Keir Starmer’s freebie row is likely to blow over

F ormer Labour MP Rosie Duffield has ensured that the row over Keir Starmer accepting freebies will remain in the news by recently resigning from the Labour Party, stating that they care “more about greed and power than making a difference.”

About 18 months ago, I discussed Rishi Sunak’s ongoing complications with sleaze in the Conservatives. The problem for Sunak, I suggested, is that given that he promised to bring integrity, professionalism and accountability to high office, he was more exposed than most to questions of ethics and propriety.

And of course I would say this, but Starmer’s top team really should pay closer attention to me. It made perfect sense for him and his team to make hay while the sun shined in opposition and attack the Tories over standards in public life. Still, they ought to have known every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Given this, it’s quite surprising they weren’t better prepared to defend something like the freebies. Scandals in British public life tend to occur around questions of money, donations, and access. They could have narrowed it down even further by thinking, “that thing that we were critiqued for in the campaign – maybe it’ll be that?”

That said, while this has been a bad hand, badly played, it still might not matter. I’m reminded of the 1997 Bernie Ecclestone affair. For those who don’t know about this, it’s a real doozy – so much so that I still teach it to students because it looks like an open-and-shut case of money buying a political favour, but it probably wasn’t.

Shortly after Labour came to power in 1997, it was revealed that Ecclestone, then chief executive of Formula One, had donated £1 million before the election (having previously been a staunch Tory supporter). He went on to lobby for Formula One to be exempt from a tobacco advertising ban. Tony Blair personally intervened, and Ecclestone got his way.

Now, if you want to know why this probably wasn’t corruption, and why the government was likely to have exempted Formula One anyway, you’ll have to come to one of my classes.

This was far more consequential than Starmer accepting a few gifts – and Labour survived it with ease. Of all the perceived sins of the New Labour government, the Ecclestone affair doesn’t even hit the top 20.

Voters care about the bigger picture

Labour brushed the Ecclestone scandal off then, and can brush this one off now if it gets the big issues right. A recent YouGov poll of voters who said they are disappointed by Labour, 28% said it was because of changes to winter fuel payments and 16% said it was because of hitting pensioners or the poor. Only 2% said it was due to the freebies scandal.

This is perhaps like saying if you bag a hat-trick in a 3-2 victory no-one will care about the two own goals you scored. But that is largely how politics works. Labour should be much more worried about the perceived cruelty of its decisions than about Lord Alli’s benevolence.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives should avoid going too hard. Getting into a game of “who’s donor is dodgier?” won’t benefit anyone, especially given that Electoral Commission returns show that just over 40% of the opposition’s total donor income in the nine months leading up to the election came from Frank Hester, including after he was exposed for making racist, threatening comments.

This means that Labour’s current travails are much more likely to benefit Reform the most. The party now sits second in 98 seats, of which 89 have a sitting Labour MP. And while Reform probably wouldn’t like to get into a game of “who’s donor is dodgier” either, they’re insurgent populists – the same rules don’t apply. It’s unfair, but it’s the way it works. Just as no one seems to care that Donald Trump is really old.

What’s the alternative?

Crucially, the only logical conclusion is the one that no political party wants to spend too much time dwelling on.

British democracy has always been fuelled by donations – often from very rich individuals, businesses and trade unions – and the public really doesn’t like it. They think donors have an outsized influence on political decisions, whether they are donating millions to a campaign or providing hospitality and clothes.

Periodically, the law is changed and updated to try and address this – and the last major one was in the year 2000 in the wake of Ecclestone’s donation. The principle set into law then was that the system broadly worked, and it was certainly preferable to arrangements across much of Europe, where politics was funded primarily by the state. What was instead needed was greater public trust and transparency.

Transparency is great, these people thought, because it serves a double function. First, it disincentivises corrupt behaviour. As the old saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Second, it creates an engaged and educated citizenry who see these donor relationships for what they are and think, on balance, “this is fine”.

But sunlight isn’t actually the best disinfectant – bleach is. Providing more information is not an automatic route to trust. To do that would mean lots of people accessing the information regularly (I think there’s only one person in the country that does and he’s currently typing this sentence). The information would also have to point in the direction of stuff that people didn’t think was dodgy or weird. And we know that they do.

The only way to stop stories like the freebies row is to have a proper conversation about the alternative. The alternative is state funding. Therefore, and I suspect Labour and the Conservatives are aligned on this, there is no alternative.

But unless the bigger (societal) picture gets better and trust can be rebuilt, people will get angry about these arrangements. And very few will benefit. Except those on the fringes. Perhaps it’s time the adults had a chat?

GOING FURTHER

• Keir Starmer's freebies so far - see the full list | THE NATIONAL

• Starmer repays more than £6,000 in gifts after donations row | BBC NEWS

• Keir Starmer met Taylor Swift at London gig as row rumbles on over VIP security | THE MIRROR

• Ministers will be required to publish list of freebies to public | THE TELEGRAPH

• Reform UK have been trying to flog £300 tours of parliament to their members | THE LONDON ECONOMIC

• Boris Johnson hits out at ‘greedy’ Keir Starmer over freebies | THE GUARDIAN

• Boris Johnson slams Keir Starmer for freebies - despite taking donor cash for wedding do and holiday | THE MIRROR

• This betting scandal is the dying gasp of a tawdry Tory government forever tarred by Partygate and sleaze | THE GUARDIAN

• Westminster sleaze and scandals: All the MPs who are suspended or have lost the whip | THE INDEPENDENT

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 17 October 2024. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Number 10. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)