Tag Archives: donations

Keir Starmer and Labour had earned the right to a bit celebration in Liverpool this week. Having turned Labour around from an utter mess to a party with the size of majority nobody should ever have, their Conference in Liverpool could have been an even bigger celebration than our display of sunshine and unbridled joy in Brighton last week.

However, the mood in Liverpool becomes gloomier with each headline.

And while some of the headlines are definitely the right wing press making trouble, others are signs of serious trouble within the Government.

Let’s take the fuss about the clothes first. Starmer,  his Deputy Angela Rayner and Chancellor Rachel Reeves tried to stem the damage from reports that they had taken thousands of pounds for work clothing from wealthy donors by announcing that they would no longer do so.

I find it difficult to muster up anything other than mild irritation about this. It absolutely does not look great to people who are struggling to pay the rent every month and there is an argument that this should have been blindingly obvious to those who benefitted from these generous donations. When you are taking a vital help with energy bills from poor pensioners and not doing anything about social care, you need to really think about how out of touch you can look if you are seen to be throwing yours or someone else’s money around. And they should maybe have seen that it would have been lumped together with everything we’ve heard about Tories in a recent years in a file marked “sleazy politicians.”

There is no equivalence between the profligate, venal, corrupt behaviour of the Tories, doing things like handing out billions of public money to their mates and the stories we have seen about Labour. Many people, on whose votes they rely, won’t necessarily look at the detail and see the massive difference in scale. They may well be propelled into the arms of populists as a result. And given that some of those populists earn an almost six figure sum for a few hours’ work a month on the media, there is an irony there.

As far as the clothing is concerned, maybe that is a bit on us as well. It is perfectly possible to look smart by picking up a dress and jacket, or suit from some well known High Street stores, but we all have unconscious biases about how people look that have been fed by the media for years. We also know that those biases apply much more to women than they do to men.

When it comes to Keir Starmer’s box at Arsenal, I can see his point of view on this. If he were to stay in the stands, the security would undoubtedly cost a fortune and we’d all be complaining about that. You can see why he thinks that having a box is less disruptive and solves that problem. Going to the football is something that he has long done with his son, who is not going to be a boy forever and I can’t find it in my heart to grudge him that.  In isolation, I don’t think anyone would have really bothered about this. The trouble is it’s being lumped in with all the other stuff.