Labour ‘taking water pistol to knife fight’ as Starmer pays back freebies
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Keir Starmer has agreed to pay back money from gifts he accepted since becoming Prime Minister - but why’s it taken so long?
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Read time: 3 minutes
In brief:
- Keir Starmer has announced he will repay £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality he received, including Taylor Swift concert tickets amid ongoing criticism.
- While no official rules were broken, there's discussion about whether the current guidelines are sufficient or if "common sense" should play a larger role.
- Labour's handling of the controversy has been ineffective, The News Agents argue.
What’s the story?
Keir Starmer has announced that he will pay back £6,000 worth of freebies after weeks of ongoing backlash and criticism over gifts and hospitality he’s received since becoming Prime Minister.
Whilst no rules have been broken - MPs are allowed to accept gifts and donations as long as they are properly declared - Starmer has also said he will no longer accept donations of clothing as Prime Minister.
Lord Alli, a Labour peer and the party’s biggest donor, donated £32,000 of clothes and glasses to Starmer when he was leader of the opposition.
The £6,000 payment Starmer is making now is for six tickets to see Taylor Swift at Wembley in the summer, plus tickets to the races and for a clothes rental agreement with a designer.
The “freebies row” story broke at the end of August, and Starmer has attempted to shut it down multiple times, initially saying he had done nothing wrong. But now, Starmer has said it was “right” for him to repay the cost of some gifts.
However, while Starmer has said he will pay back some of the donations, he’s not called on other members of his cabinet to do so.
Which leaves a lot of confusion over what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, who’s right and who’s wrong.
Do the rules around gifts and donations need to change after Labour's 'freebie row'?
Do the rules around donations and gifts need to change?
The “arbitrariness” of Starmer’s latest decision leaves things feeling very complicated, Emily argues.
“Why this £6000, but not the last £6000? Why Kier, but not the cabinet?”
A Downing Street spokesman has confirmed that the ministerial code will be updated with “a new set of principles on gifts and hospitality”, with the Prime Minister saying “until now politicians have used their best individual judgment to decide".
Jon argues these things should be a matter of common sense.
“I didn't think there was anything wrong with taking the Taylor Swift tickets. I don't think it is a big deal. I think you should have said ‘they're a very big music publishing company. They invited us. It's declared;”. Whereas, taking £32,000 worth of clothes, he says, “just looks absurd”.
But Lewis isn't so sure.
The rules, Lewis says, have changed. Not the official rules MPs are bound by, but rather “the rules of the game”.
Lewis says this is evident by how drastically the narrative has changed since Starmer attended the Swift concert back in June, and no one questioned it - even though most probably assumed he didn’t pay for the tickets himself - to now.
“The narrative has been shifted by the media and by the papers in particular, and the Conservative Party who are determined to really run with this story.”
“So, it’s not common sense,” Lewis concludes.
Emily thinks we have moved into what she calls a “values based system of politics”, which makes things complicated.
“At one time it ought to have been enough to say ‘that's what the rules allow. If you don't like the rules, change the rules’”, she says.
“Everything about politics is now much more honed in a values space, which is very, very hard to define, and that's where you get sentiments like, ‘oh, it made me feel sick’, or ‘I didn't like it’, or ‘it didn't pass the smell test’ which is a very hard thing to legislate against.”
This likely, Emily says, is less about the gifts themself, and more about the hypocrisy people feel Starmer has shown.
“Are you just cross with Keir because he was angry with Boris Johnson and the wallpaper, as opposed to cross with Keir because he accepted the glasses and the ticket?”
Why has it taken Starmer so long to nip this story in the bud?
Lewis says Starmer and his team are fighting a losing battle with the press, who appear to be one step ahead on this story.
And paying back some of the donations won’t go very far.
“It feels right now that the Labour Party is taking a water pistol to a knife fight”, he says. Emily and Jon also agree that Labour’s handling of this story since it broke, and their inability to nip it in bud quickly, has made it far worse than it ever had to be.
“Every intervention that they make just seems to make it a bigger story, another news cycle, and on and on it goes,” says Jon.
It’s the indecisiveness that has let this story linger.
A confident government, Emily says, would have stood firm on one stance or the other. Either telling the public to ‘get over it’, because they’d done nothing wrong, or admitting fault and paying the money back within 48 hours.
“They seem deeply unprepared,” Emily says. “I'm wondering whether it's something as simple as they actually haven't been in power in the new media age.”
“Tony Blair didn't have a mobile phone,” she reminds everyone.
Listen to the full discussion on today's episode of The News Agents.
