Shadow Chancellor’s register of interests reveals large donations from multi-millionaires, bankers and CEO/investor ‘forum’
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves accepted a £1,250 ‘handbag and contents’ for giving a talk to an investors’ ‘forum’ run by a multimillionaire, her ‘register of interests’ reveals. As Private Eye has pointed out, the value of the bag is worth around four months’ worth of the money a family hit by the Tories two-child benefit cap loses as a result – an annual sum of around £3,235 every year.
Reeves and Keir ‘Sir Kid Starver‘ have said they will not end the Tory cap, even though doing so would instantly lift 250,000 children out of poverty and massively improve the situation of at least 850,000 others – and would actually save the UK almost £40 bilion. It is just one of the Tory measures the red Tory pair has said they will keep, including such injustices as the so-called ‘bedroom tax’.
Reeves has also said that she is ‘not convinced of the case’ for a windfall tax on bankers. Her register of interests reveals that she has accepted huge sums from former Lloyds TSB Bank chair Victor Blank (£75,000), billionaire former Lib Dem donor David Sainsbury (£84,500) and Israel lobbyist Gary Lubner (£55,000), whose fortune is said to be in the hundreds of millions of pounds, gambling boss Neil Goulden (£10,000) and media (and literal) baron Clive Hollick (£10,000).
And for good measure, while Reeves was saying how the poor will remain poor under Labour with her as Shadow Chancellor and ‘Starver’ as boss but there’s no case for a tax on bankers’ vast profits, she was accepting free tickets and hospitality for herself and two friends at the Wimbledon Tennis Championship and partying with union-busting press baron Rupert Murdoch.
The handbag was less a handbag and more the tip of an iceberg.
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