The Labour Party: for the money not the few?

THE Labour Party is engulfed in a factional dispute that seems to grow more serious by the day.

Despite pledging to bring unity to the party, Sir Keir Starmer has taken a series of controversial decisions that have deepened fault-lines between what we might call Labour’s socialist and centrist wings.

An unfortunate byproduct of factional disputes is that facts can become secondary.

Therefore, we decided to perform an objective analysis that goes to the heart of the Labour tradition: we analysed the economic base.

Details of every donation made to Jeremy Corbyn and Starmer are recorded by the Electoral Commission and the Register of Members’ Interests.

We tallied these and cross-referenced the various individual and group donors to produce a detailed report you can read in full at mstar.link/TheFreePressLabourAnalysis.

What did our raw analysis of the funders behind Corbyn and Starmer reveal?

Corbyn v Starmer: Donors

Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015. He received a total of £512,417 in donations from that point up to the time of writing.

Starmer received few significant political donations prior to this year. However, it is notable that Starmer received a greater amount in donations in 2020 (£708,605) than Corbyn received in five years at the forefront of Labour.

Lord Waheed Alli and Robert Latham donated £100,000 to Starmer.

Martin Taylor donated £95,000. Lord Clive Hollick and Sir Trevor Chinn donated £50,000.

The majority of Starmer’s funding is accounted for by personal donations of this type.

In contrast, the majority of the funding Corbyn received since 2015 came from trade unions.

Corbyn’s three largest donors were: Unite (£141,618); National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (£50,000); and the Communication Workers Union (£50,249).

The largest donation Corbyn received from an individual was £7,000.

This came from Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union.

According to our research, Starmer received a minimum of nine donations from individuals in excess of this amount.

The individual donations mentioned above are all larger by a factor of seven to 14 than the biggest individual donation received by Corbyn.

Digging into the details

When we deepened the level of our analysis, cross-referencing donors and significant groups within Labour, an even more interesting picture emerged.

A few names recurred during analysis of Corbyn donors. For instance, Jon Lansman loaned Corbyn £5,123 (subsequently repaid) and the organisation he founded, Momentum, donated £50,000.

Only the full article can do justice to the web of connections revealed by our analysis of Starmer’s donors. Nonetheless, we provide a summary below of the most striking patterns.

Owen Smith is an integral part of the story. Smith stood against Corbyn in the 2016 Labour leadership election that was triggered by a revolt of the shadow cabinet.

We cross-referenced individuals who donated to Starmer and Smith, those who donated to Starmer and centrist pressure groups, and those who donated to Smith and the same centrist pressure groups and found that a total of 14 donors recurred.

They provided Smith, like Starmer, with a level of funding for a single leadership campaign that dwarfed the amount Corbyn raised over five years.

Indeed, the £866,905 Smith raised was even greater than the amount raised by Starmer in 2020.

Several of the donors to Smith were Labour funders who not only turned their financial might against Corbyn but voiced their disgruntlement publicly.

Martin Clarke described Corbyn’s leadership as “simply so alien to my own views of what a Labour Party is all about” that he cut off his funding.

Billionaire Peter Coates, who donated £200,000 to Labour during the Blair years, said he remained a member of the party under Corbyn “through gritted teeth.”

Individual donors to Starmer were also heavily involved in the funding of groups within Labour that were critical of Corbyn’s leadership.

Labour Together is a group of MPs who were heavily implicated in anti-Corbyn activity.

Many participated in the 2016 mass resignation and are also members of the Tribune Group, which received funding from Labour Tomorrow.

Labour Together has only two donors: Trevor Chinn provided £35,000 and Martin Taylor £171,000.

Taylor donated a whopping £230,000 to Labour Tomorrow.

According to the Independent, this group was “was set up to distribute funds to other Labour centrist groups,” such as Saving Labour.

In total, Taylor has donated £516,000 to Starmer or groups opposing Corbyn.

We note that figures within Labour once criticised Momentum for trying to influence the internal apparatus of the party!

Finally, in regards to the anti-semitism crisis that has engulfed Labour in recent months, it is worth pointing out that many donors to Starmer have publicly attributed blame to Corbyn or associated him with anti-semitism.

At least five of Starmer’s donors were signatories of the Labour peer letter to the Guardian in 2019 that was highly critical of Corbyn’s handling of anti-semitism.

At least three members of Starmer’s wider network of connections also signed. Other donors were signatories to letters with a similar purpose.

Chinn, the donor who recurred most often in our cross-referencing, is a member of the executive committee of the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom).

The group has been described by the Guardian as “Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation” and has been notably hostile to Corbyn, a long-time activist for Palestinian rights.

To be clear, our research does not attempt to draw direct links between donations and public statements on anti-semitism.

However, given that Corbyn was suspended from the party for stating “the scale of the anti-semitism problem was dramatically overstated for political reasons,” it seems relevant to highlight that Corbyn clearly did have political opponents within Labour and that these individuals seem to be heavily represented in the donor list for Starmer.

The picture

Our report into donations to Corbyn and Starmer found that:

• Six trade unions supported Corbyn versus three for Starmer.
• Two individuals with a peerage or knighthood supported Corbyn versus 15 for Starmer.
• One millionaire and/or former chief executive of a corporation supported Corbyn versus 12 for Starmer.
• Overall financial backing for Starmer significantly outweighed support for Corbyn.

We suggest that you do not require training in Marxism to look at each economic base and conclude that Starmer is going to drive the Labour Party to the right.

Indeed, the “hidden patterns” of Starmer’s funding, highlighted by our research, suggest that he is the “continuity candidate” of an infrastructure of Blairite funders, think tanks and internal pressure groups.

These groups/figures withdrew financial support from Corbyn’s “socialist” Labour, diverted resources into the pockets of his opponents and now fund Starmer as he attempts to define a brand more palatable to corporate interests.

The fact that this process has resulted in the suspension of Corbyn, the removal of the whip and threats to expel supportive left-wing elements of the party is, we would suggest, highly suspect when viewed in the light of our findings.

Is Labour for the many or for the money? For the workers or the owners?

We believe our report is suggestive of the direction in which the party is moving under Starmer.

Sean Rankin and Steven McCracken are from The Free Press (the-free-press.co.uk), a journal and teaching tool exposing propaganda in the mainstream media. You can follow The Free Press on Twitter or Facebook. You can read the full version of our report here.