Keir Starmer is in trouble over lobbying. Following a drumbeat of stories over his seeming love of freebies, questions and scrutiny are swirling around clothing bought, glasses worn and flats borrowed. All of these gifts have been declared and made transparent, and so are within the rules. But that is not the problem, or the point.
It was already known that Starmer accepted more freebies than any other MP and accepted £82,000 of them in the last parliament (of which a third came from Labour Party donor Lord Alli). You can see an interactive list here. Questions spread to cover other ministers and MPs over clothing and hospitality and a whole range of gifts totalling £700,000. Analysis by Tortoise found that ‘The shadow cabinet has accepted more than £220,000 worth of free tickets and gifts for themselves or staff over the course of the last parliament’ including ‘Glastonbury, the Proms, the British Grand Prix, Cricket, Wimbledon’. For those feeling cynical, the level of freebies appears to have increased in line with Labour’s chances of winning. Stamer has now paid back more than £6000 worth of gifts and hospitality, which has been taken as a signal that something was wrong.
How damaging is it? The scandal has set off a wave of headlines and dominated discussion at the Labour conference and has, according to their own resignation letter, convinced one Labour MP to leave the party. YouGov found that a significant proportion of voters are aware of it to some degree, with 11% watching very closely and 23% fairly closely.
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Article originally appeared on the UK in a Changing Europe website.
The featured image appears courtesy of a Creative Commons License.
About the Authors
Dr Ben Worthy joined Birkbeck College in 2012 and is a senior lecturer in politics. His research interests include Government Transparency, Open Data, Political leadership, British Politics, Digital Democracy and Public Policy and Policy-making. He has written articles for Governance, Parliamentary Affairs and Public Administration. He has also written a number of reports and presented evidence to the Justice Select Committee.
Dr Michele Crepaz is a Vice-Chancellor Illuminate Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests lie at the intersection between comparative politics and public policy and he is particularly interested in the role of interest groups and transparency in politics.
