Starmer deleted promise to ban MPs’ second jobs from conference speech

Seems moneybags MPs aren’t content with huge freebies and junkets

Keir Starmer’s speech today was almost free of substance – apart from his ‘saving kids is so 2019’ put-down of a delegate who interrupted his droning to call for Starmer’s government to do something to help the children of Gaza being murdered daily in Israel’s genocide.

But it turns out it might have had one significant announcement that never made the airwaves – a ban on second jobs for MPs, many of whom have always happily raked in the cash for directorships and other cushy numbers, to the loss of their constituents who need proper and full-time representation.

But it didn’t – perhaps because he has had to promise to limit the amount of cash and gifts he, his wife and his cronies take from hugely-rich donors – as right-wing journalist Christopher Hope found out when someone slipped him Starmer’s speech notes, which show that the line on the ban had been deleted:

The rest of Starmer’s speech, predictably, was vapour, jingoism and hot air about ‘politics as service’ – a joke when it comes from such a brittle and authoritarian politician – along with a wave at a few items designed to grab headlines but that will probably never happen in any meaningful form, just as the so-called ‘Great British Energy’ is a scam, badged with a 57p logo, to enrich corporations.

A ban on MPs’ second jobs might just have been worth the huff it took to speak it, but presumably that was a bit too much actual change for the grasping Labour right – particularly as Starmer is not entirely unacquainted with well-paid second jobs, having been made to turn one down by his then-boss Jeremy Corbyn.

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