Over the past few weeks, senior figures in the Labour government, including prime minister Keir Starmer, have faced criticism for accepting thousands of pounds worth of gifts from party donors, including clothes, glasses and tickets to must-see events.
While far from the first allegations of ‘sleaze’ against politicians in recent years, it comes just months after Labour made ‘serving the country’ a key theme of their election campaign, with their manifesto accusing the Conservatives and SNP of failing to “uphold the standards expected in public life”.
Labour and Starmer have stressed that their actions were within the rules, with Starmer also deciding to pay back £6,000 worth of gifts that received as donations, a move that eight in ten Britons (79%) support. Nonetheless, the controversy has left a mark on the government.
Reacting to the government announcement of investment in carbon capture and storage projects, Green MP and party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:
“Labour has spent too long listening to the pleadings of energy companies for major public investment in unproven technological solutions like carbon capture that simply won’t deliver the immediate real change we need.
“This announcement is no substitute for the urgent and immediate investment needed in home and business insulation to cut energy use and the increased renewables funding that is badly needed to meet future energy needs.”
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
I need to do an article about the UK government’s insane pursuit of Carbon Capture and Storage, accepting fossil fuel industry lies and continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel industry to destroy the climate.
A mural depicting the Battle of Cable StreetPhoto: Maggie Jones / Creative Commons
DAVID ROSENBERG assesses the far-right threat in the wake of the summer’s Islamophobic pogroms and asks what lessons we can learn from the 1930s
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Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke of “thuggery” and was especially concerned that police were attacked, though the main targets of what anti-fascist activists prefer to label “pogroms” by an insurgent far-right were long-settled Muslim communities and current asylum-seekers, including many Muslims. Yet Starmer would not let the word “Islamophobia” cross his lips.
There were attempts to set fire to hotels temporarily housing refugees, and threats made against law firms and advice centres that support asylum-seekers.
The state’s law and order-centred response to far-right pogroms in 2024 mirrors its responses to Cable Street. For several months in 1936, Jews experienced repeated street violence from Oswald Mosley’s fascists, culminating in Mosley’s threat to march thousands of Blackshirted fascists through the East End’s most heavily Jewish-populated streets on Sunday October 4.
Grassroots Labour members and trade unionists wanted to confront them, but Labour’s aloof hierarchy colluded with Tory and Liberal leaders to denounce plans for a counter-demonstration. From the relative comfort of the West End, the Jewish Board of Deputies made the same call.
Thankfully, many Jews completely ignored them, following the lead instead of the Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Antisemitism (JPC), formed in the East End, and the Communist Party which had many local Jewish members. Trade unionists and Labour members, especially from the Labour League of Youth, joined the mass blockade at Gardiner’s Corner, and dockers from Irish Catholic families whom Mosley had tried to woo helped reinforce the barricades in Cable Street.
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer congratulates Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves after she addressed the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, September 23, 2024
LABOUR has not felt threatened by the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this week.
Its just-defeated rival is without a leader and has less than a third as many MPs as the government.
The Tories are in denial: not one speaker addressed the real causes of electoral defeat.
But this is less reassuring than it should be, because Labour too is in denial — about the nature of its victory and the urgency of delivering palpable improvements in living standards and public services.
The explanation for the collapse in Conservative support between 2019 and 2024 is straightforward. It was the sharp decline in quality of life felt by the majority of British people.
The most immediate cause was the cost-of-living crisis. While the inflationary crisis was global, British people were hit unusually hard because it came after more than a decade of falling real-terms wages.
Furthermore an asset-stripped, privatised utilities sector had not bothered to invest in reserves to mitigate shocks: Britain has gas reserves amounting to just 12 days’ usage, compared to 89 days in Germany or 103 in France, for example, leading to weaker resilience in the face of global price fluctuations. To cap it all our government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich did not take serious steps to control runaway prices.
At the same time, years of austerity and privatisation began to hit home across essential services.
Rachel Reeves says that there are difficult choices ahead, that the poor have to make sacrifices and thanks for her new clothes.Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.Angela Rayner wears her “benefits in kind” donation from multi-millionaire Lord Alli.
