Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.
“We will not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis. In addition, we will not grant new coal licences and will ban fracking for good.”
UK Government Denies Claims Ed Miliband Has Banned New North Sea Oil Licences
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has denied reports that Ed Miliband has banned the North Sea oil regulator from issuing any outstanding drilling and exploration licences, calling them “a complete fabrication”.
Earlier today, The Telegraph claimed that the new energy security and net zero minister had overruled his officials to stop the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) from issuing new licences, even those that were in the final round of approval with the regulator.
But Miliband’s department hit back at the claims, telling City A.M.: “This piece is a complete fabrication – it invents meetings and decisions that have not taken place.
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Were Miliband to have withdrawn the licences, it could have left some North Sea oil firms millions of pounds out of pocket having prepared bids before the general election was called that were in the final throes of being approved.
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It would appear that they are incompatible positions: The manifesto says “We will not issue new licences to explore new fields … ” but yet it’s a complete fabication that Ed Miliband has banned the North Sea oil regulator from issuing any outstanding drilling and exploration licences and licences yet to be approved are going to be granted? So, which is it?
Former Secretary of State Michael Gove gave permission for the mine near Whitehaven in 2022
The government will no longer defend a decision, made by the previous government, to allow a controversial new coalmine in Cumbria.
The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, has accepted there was an “error of law” in the decision to grant planning permission for the mine in December 2022.
Consequently, the government will not now be defending two legal challenges next week against the mine – by Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change (SLACC).
It has instead informed the court that the decision to grant planning permission should be quashed.
BBC News has contacted West Cumbria Mining, the company behind the proposed mine, for comment.
The mine has been heavily criticised by climate campaigners and the government’s independent advisors on climate.
Two legal challenges over the climate impacts of burning the coal will be heard at the High Court in London next week.
It comes after the court ruled in June that permission for an oil drilling project in Surrey should not have been granted because the climate impacts of burning the fossil fuels had not been considered.
The government referred to that ruling in its decision on Thursday to withdraw support.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria board a plane at Stansted Airport in Essex, England, July 9, 2024 as they head to Washington DC to attend a Nato summit
LABOUR has spent its first week in power signalling a changed approach from the Tories — a national wealth fund for infrastructure projects, a reset to devolution with a new council of the regions.
In Washington Keir Starmer’s purpose is different — to show his “cast-iron commitment” to continue the last government’s subordination to US foreign policy, co-ordinated through the Nato military alliance.
This was never in doubt — Starmer is merely affirming Britain’s role in the US-led imperialist bloc as every postwar Labour prime minister has before him.
There are good reasons, though, to regard British foreign policy as every bit as disastrous as domestic policy in recent decades.
On one level the Morning Star can agree with Starmer’s lines at the Nato summit — yes, the world is getting more dangerous.
Two current major wars, in Palestine and Ukraine, show a real capacity to expand into wider conflicts and drag in other powers.
Both relate, in different ways, to the major fault line in international relations, that between the US and the old European colonial powers on one side, and the rest of a world in which that transatlantic bloc carries less and less weight.
Starmer’s speech, calling on Nato members to spend more on their militaries, follows the Western convention of presenting the alliance as guarantors of a “rules-based international order” which is under threat from rising “authoritarian states.”
In reality, the arms race is driven by Nato. Not only does the United States spend more on its military than the next 10 countries put together, the Nato bloc taken together is responsible for 75 per cent of all military spending worldwide, though it comprises just 12 per cent of the world population and 30 per cent of its GDP.
Three-quarters of all arms spending is not, in Starmer’s eyes, enough. Though Labour opts to stick to arbitrary Tory spending rules overall, it promises billions more for the military: raising the defence budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP entails a rise from £64.6bn to £87.1bn, a £22.5bn increase in spending annually. By contrast, axing the two-child benefit cap to lift hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty is something Labour says it cannot afford: the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates this would cost £3.4bn a year.
Nor can Nato’s claim to spend this money defending a “rules-based order” stand scrutiny. Last month saw Julian Assange secure his freedom after years of persecution in British jails for exposing the war crimes of “the empire,” as the US bloc is widely known in the global South.
Britain has been alongside the US in ripping up international law with wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, conflicts whose consequences persist in ongoing conflicts and refugee crises today. Today’s militarism risks igniting a new world war with China, the principal economic and technological rival to the US. All in the name of upholding a global system of unfair trade treaties and unfettered corporate access to resources that keeps a majority of the human race in poverty, is wrecking ecosystems at an accelerating rate and is destabilising the climate into the bargain.
Nothing could be more important than stopping this war. Those who claim the troop build-ups are a deterrent ignore history, not just that of the first world war but recent history: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine followed the expansion of Nato to its borders, its encirclement by US bases and a whole series of enormous Nato military manoeuvres — the “Defender Europe” exercises — simulating war against it. Unsurprisingly, frightening Russia did not prevent war but provoked it, feeding a parallel rise in nationalist militarism there.
The drive to World War III will not be challenged by the opposition Conservatives, or by more than a handful of MPs. But its consequences if unchallenged are unthinkable. So a real opposition must be built outside Westminster.
Senior Labour figures have met hundreds of times with lobbyists for big business, banks and arms firms in the last year | Tim Grist Photography/Dan Kitwood/Getty / Composition by James Battershill
An openDemocracy investigation reveals the secretive mass lobbying campaign that shaped Starmer’s policies
Twelve months before seizing power in last week’s historic election victory, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party welcomed with open arms an unprecedented lobbying campaign by the UK’s most powerful corporations.
Weapons manufacturers implicated in human rights abuses in Gaza bent the ears of would-be defence secretaries. Incoming climate change ministers met with oil companies. Labour ministers who will now be responsible for curbing the excesses of the City of London were wined and dined by financial services executives. Public affairs firms representing asset managers, the tobacco industry, gig economy firms and tax-avoiding mega corporations secured meeting after meeting after meeting with future ministers.
In a high-voltage campaign that was simultaneously secretive yet enacted in plain sight, lobbyists worked hard to ensure the policies of the UK’s first ostensibly progressive government in 14 years reflected the interests of their influential clients. And Labour was only too happy to engage.
Westminster’s lax transparency rules mean there is no official record of this mammoth public affairs offensive. The rulebook says the public has no right to know which companies lobby the opposition – a position shared by Starmer’s Labour. In every instance, the party has refused to disclose what was discussed, what promises were made, and even who was at its meetings, saying: “We should not be treated as the government.”
Now, an investigation by openDemocracy lays bare the astonishing access that Big Business had to Starmer and his frontbench team.
openDemocracy spent months gathering information about lobbying meetings from a variety of open sources, including parliamentary meeting rooms’ booking logs, social media posts and events publicised by lobbying firms. These meetings, spanning the past 18 months, have included private meetings, exclusive Q&A sessions, dinners, mixers, briefings, client roundtables, overseas visits and seminars.
We have identified hundreds of meetings that senior figures in the party held with corporate lobbyists, financial institutions and business groups. On average, they met with influential business leaders every single working day of the past year.
This is about more than private dinners and smoked salmon breakfasts. Starmer’s cabinet is about to begin implementing the programme for government laid out in Labour’s manifesto. As Rachel Reeves, his new chancellor, said last month, the “fingerprints” of business are all over Labour’s policies, shaped as they were through an unprecedented level of engagement with corporate lobbyists, financial institutions and business groups.
Experts warn the consequences of the party effectively outsourcing its policy-making to private corporations will be far-reaching for British society. Labour has pledged to build new towns, to increase green investment, to reform health and social care and to launch major infrastructure projects. Mick McAteer, a former director of the UK’s financial services regulator has warned that the much-vaunted partnership with private finance which lies at the heart of all these plans “will result in a massive transfer of wealth from local communities to the City of London and global financial institutions over the next decade”.
The corporate lobbyists
Lobbying is a huge business in the UK. Dozens of agencies make millions every year advising clients on how to influence policy to their benefit and get their messages heard by the politicians who write laws, set regulations and sign off on public sector contracts. The last decent estimate of the industry’s size is from 2007, when Gordon Brown was still the prime minister. A study by the Hansard Society then put it at around £1.9bn. Insiders suggest it has certainly grown in the nearly two decades since.
A big part of a lobbyist’s work is getting their clients access to the right people, which often relies on the lobbyist themself knowing the right people – or having contacts who do. Around 18 months ago, after the spectacular implosion of the Liz Truss regime meant the chances of Labour taking power started to look more likely, the public affairs industry began to reorient en masse.
To prepare for a Labour government, lobby firms began establishing dedicated ‘Labour Units’. They hired former Labour MPs and staffers to make use of their contact networks, with a few even snapping up prospective candidates or seconding staff members directly into the offices of senior party figures. Lobbying firms Global Counsel, Lowick Group, FGS Global and Weber Shandwick have all sent members of staff to work in the offices of senior Labour figures in the past two years – at a combined cost to the firms of more than £100,000.
Other lobbying companies have given donations in cash or in-kind to influential MPs, despite industry rules seeming to bar this practice. New deputy prime minister Angela Rayner alone has received donations from two lobbyists – Sovereign Strategy and Pentland Communications – in the past year.
openDemocracy reached out to each of the firms mentioned above to ask whether they expect to receive anything in exchange for seconding members of staff at their own cost or donating to MPs, but received no response.
The lobbyists’ efforts bore fruit: in the twelve months leading up to the election, not a week went by without a member of Labour’s frontbench team attending a private client roundtable organised by a lobbying firm. These meetings, industry insiders say, represent only a fraction of the work a firm does in connecting its clients with politicians. They often serve merely as an introduction, with clients then able to follow up on issues discussed at the meetings or raise more sensitive matters, either through the agency or in some cases directly with politicians.
One firm, Arden Strategies, was able to secure more private client roundtables with Labour than any other, as far as openDemocracy can establish. The lobby shop, run by former Labour minister Jim Murphy, put its clients in a room with senior Labour figures on at least nine occasions – with politicians lobbied including Reeves, business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds and Starmer’s head of business engagement.
Unlike many firms, Arden doesn’t publish a general client list on the Public Relations and Communications Association register. But openDemocracy can reveal that the firm’s major clients include leading arms manufacturer Northrop Grumman and two of the UK’s largest power distribution companies, UK Power Networks and SGN.
Labour needs to take on the vested interests of big corporations, not give them the pen to write policy
Unlike in many other democracies, such as Canada, Germany and Scotland, voters have no right to know who is lobbying opposition politicians in Westminster. Only government ministers are required to regularly publish a list of any meetings they have with businesses, charities, think tanks and corporate lobbyists, along with a brief description of what was discussed. Details of government politicians’ meetings are not disclosed unless a specific Freedom of Information request is made asking about them, and the government may well decide to refuse to answer such requests.
This heavily flawed system is a major issue in a year such as this one, when the opposition’s election victory was almost a foregone conclusion and interest groups have been queuing up to influence its plans for government.
While firms do not need to declare which opposition politicians they’ve lobbied, many advertise their ability to secure access to the shadow frontbench. openDemocracy monitored the leading lobbying firms and found dozens of public references to meetings involving senior Labour politicians. In every instance where openDemocracy asked the lobbying firms and Labour which clients were present at these meetings, neither would provide any details.
Tim Bierley, campaigner at Global Justice Now, warned that Labour may be treating lobbyists as “independent experts” rather than people “responsible primarily for boosting their shareholders’ income”.
Bierley added: “On climate, trade and the economy, the interests of giant corporations are extremely different from the public’s – their outsized influence would blur any visions of progress under Labour.
“To provide a remotely adequate response to crises on multiple fronts, Labour needs to take on the vested interests of big corporations, not give them the pen to write policy.”
The City
Few interest groups carry as much sway with Labour as the representatives of the City of London – and the wider financial services sector that the City rests at the heart of. In recent years, no other industry has more effectively forged ties with the party.
In the weeks before polling day, Labour’s shadow City minister Tulip Siddiq – who is expected to keep the post in government – took to LinkedIn to share manifesto documents on three occasions. Tellingly, it wasn’t her party’s manifesto she was sharing, but those of three major financial services industry representative bodies, UK Finance, TheCityUK and the Association of British Insurers.
“I have worked closely with TheCityUK and its members in recent years,” wrote Siddiq in one of the posts, “to formulate the Labour Party’s policies for the financial and professional services sector.”
Her other two posts are seemingly copy-and-paste jobs, with near-identical wording. In both, Siddiq told of how “delighted” she had been to “work closely” with the Association of British Insurers and UK Finance “to inform Labour’s plans for the sector”.
All three posts suggest that the lobbyists for the City of London and the financial institutions were directly involved in shaping the policies and regulatory approach that will apply to their own industry.
When Labour published a policy document earlier this year laying out its plans for the financial services sector, the party held a no-press-allowed soiree in the City of London’s Guildhall, sponsored by the City of London Corporation, to thank the industry for its contributions. The plans were criticised for committing the party to the same lax regulatory approach taken by the Conservatives, with campaigners describing the document as “a love letter to the city”.
Labour’s frontbench team, including Siddiq, has met with City lobbyists on more than 20 occasions in the past year – not counting its significant engagement with the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, which openDemocracy revealed last month. BlackRock, Macquarie, HSBC, Bloomberg, Lloyds, Brookfield Asset Management and Blackstone are among firms to have secured access to leading members of the new government, including Starmer, Reeves, Reynolds and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden.
Mick McAteer, a former board member at the Financial Conduct Authority and a campaigner for economic social justice at the Financial Inclusion Centre, told openDemocracy that the close relationship between incoming ministers and the Labour Party can essentially be seen as a kind of quid-pro-quo.
Lobbyists for financial institutions push Labour to commit to a favourable regulatory environment while dangling the promise of vast amounts of private capital. McAteer is increasingly concerned this relationship will amount to a rehashed form of the Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) favoured by New Labour, in which private firms provide all or most of the investment to build infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, and generate profits from lucrative contracts to maintain the infrastructure long after it has been built.
These public-private partnerships, McAteer warns, will shape almost every aspect of Labour’s agenda in government – from its plans for house-building to energy generation and distribution – and will represent a bad deal for the public.
“Private investment is by definition more expensive than public investment, because of the high returns that financial institutions expect to make for their shareholders,” MacAteer said. “These returns have to be paid for in some way, so ultimately, the costs get passed on to households through higher bills.”
The financial services sector has consolidated its relationship with Labour in different ways. HSBC has had a staffer in Reynolds’ office for almost a year, for example, and NatWest had a similar arrangement with the new business secretary for a few months prior to that. Staffers seconded from the firms have been involved in policy development and business engagement – but because they are still paid by their employers while working for Labour, the Electoral Commission classes the arrangements as political donations.
Then there are two advisory panels made up of executives from major financial institutions, which Labour set up while in opposition but that will continue to advise it on where and how to deploy billions worth of private sector investment in government. One board, the National Wealth Fund Taskforce, is headed by Mark Carney, the former Bank of England director general who now works for Brookfield Asset Management. The other, the British Infrastructure Council, includes senior figures from investment firms such as M&G and BlackRock.
McAteer warns these advisory panels constitute a major conflict of interest. “The British Infrastructure Council is full of representatives from firms that stand to financially benefit, who will not just be determining where the money goes, but in what form does the money go, what are the terms of the deals, and that the capital is de-risked before they’ll commit the finance.
“There’s a reason why they want to be on this infrastructure council, they’re not charities. This is not a criticism, it’s just how finance institutions work, and how markets work. They exist to get the best deal for their shareholders and their owners.
“This thing has been sold as a win-win for the economy and for the investors, but somebody pays for that. Ordinary households pay for it, and more importantly, because they don’t have a say in this, it will be future generations who will pay for this.”
He added: “Because these firms will have ownership of the economy and they’ll be able to extract value for as long as that infrastructure lasts. Ordinary people are really going to end up on the wrong side of some very, very badly designed transactions here, shaped by the financial institutions in the City of London.
“They’ve been lobbying for this for a couple of years – and they’ve got what they wanted.”
openDemocracy reached out to each of the firms mentioned above, but only HSBC provided a response. A spokesperson said: “HSBC regularly engages with the major political parties in the UK on issues facing our customers and the wider financial services industry.”
The consultants
If the City of London’s financial institutions stand to win big from Labour’s PFI 2.0, then so, too, do the City management consultancies and accountancies that work so closely with them.
Firms such as the ‘Big Four’ consultancies – Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – and the industry lobbying body, the Management Consultants Association, have met with senior Labour figures at least 13 times since March last year.
Lord Sikka, a Labour peer and Emeritus professor of accounting at the University of Essex, said his party should not be working so closely with management consultancies.
“I think this new form of PFI would be disastrous, it would be a continuation of what we’ve seen in the UK since the late 1970s, a kind of right-wing coup which has seen a restructuring of the state so that it has become a guarantor of corporate profits, rather than an entrepreneurial state which invests,” Sikka said.
“PFI, privatisation and outsourcing – the very things these companies advise on and profit from – are all examples of that.”
Though Starmer doesn’t appear to have attended many of the meetings openDemocracy has uncovered, he was present at a day of business roundtable events at EY’s London offices in March 2023. There, the Labour leader, along with Reeves and Reynolds, heard from business leaders about “the potential value of public and private sector collaboration”, according to a LinkedIn post by EY’s managing partner. The trio returned to EY in November, along with the now chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, for similar discussions with a few dozen business leaders.
Jones has also attended secretive meetings with elusive consultant Hakluyt, which was founded by former MI6 operatives in 1995 and claims to work with “at least one of the world’s top five corporations in every major sector globally” and “three-quarters of the top 20 private equity firms in the world”. The firm also organised a dinner with Labour MP Peter Kyle, then the shadow secretary for science, innovation and technology, while he was in the US earlier this year.
Hakluyt counts among its advisory board former executives from Rolls Royce and Coca-Cola, as well as former senior civil servants and politicians. It has previously been linked with large oil and gas interests, having been accused by The Sunday Times in 2001 of deploying an agent to spy on Greenpeace campaigners on behalf of oil companies. In recent years Hakluyt has sought to “demystify” and says it now has “no relationship with the spooky world”. A spokesperson said Hakluyt is not a lobbying organisation and does not advise political parties.
Speaking at last year’s Labour Party Conference, Reeves pledged to slash public spending on consultants if elected. This promise also made it into the party’s manifesto. But as economists and authors Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington highlight in their book, The Big Con, the industry has been known to offer its services pro-bono during times of austerity, in hopes of securing lucrative paid contracts in future. In 2011, the then head of public sector at KPMG described the strategy to the Guardian, in the context of working with David Cameron’s coalition government: “We can’t afford to [work pro bono] indefinitely, but we can in the short-term. We’re hoping to position ourselves well when the government decides it is willing to pay.”
In a similar vein, when Labour’s shadow Treasury team was working on its aforementioned plan for financial services, City consultancy Oliver Wyman donated a staff member to help out – at a cost of more than £58,000 for the past year, according to Electoral Commission data. Senior staffers at leading consultancies Grant Thornton and EY have held parliamentary passes as members of Starmer’s team for the past year or so, according to the register of MPs’ staff interests. Since 2021, firms including PwC and Baringa have provided combined pro-bono services to the party worth more than £650,000.
“There are huge questions about why these firms have been providing free staff,” Lord Sikka said, “because obviously that has a cost to them and they would expect a return because they’ve made an investment.”
None of the firms mentioned above responded to openDemocracy’s request for comment.
Labour is sending a clear message to arms dealers – that it will be business as usual
The arms dealers
In March last year, Labour’s then shadow defence secretary, John Healey, and minister for defence procurement, Chris Evans, filed into a function room in the Churchill War Rooms along with executives from 20 of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers, including BAE Systems, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Rheinmetall and Rolls Royce.
The private event at the historical attraction in Westminster was arranged by public affairs firm Rud Pedersen. The firm’s head of defence and security is a former Labour staffer who worked in the party’s shadow defence team between December 2018 and September 2020.
Since last March, party figures have met with representatives from defence firms on at least 13 occasions, including two visits to sites run by BAE Systems and German defence contractor Rheinmetall. Labour’s then shadow science minister Chi Onwurah and armed forces minister Luke Pollard attended a private meeting – hosted by the industry lobbying body, ADS Group – with BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Thales at the Labour Party Conference.
A BAE Systems spokesperson said: “As the UK’s largest defence company, employing more than 45,000 people in the UK with thousands more in the supply chain, we regularly engage with political representatives to increase awareness and understanding of the significant contribution our industry makes to the UK’s security and prosperity.”
Most recently, Reeves attended a private client roundtable event hosted by lobbying firm Headland in March this year. The CEO of German AI defence startup Helsing was also present, as was Headland staffer and new Labour MP, Gregor Poynton.
While Labour has consistently ruled out progressive policies such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap or boosting local government funding, it has committed to increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, up from 2.3% last year. Despite a YouGov poll from April indicating that the majority of the public backs a ban on exporting arms to Israel, the party has declined to call for an end to arms sales to the country.
Emily Apple from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade described arms trade lobbyists’ access to the upper echelons of the Labour Party as “hugely alarming”.
She said: “These meetings give [some of] the companies profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza a huge amount of influence over Labour’s future defence and foreign policy. This rings alarm bells over whether a future Labour government will uphold international law and impose an arms embargo on Israel or any other human rights-abusing regime.
“These companies profit from death and destruction. Labour should be taking a stand and reducing the influence of these death merchants on political policy. Instead, these meetings mean Labour is sending a clear message to arms dealers – that it will be business as usual for them to continue boosting their share prices through perpetuating conflict and misery across the world.”
openDemocracy reached out to each of the firms mentioned above, but only BAE Systems responded. A spokesperson said: “As the UK’s largest defence company, employing more than 45,000 people in the UK with thousands more in the supply chain, we regularly engage with political representatives to increase awareness and understanding of the significant contribution our industry makes to the UK’s security and prosperity.”
If business wins, who loses?
On Friday morning, during his first address to the nation as prime minister, Starmer said voters had given him a mandate “to do politics differently”. But the representatives of big business, finance and the arms trade, which have worked hard to influence his party, will hope it plans to continue the status quo: prioritising their interests over those of working people.
One week earlier, as now-chancellor Rachel Reeves prepared for a Monday morning sit-down with the heads of financial firms, the couriers’ branch of the IWGB trade union held its annual group meeting in a sunny courtyard in east London. There, some of the most marginalised workers in the UK reflected on the struggles and victories of the past year and looked ahead to the future.
The IWGB, one of many smaller independent trade unions with no affiliation to the Labour Party, works across a number of sectors where the power gap between workers and employers is most acute. From Hartlepool to Hackney, its members are outsourced security guards and cleaners, foster carers, receptionists and couriers.
Many of the corporations that have spent the past 18 months wooing Labour are the same firms severely exploiting these workers, the IWGB’s general secretary, Henry Chango Lopez, told openDemocracy.
“These huge corporations,” Chango Lopez said, “have access to vast sums of money to lobby governments – a method of policy influence that is simply not available to working people. That many senior members of the Labour Party have allowed those employers to get anywhere near influencing policy is indicative of where the government’s priorities lie.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during an interview at the Senedd, in Cardiff, Wales, during his tour of the UK following Labour’s victory in the 2024 General Election, July 8, 2024
ONE of the clearest messages from last week’s general election was the disillusionment very many British Muslims feel with the Labour Party.
Labour’s vote fell far further in constituencies with a large Muslim electorate, confirming the antipathy expressed in May’s local election results.
After that poll, the party claimed that it was ready to listen to the community’s concerns. Yet just a few weeks later, it axed Faiza Shaheen, a Muslim, as a party candidate in a brutal and unjustifiable fashion.
The core concerns of Muslims, who are in the great majority working-class, about Labour come under two well-understood headings.
First, there has been the persistent willingness of Starmer and his party apparatus to ignore or downplay evidence of Islamophobia. It is simply not taken as seriously as other forms of racism by Labour.
Indeed, Starmer has not seemed averse to consciously indulging in it, as when he made dog-whistle remarks about deporting Bangladeshis in the last week of the campaign.
Second, of course, is the party’s position on the genocide in Gaza, which it gave full-throated support to at the outset. For week after murderous week it refused to call for a ceasefire and only eventually did so when Washington had given permission to shift line.
The slaughter of Palestinians has aroused revulsion in all parts of the community. But there is no doubt that this indifference to the lives of Israel’s victims is particularly keenly felt in Muslim communities.
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.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
