Market value of rent for London ‘£18m penthouse’ seems to be around five times the estimate used in donation declaration
Keir Starmer has been under fire for accepting – among a number of high-value gifts from multi-millionaire peer Lord Alli – more than six weeks’ free stay at Alli’s £18m penthouse in London. The revelation of the freebie came after voters were already angered by Starmer and his wife accepting tens of thousands of pounds worth of personal shopper-selected designer clothes, and Starmer accepting designer eyeglasses, while his government imposed poverty and hardship on pensioners and children, to fill a supposed ‘black hole’ in the national budget, that Labour knows will kill at least 4,000 pensioners each winter. Other senior Cabinet members, including Chancellor Rachel ‘Freeze’ Reeves, accepted similar gifts, some of which were disguised as ‘office support’. Alli was controversially provided with a pass providing free access to Downing Street.
Starmer has claimed that he accepted the penthouse to provide a peaceful environment for his son while he was doing his GCSEs – but the stay lasted almost a month after the end of the exam period. Starmer declared the value of the free stay at just over £20,000, a daily rate of £444.
But the market-value daily rental for a similar penthouse in London appears far higher than £444. Alli’s flat is described as having an area of 5,000sqft, with three suites,
each adorned with its own terrace.
A search on prestige property rental sites shows a cost of £2,500-£3,000 for remotely comparable penthouses – perhaps far more for those equipped and decorated like Alli’s, with ‘three suites and accompanying terraces. Even far less luxurious London apartments on holiday rental sites can easily cost £1,500 a day, perhaps a little less for special late deals .
But apartments in the same area as Alli’s are renting for more than £86,000 a month, as Steve Powers pointed out on ‘X’:
Below are images said to show parts of the actual property:
At market rates, the value of Alli’s gift of 46 days in his penthouse appears to be more like £100,000 than the £20,000 Starmer estimated for his declaration of interests. None of the ‘mainstream’ media appear to have investigated or even mentioned this issue.
Keir Starmer has been contacted for comment.
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Spare a thought for the many many under nourished children, and the sleep deprived without beds to sleep in in some cases, trying to study for their GSCE’s eh Starmer?
From his leadership campaign, indeed even before then, I have never had any hopes of Starmer but good grief he continues to sink below even my very very low expectations.
Sometimes one gets an awful feeling for being right. Neighbours, family, friends, just people I spoke to voted Labour. Not one of them gave me a policy based argument. Time for a change, 10 vows etc. I stopped trying to warn them and already old timers are saying, “I’ve voted for them all my life but I’ll never vote for Labour again. Headroom’s campaign to smash the working class has already begun. Even I thought it would take a while longer to embed itself but to quote Robin Cook, they’ll “hit the ground running”.
ROSIE DUFFIELD – Canterbury: has RESIGNED from freebie scrounging SIR STARMER (Keith)’s outfit.
Starmer in top 1% re earnings in the country has grasped MORE freebies than ALL other PM’s combined, for an equal duration of time.
Scrounging EVEN more freebies than the Blair creature.
At the same time, Starmer withdraws WHIP from those who opposed keeping Two Child Cap which imposes poverty on innocent children.
While grabbing THOUSANDS of £££ in handouts from millionaires, STARMER sir despises those against withdrawing Winter Heating Assistance for MILLIONS of pensioners who miss out on help because of a ONE POUND over the cut off. 🪰⚠️🪱🪰⚠️🪱🪰⚠️🪱
Duffield is SCATHING in her resignation letter; citing “NEPOTISM” amongst other deplorable traits of the Establishment tool’s regime.
Surely this must be a RECORD re SWIFTEST resignation from a new government in several decades.
She says “there are others in the…” PARASITISED “party” who feel the same way.
We appear to be missing the usual below the line URL link which invites us to listen to Herr Starmer pontificating on the issue.
Has there been an unreported record-breaking hurricane tearing through the Gulf of Mexico?
A sudden increase in global warming which has resulted in putting Caribbean islands underwater, perchance?
Or, mayhap, a Russian submarine has cut the undersea cables crossing the Atlantic?
Perhaps a mysterious plague of muteness is afflicting the region?
It surely cannot be that the penny has actually dropped?
To be fair, a kid shacked up in such a pad is more of a house-sitter than a full-on tenant so I don’t think the discrepancy holds up
What are you suggesting? That keef did alli the favour here?
“TIMW- “…shacked up in such a pad is more of a house-sitter than a full-on tenant so…”
Do you think the kid’s father charged the landlord at least the national minimum wage for his boy’s services?
No. Me, neither. That’s not how corrupt politicians work
According to Guido Fawkes, the dates don’t match.
First GCSE was 9th May 2024 and was finished 19th June 2024.
Flat stay was registered as 29th May 2024 to 13th July 2024.
I don’t know about you, but I’m smelling something. It’s a flowery scent for sure.
And then there’s that kiss between him and his wife…
It appears keef accepted ANOTJER £16k off alli for more clobber…money that was originally declared as ‘Private LOTO office’ (whatever that entails).
So my message to labour members and affiliated unions is to save your dough – because its obvious alli can pay for the bleedin’ lot.
From KernowDamo:
3 MASSIVE Labour Policies Tied to £4m Tax Haven Donation!
So that’s £32k for clothes alone – nevermind glasses. And that’s what we know up to now.
And there’ll be more, as I said in a previous post on another thread. Although not necessarily from alli.
How much child benefit would that pay for? It’s about 35 kids – a classroom full – for a year, isn’t it?
OR it’s 106 pensioners staying warm this winter. …And change.
And the worst part is, you can rig keef out in whatever you like, he’ll always look like the dolourous drip he always has.
As the video from KernowDamo, above, implies, all this buckshee clothing, designer glasses, birthday party, free accommodation etc is small change.
It’s a dead cat slammed on the table distraction from the real big money scandal of donations from hedge funds and private equity firms buying policy which is going to bake in more and more austerity and larger debt for the 99%.
These people are predator feudal era rentiers. They don’t do paying tax. Nor do they do productive capitalism as envisaged by those such as Adam Smith in a previous era.
They used borrowed money, usually that of productive companies and governments (ie public money) on lower interest rates, to buy the companies own stock and push up the price of that stock AND other existing assets – such as real estate and anything you can charge a rent on – to make a short term gain.
Companies and then carved up and sold off piecemeal to obtain this gain, Increasing unemployment, decreasing the social wage (wages, pensions, tax etc) and reducing the amount of money and resources that circulate in the real – productive – economy.
And when the bet goes wrong (as it did in 2007/09) becuase of the greedy junk lending practices and insider dealing and the debt cannot be paid they use Governments and Central Banks to enforce payment in full which produces further debt deflation on the real economy which goes further into debt as a result.
The collateral of public assets are then privatised to these one per center’s operating these parasitic entities which results in an inability of the economy to grow in the classical sense of capitalist production whilst those now owning the privatised former public commons set up rentier toll booths. Which increases prices of doing business at all levels.
All whilst paying no tax. The burden of which falls on a reduced and reducing real productive economy, workers wage levels, pensions and ordinary tax payers.
———————————–
Sidebar: Ask the people of Ireland, Latvia, Greece, and now Germany and other EU countries. Not to mention Ukraine. Check out the population losses from the lost opportunities and debt produced austerity and debt deflation from policies which forbid Countries from the EU Central Bank policies of not allowing a sovereign State the Sovereignty of producing its own money for the public good – which is what is happening in China and increasingly in Russia – but which forces them to borrow at punitive and unpayable interest rates from these parasites.
And, for good measure, check out the contemporary immigration figures of people from the neo-liberal prison that the Collective Worst had become who are fleeing to Russia to escape this hell hole of a system. Which has now all but exhausted its neocolonial exploitation of the Global South and is now engaged in rapidly consuming the economies of the host nations of the West.
——————————————-
Resulting in further austerity paid for by a shrinking pool of money and resources, which stifles the real growth of economies. Which can never ever hope to pay off the debt levels based on compound interest because, as any third year secondary school arithmetic class will tell you, compound interest increases exponentially whilst productive capacity only grows logarithmically.
Go figure.
And that is what these parasites are buying with their ‘donations’. Control of policy. Tax policy. Regulatory policy. Economic policy. Social policy. Health policy etc. etc.
All designed to increase opportunities to set up toll booths on everything. Dragging more and more out of the real economy until not just whole countries collapse but the entire host civilisation. Exactly the same process which collapsed Rome and Athens.
That’s why they need to conquer the Eurasian Heartland – Russia and China. Because without those resources, the whole giant Ponzi scheme WILL collapse.
Like the previous ‘first eleven’ this is a captured Government. A Government of the 1%, for the 1%. £20K here, and £100k there is chickenfeed. A dead cat slammed on the table to distract attention from the real money for policy favours taking place. Your vote is worthless because the policy has already been bought by those with more money and power than any so-called Sovereign Government outside of Russia and China.
……and right on cue, here’s Richard Murphy providing a prime example;
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/28/where-do-neoliberal-economists-think-money-comes-from/
“I heard an interview with Rupert Harrison on the World at One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday which really made my heart sink.
For those who are not aware of who Rupert Harrison is, he acted as senior advisor to George Osborne from 2006 to 2015, having various job titles, including in the Treasury for five years as a consequence, and he also stood for the Tories in the last election, but thankfully did not make it to the House of Commons. He does, however, seems to think himself well versed in economics ideas when, in fact, he is completely unaware of the nonsense he is talking.
How do I know this? That is because his suggestion was that if Rachel Reeves were to change the UK’s fiscal rules so that she might borrow another £10 billion or so a year this would be disastrous.
His explanation for this claim was that if the funding in question were, for example, to be invested in infrastructure, such as a bridge, then if a crisis of the sought that we had in 2020, when Covid hit, were to happen the the bridge in question could not be turned into liquid assets and as a consequence, the country would not have the funds available to it to pay for that new crisis. Investment should not, therefore take place.”
Murphy asks the obvious question……….
“What… do people like this think happened in 2020, or in 2009, come to that? Where do they think that the money to deal with the Covid crisis and 2008 financial crises come from, and why do they think that it might be impossible to repeat that process now if, as would be the case once again, the private banking system would be quite unable to meet the demand for money within the economy if such crises occurred again?
Does he really think that the government did not create new money out of thin air on both occasions? And how did he not know that it did so after five years at the Treasury from 2010 to 2015?”
…..but does not seem to join the dots.
The dots being that people like Harrison and the 1% he represents really, really, really do not want democratic control of money. They do not want (nominally) representative Government on behalf of the citizenry (the 99%) to own or have anything. You will own nothing and be happy – or else.
Because anything in the public sector means that it is not owned by the rentier pirate class 1% to be able to increase its asset value for that class and charge rent on it.
Such people are so sociopathic and egotistical they would rather see the collapse of civilisation and the annihilation of 99.9% of humanity and 100% of other living organisms than not control and own everything for themselves.
For those like Harrison, infinity is too restrictive. The only way for civilised society and the 99% to protect themselves and survive, is to exterminate the parasites before it is too late.
An important article about why UK arms companies are so successful in getting the government to follow their agenda:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/report-uk-pms-hold-more-meetings-bae-systems-any-other-company