Lobbying Labour
JVL Introduction
Did you know that Labour’s Kevin Craig, suspended corporate lobbyist-cum-election candidate, was also a big donor to the party before being selected unopposed for a Labour seat?
Or that three men alone have given Labour over £15 million since the start of 2023?
Me neither.
This article by Ethan Stone of The Dark Arts is about how money talks – or rather screams – in political life in Britain.
Here he discusses the role of lobbyist Jim Murphy (a short lived Scottish Labour leader back in 2014) who now runs a rapidly-growing political consultancy, Arden Strategies.
Murphy’s views are interesting, believing that Starmer will lead “the first truly private sector Labour government”, so he is not sitting around, doing nothing, as The Dark Arts reveals.
And there is more, particularly about how lobbying firms get in at the ground floor, forging links with prospective parliamentary candidates.
And yet more…
RK
This article was originally published by OpenDemocracy on Fri 28 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
The lobbyist connecting Labour’s top team with arms firms and energy bosses
While fighting raged in Gaza in October, top Labour figures met with the CEO of a major supplier of arms to Israel
Loading article text…
Corruption is probably widespread in the arms industry.
Prime Minister Tony Blair infamously halted an inquiry into the activities of BAE Systems by the Serious Fraud Office. If there was nothing to find, why bother halting it?
Jim Murphy reportedly played a crucial role in Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader. It is claimed that he did not think that a sufficiently Blairite candidate could be nominated under the proposed new election rules and so argued for the threshold to be lowered. Corbyn was thus able to get nominated.