How the right-wing bank-rolled Keir Starmer

By a Labour member

One of the few good things to come out of the Blair/Brown Labour government was the regular publication of the register of MPs financial interests. The latest version shows the huge amounts of money that went into bank-rolling Keir Starmer’s bid for the Labour leadership in early 2020 and how his total campaign donations exceeded £700,000.

The timetable for the leadership election was set out by the NEC on January 6, but long before then Starmer was the darling of the mainstream (anti-Labour) media. Within days of the official race starting, he was considered the favourite of the right and money was pouring into his campaign, mostly from wealthy individuals.

Big donors gave an average of £16,000 each

When Jeremy Corbyn stood for the leadership, in 2015 and again the following year, his campaign was notable for the fact that the overwhelming majority of his finances came in small donations from tens of thousands of Labour Party members and supporters.

In the case of Keir Starmer, it was the exact opposite. The published list shows a total of only 35 individual donors, each giving the kind of donation that would be an impossibility for an ordinary worker – an average of £16,600. The smallest was £1,500 and the largest £100,000. That hefty bung came from Robert Latham, a retired barrister and no doubt an old professional acquaintance of Starmer’s.

Another notable individual donation, and the second highest, was £50,000 from Sir Trevor Chinn. He is an active supporter of the Israeli government who regularly gives financial support, not the Labour Party as such, but to the private offices of selected Labour MPs.

In an article in December 2019, in the aftermath of the election defeat, we wrote in Left Horizons, about the intentions of the right wing: “Following Labour’s election defeat, the right-wing of the party have begun what will be a protracted and determined attempt to roll the party back to the Blair years…The campaign to eviscerate the party of its radical membership and to ‘Torify’ the party programme will be supported over the coming months by all the mainstream media, the BBC and all the lords and ladies of an establishment – those who opposed Labour in the election.”

Starmer’s ‘ten pledges’ were a cynical ploy to win votes

That is exactly why the rich and powerful coughed up so much to support Starmer. The only way Sir Keir was able to garner votes from members was to offer the pretence of at least a modicum of radicalism. He was at pains to emphasise he was ‘Not Corbyn’ – a more or less continuous mantra since then – but his ten pledges were aimed to pull in fodder.

Point number five, for example, reads as follows: “Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.”

This ‘pledge’, like the other nine, was a cynical piece of deception, and there was never a chance that these words would translate into action. But unfortunately, they fooled a lot of party members. There was never the slightest chance that Starmer would stick to anything remotely radical in his ten pledges…and his backers knew it. Why else would thirty-five individuals cough up a grand total of more than half a million pounds – £583,958, to be exact – for him to fight a leadership campaign?

Hotel ‘freebies’ for Starmer and staff

Apart from the individual donations recorded in the register, there is a total of over £47,000 from companies, including what appear to be hotel ‘freebies’ for Starmer and his staff roaming up and down the UK to address meetings.

Although it was only 11% of his total of donations, it ought to surprise affiliated union members that £81,455 was donated by three trade unions.

USDAW and Community each gave £25,000 to his campaign. Shop-workers, among the lowest-paid of all workers, yet still on the front line in terms of regular contact with the public during the pandemic, ought to be asking their union, USDAW, what they are going to get out of the donations? Will Keir Starmer be backing moves to increase the statutory minimum wage to £15 an hour, or even £10 an hour. Somehow, we doubt it.

The biggest union donor was UNISON, whose members ought to be asking why the union donated cash and money in kind to the total of £31,455. What are low-paid health and local government workers going to get out of Starmer’s election? There has certainly been nothing for them to get excited about yet.

Free publicity from mainstream media

The massive donations to the Starmer leadership election are all published and available for the public to peruse. But what was far more useful to Keir Starmer – and actually worth millions of pounds – was the free publicity given to him by the mostly anti-Labour mainstream media. The same newspapers that had demonised, lied about and distorted the views of Jeremy Corbyn, and which had urged their readers to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019, now supported Keir Starmer for leadership.

He who pays the piper calls the tune. The massive £712,709 donated by a variety of right-wing individuals and organisations, just to make him Labour leader, represent an investment, in making the Party ‘safe’ again. The rich and powerful backers of Starmer who bunged him nearly ninety per cent of his campaign funds, and the mainstream media who gave him unlimited publicity, did so precisely in the hope that the good knight would make sure that Labour no longer challenged the interests of the British establishment.

As far as the leader and the Shadow Cabinet go, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. It remains to be seen what happens when the membership of the Labour Party and the trade unions have their final say.