Is Starmer’s Labour so corrupt that they’ve 'sold' candidacies?

Right, so whilst Rishi Sunak has been rightfully hammered over a Tory betting scandal, where one of his closest aide’s and former MP Craig Williams placed a bet on when he thought the General Election would be called when he might have been the beneficiary of insider information, followed by a second suspension for the same thing of Laura Saunders, the Tory candidate for Bristol North West, Labour are now embroiled in one as well, the same sleazy corruption that is characteristic of right wing politics pervading both parties, but certainly whilst hammering the Tories is easy right now, they deserve it after 14 years of trashing the country, ruining lives, acting with impunity in the interests of the wealthy, their donors, their own sodding leader, you don’t get much richer than Rich Rishi, they are electorally toast, so in my view as this election campaign goes on, we should be holding Starmer’s feet to the fire as the all but certain next Prime Minister and examining his conduct before he get’s too comfy. But there’s another reason here too though, because for as much as Labour’s latest source of shame is being described as a gambling scandal, that is framing it wrongly in my opinion. What I’d like to know and what I think the mainstream media should be asking, is why did a guy who donated £100,000 to Labour get selected for the seat he was stood in unopposed? Did he in fact buy his candidacy making a mockery of Starmer’s claims to only want high quality candidates, when if you’re rich enough, you get a free pass however bad you might be?
Right, so the headlines in my mind should be about a Labour candidate possibly having bought his candidacy, rather than the inevitable result of them bringing shame upon the party, for not actually vetting them past the point of their chequebook, high quality candidacy in Starmer’s Labour possibly being measured in the size of a given person’s bank balance.
By fixating on the gambling side of this story though, the mainstream media are able to directly compare the issue surrounding the Tory candidate Craig Williams, with the suspension of Labour’s Kevin Craig. You have a Tory who bet on when he thought the election was coming, when he might have had some inside knowledge of that, against a Labour candidate who bet on himself to lose! But whereas Craig Williams perhaps saw an opportunity, Kevin Craig’s story is so much worse and Labour are not being held accountable for this, because how the guy even became a Labour candidate sis actually the far bigger story in my view, there is no moral equivalence here and with the Tories as amoral as you get, what does that make Labour?
Kevin Craig is the CEO of a Westminster based lobbying firm called PLMR, for once where Starmer’s Labour is concerned, it is not a pro Israel lobbying firm, but a cursory snoop around their website highlights stories regarding healthcare, they acquired a company called Healthcomms Consulting, meaning they now likely lobby for private health interests and pharmaceutical companies, since nowhere in the blurb does it ever mention the NHS as an example, but there are other sectors mentioned too. Underlining that is a claim that he had pledged to give NHS privatisation fan Wes Streeting a further £39,000 towards the oh so convenient excuse of staffing costs, though I don’t suppose Wesley can expect that now.
Now PLMR’s connections to the Labour Party began only back in February of this year, as another of the firms lobbyists, Jack Abbott, had been selected by Labour to stand for the party in Ipswich, where Tory Tom Hunt currently holds a 5,400 majority. In order to raise Abbott’s profile, to lobby for their own lobbyist if you like, PLMR brought Rachel Reeves to Suffolk to speak to local business leaders and she agreed, so it was quite a coup.
Now I couldn’t possibly say whether this is connected to Reeves’ visit to Ipswich or not, but just one week later, PLMR’s CEO, Kevin Craig was announced as the Labour candidate for the neighbouring constituency of Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, again a seat which had been held for most of the last parliament by the Tories, it’s then Tory MP Dan Poulter, being one of three Tories Keir Starmer allowed to defect to his party, no questions asked.
Now according to two Labour sources who had spoken to OpenDemocracy on condition of anonymity, they confirmed that there had been no selection process, no vote and certainly no input from local members, just that Kevin Craig was the only candidate selected for Labour, a shortlist of one. There is imposing candidates and there is not even making a pretence of democratic process. It’s worth noting that for all of Labour’s faffing about in recent weeks imposing candidates in a rush as the election was called, they actually chose to shut local members out of the candidate selection process and allowed Labour’s National Executive Committee to take over selections as of last November. This of course led to 6 of those NEC members imposing themselves on safe seats and if that doesn’t scream corruption frankly, then I don’t know what does.
So was this all down to Rachel Reeves getting Kevin Craig on a ballot?
Well it’s not like he wasn’t known to the party already. Back in May of 2023, Craig donated £100,000 to the Labour Party, putting him in the top 20 private donors to the Labour Party full stop.
One week after that donation, Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds appeared at an event chaired by PLMR to talk about the economy, Labour’s manifesto and how it was developing at that point and how best to engage with Starmer’s Labour, well how many times has Starmer referred to his party as the party of business, to which we as working class people have looked at it and thought to ourselves, so it’s the party of the bosses now? A PLMR event, a lobbying firm full of their clients and they’ve put a likely future minister in front of them. £100,000 investment for such a return perhaps? Apparently since then at least 7 more Labour figures have spoken at PLMR events and then along comes the offer of a parliamentary candidacy for the next party of government with all but certainty and a good chance of being part of that government it seems. Perhaps too good a chance, when the opportunity of making more money by betting against such an outcome presented itself. After all, most people who stand to be MPs usually desperately want to be MPs and winning is absolutely what they set their sights on. In this case, that does not appear to be true at all, so did Craig even want it, or was he literally just handed it as a thank you for his donations and his making people Starmer’s lot very much want to court accessible to them?
As the mainstream media have of course fixated upon, Craig bet on himself to lose, the majority held by Dan Poulter when he won the seat for the Tories in 2019 was over 23,000. Given how badly the Tories are set to lose, I wouldn’t describe that as necessarily insurmountable, but Craig allegedly in fun, bet on the new Tory candidate, a chap called Patrick Spencer, to win. I’ll come back to him in a moment, because he’s also relevant.
When we think of people betting on themselves to lose, we think of footballers taking a dive, or a boxer throwing a fight in a certain round, we don’t think of politicians doing it, they are usually so self serving, yet here we have a scenario where, conceivably – and it has to be said Kevin Craig has stated his intention was to give the money to charity – where he could have effectively been taking a dive in a General Election, in a position to engineer his loss effectively. It’s much easier to plan to lose than plan to win after all.
All of this means there are questions that Labour need to answer and whilst the Gambling Commission inquiry are what the media are focussing on, how Kevin Craig became a candidate at all should be the bigger story.
Was it wooing Rachel Reeves in February when promoting one of his firms employees, or was she just the latest in a line of Labour politicians since Jonathan Reynolds rocking up to a PLMR event to press the flesh amongst the business types, lobbyist clients for whom access to politicians, especially ones likely to make up the next government are incredibly valuable? If Reeves was just the latest Labour MP to attend an event since that £100,000 donation though, has that donation effectively bought all of this Labour access and indeed this parliamentary candidacy? We need to know because Starmer has made such a song and dance about only wanting high quality candidates standing for Labour, to excuse him purging left wingers who would challenge him. But if candidacies have effectively been bought, as this case can be seen as, it makes a mockery of any such notion of high quality candidates and that the corruption under Starmer’s leadership is more widespread than just NEC members awarding themselves safe seats. Have any other seats been effectively bought by other wealthy candidates?
I said I’d come back to that chap Patrick Spencer too. You see the Tories have no moral high ground here either, since Spencer’s father, a billionaire Tory peer, gave the Tories quarter of a million, his biggest donation in years, and lo and behold, his son gets selected for this ostensibly safe Tory seat, but in this election that’s not guaranteed. What a sorry place to live where both the Tory and Labour candidacies were apparently purchased! Rotten borough’s eat your heart out.
This is the real scandal, yet this is the one mainstream media are avoiding and again it’s independent media like OpenDemocracy, where the real news we need to know can actually be found.
And it’s not even the only example of lobbying going hand in hand with perceived corruption in Labour either, as it appears members of the Israel Lobby are making up the shortfall in campaign support for Mr Israel himself, Luke Akehurst, one of those NEC members imposing themselves on a safe seat up in North Durham. When your own party can’t stand you, or even just hates the way these awful right wingers are imposing themselves upon the populace, it’s not a good sign of things to come, get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.