Nice work if you can get it
JVL Introduction
Perks are offered by those who want to get something in return. Not immediately – they aren’t bribes – but an invitation to remember those who helped you up the greasy pole with the unstated expectation that you will return the favour when you can.
That why principled Labour politicians have always called out those who got their snouts in the trough at every opportunity. It’s an invitation to corrupt behaviour.
But, hey. Why upset the applecart if you can get on it.
As Adam Ramsay shows here, Keir Starmer is a high-end consumer of corporate hospitality, grabbing it with outstretched arms, treating it as a sign of recognition by those who really matter – those with money and power.
And this is before he is in government, with real reason to be wooed…
This article was originally published by OpenDemocracy on Fri 25 Aug 2023. Read the original here.
Starmer has taken more freebies than all Labour leaders since 1997 combined
Labour leader’s 28 junkets include Spurs hospitality, two Coldplay concerts and a £380 dinner from Google at Davos
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Starmer is what he is . He is certainly no socialist.. His credentials to be leader of any true Labour party are very doubtful. But he is the leader of his Labour party. It is certainly not mine.
The US has two parties: right wing and further right wing. Our transatlantic transformation will be a little closer if Starmer wins the next election. As a socialist, I take pride in my expulsion from the Labour Party.
What a squalid little chap he is. The more desperate he is to grab all the trappings of power and status, the more shabby he looks. Vote Labour? No thank you.
Each day brings more evidence of this man’s unsuitability for the position he holds
The absence of any comment almost 24 hours after this story was posted made me wonder whether JVL readers were finding it difficult to believe that a Knight of the Realm – much less the leader of the Labour Party – could behave in such a way. A more likely explanation, of course, was that Adam Ramsay’s article was met with weary cynicism by readers who are already well aware of the moral vacuum in which Keir Starmer exists.
When Lloyd George was selling honours in the 1920s, he was allegedly charging £10,000 for a knighthood, £30,000 for a baronetcy and £50,000 for a peerage. Tony Blair tried something similar 20 years ago, when his friend Lord Levy sidestepped the law by persuading rich businessmen to “lend” the Labour Party millions of quid. For some reason the House of Lords appointments commission smelled a rat: the peerages were refused and the “loans” had to be repaid.
What does it say about the present leadership of the Labour Party when it can be bought so cheaply – a glass of Prosecco and an afternoon at the races or a box at Tottenham Hotspur? How tawdry.
Of vastly greater concern, however, is that someone who invoked God when taking the oath of allegiance in Parliament should prostitute himself, debase his office and subvert everything that the Labour Party was set up to fight against by accepting (and soliciting?) such immoral inducements.
To what depths the British labour movement has sunk.
Strange, No, that the BBC completely ignores Starmer and any negative stories about him. If it had been Jeremy Corbyn, they would have had it on their News with relish. There’s also evidence that Starmer and Streeting both taking money from a Company involved in Health. Both of them have said they will introduce more of the Private Sector, their excuse, “To help the NHS”.
https://inwhoseinterests.uk/2022/06/08/hedge-fund-labour-why-is-the-party-of-the-nhs-now-receiving-money-from-private-health-investors/comment-page-1/#comments
Starmer has become a Boris Johnson a SCROUNGER & an OPPORTUNIST who takes much more than he gives!
Frances Kay you used two words that sums him up “squalid & shabby”
We always voted Labour but since the DISPICABLE corruption of a confirmed Zionist who expells Jewish people even the Holocaust survivors has NO humanity or integrity & our vote will go elsewhere more deserving!
Yes, I think that Jacob Ecclestone’s explanation is spot on – ‘weary cynicism’. It seems pointless protesting. Defeatism? Realism I think.