.
According to The Mail on Sunday, the PM intends to fast track a bill on assisted dying through Parliament, in order to have a vote passed before Christmas. This is an insane idea, not least of which because there’s no mention of this in their manifesto, and hitherto very little discussion or public demand for euthanasia. One would have thought that such legislation, which would be some of the most significant since the 1960s (Wilson’s reform of laws on the death penalty, abortion and homosexuality), would have had a little more debate, and wouldn’t be rushed through.
Although I find it objectionable, I understand why people are in favour of euthanasia. Nevertheless, the timing of this appears politically deaf. How stupid can their special advisors be to think that, given the public mood, these are good policies to bring up out of the blue?
Gifts-which-are-not-bribes
In 2021, writing for The i, Starmer said:
“We’d toughen the rules so MPs can’t profit from their office and open the door to vested interests.”
This sounded fantastic. In the full article, he was right to point out the degree of sleaze and corruption in the last government. Unfortunately, perhaps Starmer isn’t the one who ought to be parading the moral torch. Only a few months later, he was himself investigated, and found not to have registered all declarations appropriately and in sufficient time. He was also pictured eating curry at a party during lockdown in Durham, accusing the Conservatives of the same thing he was guilty of.
Since December 2019, Starmer has accepted more than twice as much as in gifts-which-are-not-bribes than any other politician.
Much of this attention has been his insistence that he cannot sit amongst the hoi polloi in the stands at football matches, and thus requires an executive box.
On September 16th, the Prime Minister said:
“I can’t go into the stands because of security reasons. Therefore if I don’t accept a gift of hospitality I can’t go to a game … Never going to a game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far.”
Only three days later, with the open solicitation for donation loud and clear, the Prime Minister was gifted an executive box by Arsenal.
But surely there’s nothing wrong with this? Surely, that just because he’s taking liberties doesn’t mean that there’s any overt corruption happening? One would hope so, but it has transpired that there may well be some strings attached to some of Starmer’s gifts-which-are-not-bribes.
According to the Daily Mail, Labour donor Lord Alli has already donated over £1.3m to Labour MPs. As well as ~£18k in suits for the Prime Minister1, he has also gifted him £2,485 to buy glasses, amongst a plethora of other paraphernalia. In exchange for these gifts-which-are-not-bribes, Alli was given a Downing Street security pass.
Shadow Paymaster General, John Glen, wrote a public letter to the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, in which he said:
“A Downing Street pass should be a privilege for those who require access to work, including civil servants and special advisers, not those requiring occasional access as is possible through the Visitor Notification System, without requiring a permanent pass.
“It is therefore deeply concerning that a pass was granted to a Labour donor providing unfettered access to the heart of government after significant cash and non-cash donations were made to the Labour Party.”
Who is Lord Alli?
Lord Alli is a media magnate who has accumulated a vast fortune through various business endeavours, and has since directed much of it towards helping the Labour Party over the last few decades.
Tony Blair ennobled Lord Alli aged just 34, making him not only the youngest politician (at the time) in the House of Lords, but also the first to be openly gay. Throughout his career, the main issue that he has campaigned for has been gay rights. He is a patron of the Albert Kennedy Trust, Oxford Pride, and The Elton John AIDS Foundation.
During the Blair years, Alli was largely used in order to help the Labour Party engage more effectively through the media (particularly the youth), given that that’s where he made his fortune.
So why is he so closely linked to Keir Starmer? His donations to the current PM have been significant and raise a series of concerns about political integrity, the first being that Starmer has spent a significant amount of time at Alli’s home rather than his own.
At first, the PM tried to explain that Alli’s penthouse was used for campaign meetings, and that he took his son there so that he could study more effectively for his GCSEs. It has since transpired that Starmer also spent significant time at the flat during lockdown, and that the story about his son’s GCSEs was just nonsense: Guido Fawkes revealed that the dates don’t add up.
Isabel Oakeshott has now prompted further speculation that the reason Starmer has been living at his donor’s £18m flat in Covent Garden is because of a strained relationship with his family.
Assuming that the Prime Minister did have a difficult familial life and had to move outside the home for a short while, why stay with the gay man who continues to buy clothes for you and your wife (including lingerie)? Why send your teenage son to this man’s penthouse at all? Perhaps the clues have been staring us in the face: Johnson and Sunak have both spent years mocking Starmer for not knowing what a woman is.
There are potentially huge conflicts of interest here, particularly given that Alli doesn’t appear to be a benign force. Alli has met several times with Assad in an unspecified capacity over the last few years, and has cultivated a peculiar relationship with our Prime Minister. The story has developed from one of sleaze and corruption in the Labour Party, to one of national security.
Comrade Lammy to the rescue
With national debt ballooning, wars breaking out all over the world, and Western hegemony being challenged, one would hope that we can look to other Labour front benchers for coherent and clear thinking.
Surely, our new Foreign Secretary will be someone who has been carefully selected? Surely this is someone who has a reasonable grasp of Britain and her place in the world? Surely this is someone that recognises the security threats that we are currently undergoing?
Our Foreign Secretary has been on a bit of a media round recently, including a diplomatic meeting with Donald Trump, who he’s previously called “a racist nazi”. If anyone was uncertain about how serious the Labour Party is, let Comrade Lammy put your doubts to rest. He may have a busy schedule managing the war effort in Ukraine, tempering tensions in the Middle East and keeping an eye on Taiwan, but he has managed to find the time to share his thoughts on a few choice subjects. Here are just three of the things he weighed in on recently:
“It’s probably the case that trans women don’t have ovaries. But a cervix, I understand, is something that you can have following various procedures and hormone treatment, and all the rest of it.”
Sparked a diplomatic controversy by supporting Azerbaijan’s invasion of the Nagorno-Karabakh. He described the aforementioned ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians as a “Liberation”, causing the Armenian leadership to question if official British policy had changed.
I suspect one of the main problems the Labour front bench has is that the ministers are just a bit stupid, and completely out of their depths.
A lack of leaders-in-waiting
Labour has a nasty habit of not replacing leaders that are useless. Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Gordon Brown were all facing crises of popularity amongst the public, but continued to captain the party until defeat at election. Nevertheless, given that Corrupt Keir has only been in power for a few months, and already Liz Truss’ term invokes the rosy hue of nostaglia, it seems unlikely that our current PM will last a full five years — it seems impossible that he’ll last the ten years that he claims he “needs” in order to fix the NHS. So, given the zeitgeist, who could replace him?
Comrade Rayner is an obvious choice, since she’s the deputy PM. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t even know how to use the memory button on a calculator, so definitely shouldn’t be running the country. Rayner has accepted over £50k from Alli.
Comrade Miliband could feasibly come to captain the party again in the future. But there are also concerns that he might be bested by a bacon sandwich. The Secretary of State for Climate has accepted hundreds of thousands from green lobbies and green philanthropist billionaires.
Comrade Philipson, the Education Secretary, accepted £14k from Alli to pay for her 40th birthday party, and her policies are ridiculous.
Comrade Streeting allegedly once burned down a pet shop. Like the rest of the Cabinet, he looks terrified in interviews — and like most of the cabinet, he stonewalls. The Health Secretary has accepted over £170k in donations/bribes from private healthcare companies.
Streeting: “I’m really proud of people who want to contribute not just their time and volunteering, but their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit, just like giving to charity.”
[…]
Interviewer: “Is going to a Taylor Swift concert a noble cause?”
Streeting: “I’m sure Keir will shake it off. But let me say, Nick, I’m absolutely delighted in the BBC’s newfound conviction that no one should be paid more than the Prime Minister, that they shouldn’t give or receive hospitality, and we’ll judge the performance on the social media mentions.”
Comrade Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is another flip flopper, who last year charged the taxpayer £2,711 for Christmas cards. Like Comrades Starmer and Rayner, she also accepted tens of thousands of pounds in clothing as donations, and disclosed these as “office supplies.”
Parasites
The Labour Party itself it has a remarkable reputation for corruption whilst in office. The Cash for Honours scandal in 2006, which was largely brought about after complaints made by Scottish Nationalist Party MP, Angus MacNeil, resulted in every member of the Labour Cabinet, including Blair, being interrogated by the police. Four donors who gave a £5m loan to the Labour Party were nominated by Blair for peerages.
Nevertheless, one could examine the issue from the more general perspective of corruption and bribery in public life. After all, the Conservative Party was also involved in dodgy dealings.
David Cameron abused his position to lobby for Greensill Capital and Matt Hancock gave government contracts to his pub landlord. There was the Partygate scandal, Owen Paterson’s lobbying scandal, Nadhim Zahawi’s tax scandal, Dominic Cummings, Boris and Jennifer Arcuri’s relationship, Matt Hancock’s Whatsapp messages, Chris Pincher’s pinching… the list is endless.
In fact, one could even argue that the sleaze in public life goes as high as His Majesty himself, who seems somewhat more adept at avoiding scrutiny. Only last year, The Crown was being investigated over its own cash-for-honours scandal, after it was alleged that Saudi billionaire Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz bribed “fixers” of His Majesty in exchange for knighthood and UK citizenship. He did receive his knighthood and citizenship, and is now Lord Abernethy. The investigation was dropped, prompting the following response from former Liberal Democrat minister, Norman Baker:
“This is an incredibly open and shut case with the evidence provided in writing. It is astonishing how this matter is not being taken forward. We need an explanation from the Crown Prosecution Service and the Met police as to why no action is being taken. But the suspicion must be that no action is being taken because of the nature of the potential offender, rather than a proper assessment of the potential crime.”
These allegations against the King followed further allegations of corruption in the preceding years, when he accepted £3m in a suitcase from the former Prime Minister of Qatar.
I suppose some animals are more equal than others. On the bright side: Comrades Starmer, Reeves and Rayner have all vowed that they won’t accept any more clothing as gifts-which-are-not-bribes.
Update: Starmer admits he lied about this, and the real figure is much higher: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13900331/Sir-Keir-Starmer-16-000-clothes-given-Labour-peer-Lord-Alli-row-Prime-Ministers-freebies-deepens.html
Comrade Starmer, Two Tier Kier, Free Gear Kier. So many nicknames. But which is the best?