What to do with a party that won't help itself? This is a question that will variously crop up in political comment over the next four-and-a-half years about Labour. The scenario unfolds thus. A problem presents itself to Keir Starmer. An obvious course of action could be taken that would mitigate problems for the party, might in some instances be popular, and could help increase the chances of re-election in 2028/29. And the leadership resolutely refuses to do anything about it.
Take the Elon Musk/Reform love-in for example. News, or to be more accurate, rumours started by senior Tories that Donald Trump's money man wanted to donate $100m to Nigel Farage's private company has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Farage met Musk at Mar-a-Lago last week, and what began as gossip is now being taken seriously as a real possibility. With a hefty wodge deposited in the Reform leader's bank account, minus whatever "top up fee" he'd cream off, it would give Reform the sorts of resources that, realistically, only the Labour Party has got: a decent-sized full-time staff that can be bussed around the country, a Contact-Creator-style platform for voter ID, the budget for targeted social media advertising and literature, and the expensive "campaign specialists" capable of creating and running such an infrastructure. Reform does have a ceiling, but a professionalised operation could cause the two main parties a headache. Particularly the floundering Tories.
This has provoked calls for an overhaul of campaign financing laws. Quite sensible to stymie the influence of overseas billionaires trying to buy the future direction of British politics, you might think. 10 Downing Street, however, disagrees. An unnamed source (Morgan McSweeney) ruled out new rules governing foreign donations. "We’ll beat Reform by defeating their arguments rather than changing the rules to stop them getting money from Elon Musk ... You don’t successfully take on populists by changing the rules in bid to thwart them." Beating the extreme right by chasing them on immigration, you mean? Or conceding popular issues ripe for exploitation by a party from whom principle is merely a word in the dictionary? But taken on its own terms, the argument makes no sense. Farage's "populism" is quite conventional. It's "us", the pure, hard-done-to, innocent (white) Britons versus the corrupt establishment. As Musk and Trump are, for the moment, closely intertwined and that the president elect is largely reviled by public opinion here, the possibility of Farage pulling off a little man act with the richest man on the planet in his corner is fanciful to say the least.
Labour's cowardice speaks of an abject failure of political nerve. Except it doesn't. There are very simple reasons why Labour doesn't want changes to campaign financing, and that's because they benefit from it. We're not talking about the clean and extensively scrutinised donations from trade unions, but the bungs party coffers enjoy from the millionaire and billionaire donors Labour has courted under Starmer's leadership. They want this to continue with a minimum of public oversight because it raises awkward questions. The relationship between private health's donations to Labour and Starmer's enthusiasm to create more profitable opportunities for them in the NHS is a case in point, but there are others. More widely, if we're going to be talking negatively about foreign billionaires and British politics, that flags up the decades of vetoes one Australian billionaire has had on this country's enfeebled democracy, and the kowtowing and complicity generations of Labour politicians have had in maintaining this affair.
Billionaire money is simply a facet of how things work. Labour have made it quite clear that their project is not to change things for the better, but perfect the way of the state as is. That means no action, and another step toward embedding the extreme right as an every day feature of how we do our politics.
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