Labour front bench donor scandal rolls on
Keir Starmer’s and Labour’s limp excuse for popularity continues to unravel with the scandal of Labour front-benchers accepting huge donations for clothes and hospitality. Starmer and his wife accepted tens of thousands of pounds in designer clothes from a hugely wealthy donor and, after initial attempts by his stooges to explain away the donor-funded splurges as just part of the job or even to claim they did it to avoid the taxpayer having to fund it, has said he has ‘reconsidered’ and won’t do it again.
Hot on the heels of that debacle, Chancellor Rachel Reeves was found out accepting £7,500 in donations for clothing – but registering it only as office “support” and deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was also exposed cashing in and accepting clothes worth more than £3,500, then declaring them as a “donation in kind for undertaking parliamentary duties”.
Now Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, as wedded to red-Tory austerity and exploitation of the working class as any on Starmer’s front bench, has been put on the spot about £14,000 that she accepted from the same minted peer who provided luxuries for Starmer, Reeves et all – this time for two birthday parties.
And her strongest rebuttal, when challenged about the birthday bashes this morning, was that she ‘didn’t even invite my own family’ and didn’t have cake:
Instead, Phillipson claimed that the birthday bashes were ‘very much professional’, while excusing Labour MPs accepting these massive donations – while planning austerity for millions – is that Lord Alli is a Labour supporter, even in the case of campaign donations for the candidacy of the son of Starmer’s chief of staff and the Downing Street pass Alli received from Starmer.
Meanwhile, millions in this country are living in poverty, 1.5 million children are in poverty and going hungry and ten million pensioners are facing the prospect of freezing this winter after Reeves’s Winter Fuel Allowance cut, with Labour expecting at least four thousand to freeze to death, decisions she described as the best period of her political career.
Austerity under the blue-version Tories is linked to at least 300,000 unnecessary deaths and the red-version Tories’ are trying to hide the true figure while concocting their own version of ‘social murder‘.
Reeves and Rayner clearly belong to the ‘let them eat Prada’ school of government. Phillipson appears to adhere to the rival ‘I didn’t eat cake so it’s all ok’ philosophy. Either way, this is a scandal entirely befitting the out of touch and ever-less-popular Keir Starmer and his red-Tory government.
An earlier version of this article said that the cost of the parties was £40k. This has been corrected to £14k.
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WTF is Alli after with all these bungs? Seems nice one is asking this
Forty Thousand Pounds, eh?
That’s loose change on the pavement compared to Boris Johnson’s latest demands:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-time-to-let-ukraine-join-nato/
“We need to show that we are serious, first by giving the Ukrainians the right to use the weapons they already possess. It is mad (and cruel) to insist that they try to protect themselves against bombardment with one hand tied behind their backs. Second, we need to produce a package of loans on the scale of Lend-Lease: half a trillion dollars, as suggested by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, or even a trillion.”
Having de-industrialised as a result of activist shareholders and private equity/hedge funds forcing companies to borrow money – best spent on long term profitable expansion and R&D – to buy their own stock and drive the stock price up for short term gains for a few carpetbaggers, leaving the company and the Country emaciated, we appear to be moving up a few gears by using the same method to put the Country and its people in hock to fund an unwinnable war our oligarchy started to upwards of a £1 trillion.
Now, that really is a black hole.
Remember, the existing outstanding loans to 404 due in August never got paid.
Given that 404’s ‘ambassador, Zaluzhnyi, was at a fringe meeting today with Lammy at the LP Conference, the question arises as to whether Free Gear Keir will run with Johnson’s idea of having the Executive acting as a hedge fund by forcing the Country to borrow silly amounts of printed money using the UK and its people as collateral?
‘I’m sorry sir/ma’am, you thought you’d paid off your mortgage and owned your own house? Not any more. We used it as collateral, along with the rest of the Country’s real estate, land, mineral deposits, and people, to give to a coke addict who plays the piano with his todger in order to try and take over the world. Move along now, please, you’ve just been sold into debt peonage to a fat plutocrat in Houston.”
And they claim Idiocracy is film fiction rather than a documentary.
philipson making a lot of noise about journalists being present at these shindigs.
🤔
But obviously they’d been invited.
Were the “parties” the sort of celebrations, the reasonably well heeled have for weddings? OK I know you CAN spend more on a wedding, and I admit I have been married over half a century, when £400 seemed quite a lot. But 20K for a birthday party? Can someone please explain if this can still be called the party of the workers, or of the obscenely rich?
Interesting that soon after Alli funded 10K of election expenses for Sur Gray’s son, Sue Gray is the one alleged to have given him a Downing Street pass. Well, well, well …..
Every time someone digs a little deeper more sh** comes to the surface… There’s more than from a Thames Water sewer in a the wettest spring of the century.
‘Do Labour Cabinet members have pockets?
You know the type you stick your own hand in.
To pay for things from their £140,000?
Bet the 19% wish they’d never let them in.’
See Lab Deputy continues to crush the diverse working class for her own lightweight irrelevant career (another Doctor Do As Little as possible to upset the rich and powerful) with her Grotesque “Fairer Right to Buy.”
RTB has massively reduced the council hosing stock as many desperate families and single people fight for decent council homes & we have diverse working class families on long council waiting lists, & some are stuck high up in multi-storey flats, and over the years a number of diverse working class kids, deprived of gardens to play in, have fallen out of windows to their deaths – they shouldn’t have beern there you comfortable Right Wing Tory & Right awing Lab B’stards!
Of course Thatcher’s lied that every council home sold under RTB would be replaced but they wouldn’t let Councils keep the proceeds to build anew & many of the now privately owned homes were then sold to private landlords who rent them off at triple the rent!
RTB helped cause the desperate housing crisis.
And of course current council tenants are still paying as part of their rent for the building of the sold off council homes in the first place!
So it’s ok to buy if you are in the right area, in the right council house, in the right time, with the right income but this continues to fuel the housing crisis whilst reducing the stock & increasing the already desperate situation for very desperate diverse working class families.
I remember in the 1970’s when my council built thousands of council homes each year before the Neo-Liberal Fruitcake Tories followed their cult of a small state (which made us all more vulnerable during Covid) and re housing they saw private renting as a solution (with high rents) which restricts many people from saving to buy.
And with imagination we should as well as building hundred of thousands of new council homes, have the public ownership to socially rent of empty homes (already on site & can be refurbished & retrofitted) and ‘Social Mortgages (you buy 50% & get the rest on a 200 year lease – like homes in conservation areas), self build projects (are voluntary groups doing this), housing co-ops, plus other aid to help people to buy houses on the market then we could solve the housing crisis but sadly Lab seem out of their depth?
And with the example I mentioned and with the Tory Neo-Liberals preventing the state intervention of a Decent Homes Standard Law, Neo-Liberalism can literally kill?
Scrap RTB!
Meanwhile, back in the real world, away from birthday parties which cost £20,000 a throw, whilst the LP Conference contemplates its own naval and hosts the ambassador of a neo-nazi Junta austerity continues apace. Not least in the NHS.
Rather than the sleight of hand rearrangement of the deckchairs of the Titanic approach of Silly Boy Streeting and Know Nothing Nandy, among other such children, designed to hide selling the NHS to Privateers and other such Pirates there are actually grown up’s presenting more realistic alternatives:
Cue NHS manager Roy Lilley:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/23/who-why-what-when-and-where-for-the-nhs/
“Is there an effective way of looking at the NHS’ predicament and coming up with a simple fix?
Yes… it’s called the Aristotle school of management!
He laid the foundations for ‘structure, inquiry and argument’ by asking key-questions. Later Thomas Aquinas divided questions into categories and they have evolved into the 5 W’s.
Who, why, what, when and where. For the NHS it means…
Who is sick
Why are they sick
What can we do to fix them up
When can we do it
Where can we do it
It’s all we need.
WHO, older people and children are the heavy users of the NHS… 60% of all of us, pitch up with lifestyle related problems. About half of cancers are discovered in A&E.
WHY, because older people are unable to take care of themselves and there aren’t enough people to help them. Some families struggle to bring-up their kids without support. The rest of us eat, drink and do all the wrong things and don’t do the right things and we don’t scan enough people, early enough.
WHAT, to do? Invest in social care, reintroduce Sure Start. Take-on the people making junk-food by taxing the junk and not taxing the rest. Focus on early diagnostics.
WHEN can we do it? Whenever we want to. Now would be good.
WHERE, we have thousands of GP premises, 1,257 hospitals of various sorts, 500 community hospitals and 6322 Neighbourhood Health Centres. We just need to maintain and repair what we’ve got, make sure they have modern kit and in particular, look after the people working in them to make it all productive.”
“Can Roy be accused of being simplistic? Of course, he can: an international consultant would charge many millions to come up with these ideas.
Can he also be accused of being effective? I think so: what he says is likely to work.
And can he be accused of clear thinking? Most definitely. That is something Silly Boy will never achieve.
As a result, the NHS will be subject to a great deal of unnecessary reform.”
– Richard Murphy.