ON THE EVE of this week’s Labour Party conference, left-wing Labour MP Diane Abbott attacked the Labour leadership saying that under Keir Starmer the Labour Party is ‘in the pocket of millionaires’.
Abbott was responding to a comment by Ellie Reeves, Labour Chairwoman and sister of Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Ellie Reeves had defended Starmer and Cabinet members after revelations that they pocketed thousands of pounds in ‘gifts’ from multi-millionaires for clothing, holidays, and tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, amongst others perks.
Reeves had defended Starmer and his fellow money grabbing Cabinet members saying: ‘Labour’s general election victory was only possible because under Keir’s leadership we changed the party.’
To which Abbott replied scathingly: ‘Changed it into an organisation whose leaders are in the pocket of millionaires.’ The millionaire Labour peer Lord Alli has given nearly £1 million to Labour as well as donating £16,200 worth of ‘work clothing’ to Starmer.
But this gift of £1 million was overshadowed when in the run-up to the general election £4 million was handed to the Labour Party by Quadrature Capital, a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands with shares worth hundreds of millions of pounds in fossil fuels, private health firms, arms manufacturers and asset managers.
In 2023, of the £21.5 million in cash received by Labour just £5.9 came from trade unions while £14.5 million came from companies and individuals.
The Starmer-led Labour government is not so much in the pockets of millionaires, as bought and paid for by hedge funds and multi-billionaires who have invested in a Labour government and are dictating that all the pain of the economic crisis of British capitalism is dumped on the backs of the working class.
Companies with interests in gouging a profit from privatising the NHS, will have welcomed the announcement from Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting that he is postponing building over the 40 new hospitals proposed by the previous Tory government, on the grounds that they were now ‘undeliverable and unaffordable’.
With the NHS brought to its knees through all the years of Tory cuts and austerity, new hospitals are an absolute necessity for the health of the entire population.
But for Streeting, who has a record of welcoming private companies to ‘save’ the NHS, they are unaffordable for British capitalism.
No wonder hedge funds with millions in private health companies are falling over themselves to bankroll a Labour government prepared to smash the NHS and open it up to the privateers.
The same Starmer Labour government is prepared to cut the winter fuel allowance to ten million pensioners this winter, condemning thousands to freezing at home while Starmer and the rest of his entitled Cabinet swan about in designer clothes and revel on free holidays.
On Sunday morning, Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham, in a BBC interview, accused Labour of ‘walking us into austerity mark 2’ and that: ‘Nobody wants to see that. Workers don’t want to see it. Communities don’t want to see it. And I can tell you, pensioners don’t want to see it either.’
In fact, workers are demanding action to put an end to this drive by the Starmer government to force the working class to pay with their lives to keep bankrupt British capitalism from drowning in its debt-fuelled crisis.
The only thing holding the working class back is the leadership of the TUC, which merely offers words of criticism but refuses to organise the full strength of the trade union movement to bring down this treacherous Labour government.
The TUC has called for a ‘workplace day of action’ on Thursday 10th October in support of an immediate ceasefire in the genocidal war in Gaza.
What is required is for this one-day action to become the start of an indefinite general strike to bring down Starmer’s government and for the working class to seize the power and go forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and end all support for the Zionist state.
Socialist Revolution is the only way forward.
Join the WRP and the Young Socialists to build up the leadership required for its victory.
