Main Edition
US
FR
Sir Keir should stop freeloading. Leon Neal/Getty Images
Keir Starmer’s premiership is well and truly goosed. One policy misstep after another, punctuated by tone-deaf doom-mongering and a freebies scandal that refuses to go away, have exposed Labour as a thoroughly undercooked governmental prospect. Some wrongly chalk this up to the fact the general election was called a little sooner than expected, but rarely has a Labour leader inherited political circumstances so favourable and yet still managed to cock things up so completely.
Rearranging his team may provide Sir Keir with a comforting sense that a corner is being turned, but the fact that he has been forced into a reset just 100 days into his premiership tells us much about his own poor judgement. Nothing encapsulates this core political defect more than Starmer’s mishandling of the donors issue. The smug and dismissive attitude with which he and his Cabinet attempted to downplay and dismiss the accusations as they began making headlines ahead of the Labour Party conference a fortnight ago was truly a sight to behold. The brazen attempt to recast their freeloading as somehow virtuous, and the growing anger as misplaced tittle-tattle, offered clear signs that power had already begun its corruptive process. And the story of politics being awash with private wealth won’t go away no matter how much Morgan McSweeney wants it to, because this is the story of politics in Britain — and it has been for decades.
The idea that moguls and big business expect nothing in return for their “kindness” is an insult to the intelligence of any reasonable person. Aristotle warned us about this long ago. The ancient practice of corrupting political hearts with flattering gifts is nothing new, and it is effective precisely because it feels harmless to those being lavished with special attention for the first time. But if donors aren’t in it for a political favour somewhere down the line, then why are nurses, GPs, teachers, police and firefighters — arguably far worthier of such generosity — not permanently inundated with gifts? Surely terminally ill children or destitute single mothers fleeing domestic abuse could do with a night out at a Taylor Swift gig. What is it about people in power which so effortlessly elicits the boundless generosity of the wealthy — if not some form of self-interest?
The tedious line they have attempted to spin over the course of the scandal — that this conduct falls “within the rules” — is another major insult. There was a time when claiming back the cost of a duck-moat was well within the rules for an MP. Sir Fred Goodwin acted within the rules of the financial sector when he crashed the UK economy from the comfort of his personal scallop kitchen at RBS headquarters in 2008. Indeed, one of the most infuriating aspects of the past 14 years of Tory government has been that almost every moral and ethical crime collectively committed — whether dishing out billions to their pals in contracts, crashing the economy with tax cuts, or immiserating tens of thousands of sick, vulnerable and disabled people through callous welfare reforms — fell well within the rules.
Most politicians don’t just wake up one day and decide to use public office to enrich themselves; entitlement develops incrementally and begins with the seductive idea that you’re a little bit special. One day it’s Taylor Swift concert tickets, the next you’re telling porkies to the Queen. Accepting gifts is not immoral in and of itself, but this is how the culture of corruption (which Sir Keir Starmer claims he sought power to rip out of public life) slowly seduces those of low character. The issue for most people is not whether the behaviour of politicians falls within the rules but that the political class is governed by one set of rules while everyone else is governed by another.
Funnily enough, most other public servants are forbidden from accepting gifts or donations because it is well understood that doing so leaves the system open to abuse. Yet somehow, politicians are ostensibly free to party like it’s 2099 provided they fill out a little form declaring what infuriating hypocrites they are.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeCome come Mr Ali is a selfless individual just making the life of our hardworking politicians that little bit more pleasant. A public benefactor indeed to our poorly paid toilers in the political space deserving of so much more.
If we want our politicians to labour on our behalf we should in fact mandate the provision of limitless suits, dresses and sundry entertainments to them and their families to compensate them from the trauma of devising more onerous taxes and regulations for our own good.
Labour politicians are far too virtuous to be corrupted by freebies. It is only the morally degenerate Tories that suffer corruption.
Why is any of this a surprise.
As DPP he gave a free passes to the Pakistani rape gangs and Jimmy Saville and then claimed to have no knowledge. “Did not cross my desk” was the phrase used which is just dissembling.
The surprise is that the press gave him a free pass on these and other issues.
Why is it surprise?
MSM are part of the same lefty, woke, virtue signaling parasitic cabal.
Telling us what to do (or rather not to do) while doing exactly opposite.
If you are going to critique someone at least do it on the basis of fact rather than rumour. It is highly probable that the majority of DPP decisions were not those of Keir Starmer – management is about delegation and the DPP can only prosecute those the police bring to them. KS is a long way from perfection but get your FACTS straight!
He said the Saville case did not cross his desk which smacks of the words used by another dissembler “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.
These were high profile cases with potentially serious political consequences. As DPP it was his business to know and for those that reported to him to make sure he knew
Apologies to the author but moral dissonance is necessary to be able to place yourself on the left in the first place. None of this is surprising. The worst offenders in the expenses scandal were from Labour.
When even lefty Cucks like the author can see it, I know I was right in my 2018-19 diagnosis: Starmer is a dud.
I am old enough to remember the scandal of PM Wilson wearing a Gannex raincoat, apparently a gift from a constituent. And the outrage at Kagan´s peerage. In comparison with today´s politicians, Wilson was a giant.
Yes, in comparison with those of today, I agree. But a phoney nevertheless – a good actor.
In any private organization there are rules around the acceptance of gifts which amongst other thing deal with value. Generally anything worth more than £10 or £20 has to be refused.
Had they worked for a private organization, Stammer and any other members of Cabinet who had their noses in the trough would have to be dismissed
Three simple changes could save a whole heap of trouble:
1.MPs cannot accept any gift over £20 (so he can be bought a drink in the pub but he cannot have someone else pay for his meal and certainly not his – or his wife’s – clothes).
2.The taxpayer gives each party a set amount of money for every election. Political parties cannot accept money from donors beyond membership fees and private donations under £100.
3.The taxpayer should build a halls-of-residence type building somewhere like Greenford. Add in some security features, a police presence and a car park. And then any MP who doesn’t live in London can have a room of their own for the duration of the parliament. No more expenses for renting in SW1 or flipping of properties Yvette Cooper style.
MPs are also unofficially exempted by HMRC from paying tax on gifts and other benefits in kind. Unlike every other citizen. But most weirdly, in HMRC’s big book of tax, the exemption is not written down. It is an unwritten rule that’s never been tested in court…
I didn’t know that
Probably like most of this parish, neither did I.
No idea what private organisations you worked for but in IT industry (I spent 30 years in) gifts of over 30 quid are quite common:
golf days, dinners, pissups, laptops (obviously for testing our hardware or software you ordered) etc.
And I am not talking at director level.
It used to be the case but not in the last 5-10 years. The advent of the Bribery Act and similar legislation in other countries put paid to that.
Some companies now have blanket bans on gifts and hospitality rather than try and police a policy that is likely to cause as many problem s as it solves
I would take the author’s condemnation of Starmer’s behaviour more seriously if I didn’t feel that he is largely motivated by resentment that the current Labour Party has turned its back on the Corbyn tendency in the party.
And why is that a problem?
Should I ignore, say, Andrew Neil’s criticisms of Sunak or Johnson simply because I think Andrew Neil’s preference would be a Government to the right of either of them?
We know these people are no good. It’s the same across the world. Elections are meaningless. There’s no consequences, there’s no shame, there’s no threat. The rats grow fatter and fatter and only the biggest rats can compete. This is a permanent pattern now. It’s no longer an aberration. Revolutions don’t necessarily repeat themselves in form, but the face of oppression is always the same, always recognisable.
They’re emblematic of a society where everyone thinks they’re entitled to something for nothing – most of us contribute substantially less to the state than we take from it. That’s why the country’s going down the to1let.
Still, never mind, it’s worse in France.
You may be right. There are, for example, many out there avoiding taxes at all levels if they can, or fiddling benefits. They/we feel fully justified. We hate the government so we hold back our contribution or support and we feel justified in behaving that way but continue to demand more from them, That’s a vicious circle and a dysfunctional society. There’s no trust. How do you break that cycle?
Politics needs to become local again. When taxes are collected and spent locally there are much greater levels of participation and accountability and therefore much less of the graft and rent-seeking that are the cause of our present misfortunes. If the parish council can do it then the Borough council shouldn’t – all the way up to the central government.
Not to mention Sweden.
Yeah but here we have better food, better weather and much better countryside. Oh and the health service still works. Having lived in the UK and France I’d sooner die than go back to the UK.
Maybe Starmer could rewatch “A man for all seasons” (not that one needs an excuse to do so), especially the scenes when they talk about “gifts”.
Or read Animal Farm.
Starmer is a man wirh scant real world experience and a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. The result is a Canute-like astonishment that the world cannot be legislated and a peevishness that reflects his thin skin.
He has neither the nous nor the temperament to be a leader and whilst his election victory will hold the line short-term, its “broad but shallow” composition will create more problems as “policies” unravel over time. Not expecting him to go full term in the bag of ferrets which makes up a British political party.
I thought of a (tiny) joke about Starmer the other day. I don’t know if it’s original or I heard it somewhere & forgot.
I say I say I say: Have you heard? Apparently Starmer’s father was a tool maker.
Well guess what he made …
I’ll get me coat.
He was a scarecrow effigy at a nearby scarecrow festival. The description read like this:
‘My father was a
tool maker.’
‘I’m a tool…
… makers son’
His hands and feet were tools and he wore a very nice suit with a red tie 🙂
Talking of ‘tiny’; I saw a picture of him today standing next to President Zelensky. Has Sir Keir got a touch of ‘small man syndrome’?
In this fallen world there are only two credible innoculations for the temptation to corruption. The one is punctilious honour and the other independent wealth.
Which is why, in Britain, we have tended to like our statesmen to be Aristocrats, and those who pay homage to the aristocratic spirit, bound as it is by strict notions of class honour. While in America, with their more democratic culture, they have generally elected Plutocrats free from financial inducement.
As we expel the last true peers from the Palace of Westminster and confess that “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded” we should be sensible and coherent and give all Members of Parlament an enormous above inflation pay rise.
Otherwise it’s just going to be more plaintive cake-ism. Bewailing the fact that hirelings won’t behave like good shepherds.
we should be sensible and coherent and give all Members of Parlament an enormous above inflation pay rise.
This sounds like the mob; pay protection money otherwise something might happen to your shop. Give us a high wage and we’ll stop being corrupt,
Perhaps, but it strikes me as the only pragmatic solution to the issue.
Carlyle said long ago that modernity would eventually subsume all personal and spiritual bonds and obligations within the ‘cash nexus’.
We live in a society where everything from sex to babies to death can be bought – ‘judgement free’. And that is a key thing, Starmer and Boris are quite sincere when they protest that ‘it was all within the rules’. Those who are blind to honour are just that. Spiritually blind.
It is fond at this late stage to expect any different of our statesman.
Wait, you think rich people are LESS corrupt than average? Billionaires tend to be the most corrupt people on earth. Being rich makes people MORE greedy, not less.
In what universe does Dawn Butler deserve anything from the taxpayer, let alone an enormous pay rise?
The universe we actually inhabit, rather than the one we wish we did. The universe where a public, well aware of political corruption and mediocrity, turn out in thousands to chair a non-entity back to public office.
20,000 of the electors of Brent East left their homes in July and voted to re-elect Ms Butler as their delegate to the House of Commons.
Perhaps, as Brecht once suggested, it would be easier to dissolve the people and elect another?
This is right. I wouldn’t care how much Ministers are paid if it resulted in a higher calibre of candidate.
This government must be the most intellectually feeble in the country’s modern history. The consequences will not be good.
“immiserating tens of thousands of sick, vulnerable and disabled people through callous welfare reforms”
Given that welfare and disability claims are at all time highs, one wonders how many of the population the author thinks should be paid to live for free on the backs of the ever decreasing few who actually work for a living.
“Most politicians don’t just wake up one day and decide to use public office to enrich themselves; entitlement develops incrementally and begins with the seductive idea that you’re a little bit special. One day it’s Taylor Swift concert tickets, the next you’re telling porkies to the Queen. Accepting gifts is not immoral in and of itself, but this is how the culture of corruption (which Sir Keir Starmer claims he sought power to rip out of public life) slowly seduces those of low character.”
The author is just about spot-on here save that accepting personal gifts while in office is immoral. The gifts are never free and they can’t be so naïve as to think otherwise
‘…low character…’ – what a precise and useful phrase!
Duck-moat? It was a duck island and, different MP, cleaning of a moat.
“It all further demonstrates the ideological contradictions at the core of his “remade” Labour Party.”
Starmer has no ideology, or even principles, other than wielding power.
Are they being given villas in Mauritius ?
He was the DPP, for heaven’s sake. He understands the concept of reciprocity very well…and still, along with his wife, grabbed with both hands. Seriously horrified at their hypocrisy quick on the heels of the GE.
When all is said and done, you have to admire how smart the prime minister looks in his new suits and leisure attire paid for by wealthy friends. The old duds made him look like a green grocer in a tatty neighborhood..
He always looks like a bag of spanners whatever he wears….no class & no taste.
Did his father make the spanners?
A bit of a mis-step from Starmer maybe, but to suggest that he is finished is ridiculous. He’s got a massive majority, and I doubt he’s losing a moment’s sleep over a dip in popularity so far from the next general election. Labour haven’t even had a budget yet. The media who write them off before they’ve had a chance to do anything are just betraying their prejudice.
Not entirely true. Labour are, as you say, in for 5 years. However, many, many people feel betrayed by these antics – and a huge number were Labour voters.
That loss of trust is almost impossible to get back. Assuming there is a competent, or even credible, opposition by the next GE, Labour will get a real hiding.
100 days on from the Conservative Party’s worst ever defeat, it is only one point behind Labour, so a statistical tie, but each of them is below 30 per cent. Yesterday, Labour had a truly dreadful set of local by-election results, losing seats in all directions while holding onto others by the skin of its teeth after huge swings against it, in both cases all over the country. We who vote in local by-elections, vote in absolutely everything. Beyond the most titular sense, the Conservative Party does not have a Leader. The same could be said of the Labour Party.
The campaign against John Woodcock, or whatever he now calls himself, suggests the impending re-emergence of the sexual harassment case that led to his departure from the Labour Party. Those were the circumstances under which Keir Starmer retained his services. The former Ruth Smeeth, of whom it can never be said too many times that she lost her seat to Jonathan Gullis, has been made a Government Whip in the House of Lords, precisely because she is a “strictly protected” asset of a foreign power.
Pace Ken McCallum, while there is mayhem on our streets, Russia and Iran are the least of our worries. Public support is waning for the war that Britain is directly waging in Ukraine and inside Russia (so much for nuclear deterrence), and there is ever-less even than there has ever been for the war that Britain is directly waging in Gaza and Lebanon, now involving deliberate attacks on Irish, Commonwealth and NATO military personnel. So this rubbish has to put out there, in the touchingly naïve expectation that anyone might fall for it. It is possible that only an unvarnished war might yet save Starmer or even Labour, so watch out for a lot more of this, not necessarily excluding one or more false flag operations. But we are no fools.
Labour MPs are under orders not to seek to amend this Government’s half-baked legislation, whether on Great British Energy that would produce no energy, or on rail renationalisation but never of the rolling stock and not of much else until well into the next Parliament, or on buses, or on renters’ rights, or on workers’ rights. Buses were anti-Semitic when Jeremy Corbyn talked about them. As were trees. Yes, really. Louise Haigh openly regretted having nominated him for Leader. To describe Angela Rayner’s package of proposed workers’ rights as the most radical in a generation is to say nothing at all.
Certain hysterics in the old no-quite-Blairite academic, media and thinktank circles are calling this the most left-wing Government since 1979. Yet what if it were? How would that be any sort of achievement? If this were indeed a left-wing Government, then Starmer’s affair with Jenny Chapman, leading to a child who was born while Starmer’s wife was pregnant and who is now supported by Chapman’s Ministerial salary, would have brought him down by now. As it is, he even felt able to joke about that at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
Both in the dropping of key commitments, and in the vague aspiration to two years rather than the firm promise of the first 100 days, the Employment Rights Bill is an enormous breach of the General Election manifesto, you fools who voted for it, and you even bigger fools who paid for the campaign. The emerging train tickets scandal is yet another unanswerable argument for real rail renationalisation, just as the impending collapse of Thames Water is yet another unanswerable argument for water renationalisation. But instead, this Labour Government has broken its undertaking to declare the National Health Service the preferred provider of commissioned health services, while wheelchairs at King’s College Hospital, if not also elsewhere, are being rented out at two pounds per hour, payable by card only and so that a mere 50 uses would make back the cost of buying them, by a private company, Wheelshare, that is based in Israel. It is all connected.As at Westminster, so at Holyrood, only Labour members voted in favour of means-testing the Winter Fuel Payment, although the two Labour MSPs who voted against it, Richard Leonard and Alex Rowley, were respectively a former Leader, and a former Deputy Leader and Acting Leader. The sentencing review is to be chaired by David Gauke, who has only just re-joined the Conservative Party. But if your sentence allowed for your release after less than 12 months, then you were obviously not bad enough to have been sent to prison at all, to spend 23 hours of the day either in front of the television or asleep. At an average annual cost to the public purse of £46,696, which is £127.93 per day, what good purpose does that serve? Let me assure you that there is absolutely none. Now let us see what Gauke came up with. He has talked the talk in the past. This is his only chance to walk the walk.
This is a Government about which there is an awful lot to criticise. Just before the General Election, someone who is now a Minister told me that 100 days into a Starmer Government, I would be blogging perhaps half a dozen times per week, about affairs abroad, about local matters, about culture, seasonally about the Faith, “and about the Tories if you could be bothered.” Beyond that, there would be nothing to say. Well, I suppose that things could change before midnight, Cinderella. But it looks as if here we are.
Would you seriously expect anything different when as DPP Sir Keir Starmer was awarded a special ‘privileged’ pension ? As the great USA historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson says about the USA ‘Elites’ : ‘These people are never subject to the ramifications of their own ideology’.
Labour sold its soul under Tony Blair. It did it again when Jeremy Corbyn was turfed out on false anti-Semitism charges but in reality because he was a threat to the Western project of retaining its global supremacy through illegal wars. It is also true that parties sometimes come into power after a long spell in opposition with an extraordinary arrogance and sense of entitled. It is a post victory high. And some parties (like Sinn Fein) have a natural sense of political and moral superiority to begin with.
Very little to object. The horrible thing is that such an article would even need to be written. These are things you should have learned at your mother’s and father’s knee. How does a whole company of people get to be so degraded, and – not the least issue – so STUPIDLY degraded?
Something is serious wrong with our system if this is the choice of politicians we have.