UnionPaws

Bridget, before you lecture others about “dodgy money” and write solemn letters to the Electoral Commission, you might want to take a long, hard look at Labour’s own funding record. Your party’s single largest-ever donation, £4 million, came in May 2024 from Quadrature Capital, a hedge fund whose parent company is registered in the Cayman Islands tax haven. The timing was exquisitely convenient: it arrived in the narrow window after the election was called but before the stricter weekly pre-poll reporting rules kicked in, so the public only learned of it months later, long after the votes were counted. Quadrature holds hundreds of millions in shares across fossil fuels, arms manufacturers, private health and asset managers, hardly the pure “values-based” climate donation it claimed.That is not an isolated curiosity. One of Labour’s most important personal and party donors, Lord Waheed Alli, who bankrolled clothing, glasses, accommodation and events for Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and, yes, yourself (including the £14,000 that helped fund your 40th-birthday-related receptions), was a director of a British Virgin Islands company and only added that interest to the Lords register after journalists asked why it was missing. Scottish Labour, meanwhile, accepted hundreds of thousands from the PG Paper Company, ultimately owned through the same British Virgin Islands secrecy jurisdiction. There was also a substantial individual donation of nearly £300,000 from George Hall. Then there is the “dark money” and administrative creativity closer to home. Labour Together, the think-tank that helped install Starmer and was run by his current chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, failed to declare more than £700,000 in donations on time; the Electoral Commission later fined it, and internal advice suggested describing the omissions as an “admin error.” Companies that donated to Labour have gone on to receive tens of millions in government contracts. Large sums have also flowed from Ecotricity (Dale Vince), whose green claims have themselves been challenged as greenwashing. None of this is ancient history or Conservative whataboutery. These are recent, well-documented transfers involving offshore structures, late or incomplete transparency, and the very same donor class that Labour now pretends to find uniquely odious when the money flows to Reform. If “it stinks,” the smell is not confined to one party’s accounts. Clean your own house first.