The tide of sleaze now lapping round prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ankles shows no sign of abating. No sooner has he fessed up to receiving over £20,000 worth of pounds’ worth of posh frocks and trendy specs (donated to his wife by investment banker, Labour donor, peer of the realm and all-round social parasite Lord Alli), than he is plunged into allegations of even more ham-fisted influence-peddling.
It seems that, on hearing that Taylor Swift, coming to tour in Britain, was having difficulty convincing the police that the VIP police escort she was being offered was insufficient, the PM put pressure on the police to bump the escort level up from VIP to VVIP.
The police stuck by their guns at first, but then caved under pressure. The Swift entourage got what they wanted, the full VVIP deal (not cheap, considering all that police overtime pay). And it seems that the Swift camp was very appreciative, handing out fistfuls of concert tickets to Sir Keir, his wife and various other freeloaders.
Under normal circumstances, this kind of persistent low-level dishonesty would not excite much interest in Westminster and Whitehall circles, where corruption is in the very air that everyone breathes and everyone has a stake in covering each other’s back.
But these are not normal circumstances. Starmer’s popularity has fallen off a cliff, his flip-flops over winter fuel payments and the two-child benefit cap have made him a laughing stock, his plans to enforce £5bn of welfare cuts has deepened the anger of those at the bottom of the heap, and Labour’s derisory performance in local elections has the government running for cover.
By reminding everyone that sleaze is not the monopoly of the Tories alone, that insatiable greed is the mainspring of all capital accumulation, and that corruption is inseparable from bourgeois rule, Sir Keir is helpfully making clear that the Britain he wants to ‘defend’ by force of arms is the continued dictatorship of monopoly capitalism.
Besides a war to reassert the domination of finance capital abroad, the other war this Labour government is preparing for is a civil war against the working class, and we can only thank our PM for clarifying this.
This lesson must not be forgotten as Starmer calls on the working class to unite behind his government and its City bosses to ‘defend the country’ from the ‘Russian menace’.
