1 October 2024updated 07 Oct 2024 1:57pm

The row over Labour’s “freebies” will carry on

Handouts stick with voters inured to thinking of politicians as greedy.

Photo by Hollie Adams / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Even before Rosie Duffield’s flaming resignation letter, the Labour “freebies” row was running out of control. So what, you ask? Here’s what: if ever there was a moment which opened the door to the swamping of the old party system, possibly by Reform in five years’ time, this is it.

Keir Starmer and his top team are furious about the false equivalence with Boris Johnson and the vengefulness of a media they have spent so long on their knees offering bouquets to. So too are they angry about the deep intrusion into a family who never asked to stand on a public balcony.

Duffield has been at loggerheads with the party leadership for ages, but too many voters will recognise her molten anger: “Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering […]. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.”

Let’s get back to the serious stuff, ministers say, to transforming the lives of ordinary people. Write about NHS reforms being brought in by Wes Streeting, they insist; write about the Budget if you must. But this? It’s chaff. It blows away.

Unfortunately, self-righteous anger is the wrong response to these revelations. It grossly underestimates public damage being done, and has so far offered no way of hosing down the firestorm of this story.

Labour is right to be angry about the intentions of some of those who are pushing the story. Robert Jenrick, so fluently ferocious in his denunciations of Starmer, has taken £75,000 from an indebted company that has never made a profit and has no employees, and which is itself funded by a loan from another company based in the British Virgin Islands. Who’s behind that? Compared to Waheed Alli, a very public and long-term Labour supporter, it’s opaque.

Such comparisons are politically useless, however. Polling suggests the public has concluded that both sides of mainstream politics are the same: both greedy, both awful. Busy working people don’t make granular comparisons; they look at the headlines.

Nor is there any point in blaming the press. It’s like a hippo blaming the Limpopo for mud. Journalists are bringing their editors and proprietors what they want: stories that are easy to understand and generate an emotional response.

The closest parallel is the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009, broken by the Daily Telegraph, with its litany of “flipped” housing, rental dodges and claims for luxury furniture or moat cleaning. It came at a moment when voters were under great financial pressure, and it also went right to the top. Tony Blair’s expenses were, it seemed, shredded by mistake.

That was 15 years ago, but memories should still be fresh. Under the then director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, four parliamentarians faced charges of false accounting and were jailed. A key Telegraph journalist on the story was the deputy editor Tony Gallagher, who is now editor of the Times.

This is a parallel, not a repeat, because, so far as we know, no laws or even parliamentary rules have been broken this time. But it is a meaningful echo of 2009, because of the contrast between voters who are still struggling with the cost of living and the freebies handed out. Clothes worth £32,000, VIP access to concerts, the football tickets, gifts to other ministers – it sticks in the minds of voters inured to thinking of politicians as greedy.

It would be silly to say that any specific event now will shift a general election in five years’ time. Tony Blair suffered serious “squalls” as Pat McFadden called them, early in his time, and went on to romp home. Starmer has been unusually open and frank about his motivation, and that’s good. But the damage is serious. We know that right across the West, as economies struggle and life chances shrivel, an angrily anti-politics mood is marching. Whether you call it populism or the hard-right, it challenges the liberal democratic order we have lived under. Here, the Tory leadership contenders are trying to outflank Reform on migration, community relations and crime, which is also nearly out of control across the country.

Starmer himself has acknowledged the danger of a huge snap-back. At a New Statesman gathering in July he told us, referring to populism in Europe, “Do not think for a moment that that could not happen here. It could – and it might – if we fail in our project of delivering change.”

And this is what, for his supporters, is so infuriating: this young government is delivering change in so many areas – speeding up planning and pushing ahead on NHS reform; rolling out school breakfast clubs; delivering on its workers’ rights agenda, and, we hope, finding new investment by the time of the Budget.

Maybe delivery will keep Labour in power, but these stories make it less likely. There is no point in hoping it will blow over. We need a cross-party, binding review of how ministers are funded, and which acknowledges the cost and benefits – for remember, senior ministers can, if they wish, be wealthy for the rest of their lives. Changes in the transparency rules have already been hurriedly announced. But like MPs’ allowances, political donations should be policed by a wholly independent body. Money and power: these last weeks must provoke a shift in culture, not an angry flinch from reality.