Labour’s snouts in the trough
JVL Introduction
The amounts aren’t generally huge but the willingness of senior Labour party members to take freebies from corporate sponsors tells us a lot about the dominant culture in the Labour party.
It is, simply, a sense of entitlement.
Why shouldn’t we go to the Brit Awards, or have a slap-up lunch and free seats at Wimbledon? “They” have had it so good for so long. Now it’s our turn!
Here, Adam Ramsay shows that Google is hard at work. They spend £10k and what did they get? The scrapping of a proposed tax on digital businesses which would have been worth £3 billion.
It may have been pure coincidence – but it sure as hell looks bad for Labour. And it is so cheap for the corporates.
This article was originally published by OpenDemocracy on Sat 30 Sep 2023. Read the original here.
Labour figures took £10,000 gifts from Google and YouTube ahead of tax U-turn
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party backtracked on plan to hike Digital Services Tax to 10% after being showered with freebies
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Forgive my simplistic approach but what’s the logic in not taxing all businesses which make turnover in the UK, at full corporation tax regardless of where they’re registered or wherever they eat their sandwiches?
All of G Osborne’s loopholes in Corp and IH Tax need sealing and the inflow to the public purse restoring.
An affront to those people struggling to survive whom they are supposed to represent.
Gross. The ‘Cherie Blair Clairol’ model of entitlement: I get these freebies because I’m worth it!
Private Eye has done good work covering this corruption and also pointing out over the years which companies are invited to (often invitation-only) meetings at Labour conferences. This strand continued during Miliband’s leadership and even sometimes unacknowledged in the Corbyn years, as individual MPs with former links for example to private health providers continued to build their connections ready for a rightward turn.
After the ditching of wealth taxes , can this government-in- waiting race to the bottom any further? The leadership team must have dug their way to Antarctica by now. Come to think of it, a lot of them look a bit like penguins.
The ‘sense of entitlement’ is here correctly identified as the cancer at the heart of Blairite and post-Blairite ideology.
The puny value of these gifts/freebies (like John Prescott’s pouffe on the taxpayer) emphasises the profound and immoral corruption which has recrudesced as Starmer ( once, it seemed, the least Zionist of the then three leadership candidates) tears up every promise he ever made. One can forgive Jo Bird for joining the anti-industrial and anti-working-class Greens…as for Labour…?