Reporters Are Asking the Wrong Questions About Labour’s Freebie Fiasco

When I first asked the Labour party in 2023 why its (then) shadow cabinet members and staff kept accepting luxury gifts, the press officer I spoke to was baffled as to why I thought this was a story. It ended up being a rather embarrassing incident: I explained in what was perhaps an overly passionate tone. She felt I was shouting at her, and hung up. It’s the only time I can remember losing my professional rag with someone, and I apologised.

But, in retrospect, perhaps Labour’s PR operation should have focused more on the content than the tone of what I was telling them. Because a year after I revealed for openDemocracy that senior officials were wilfully taking bribes from the super rich, it’s blown up in the new government’s face.

Of course, the same media which ignored my scoop last August has now largely missed its point. For the establishment press, this is simply another take about the individual venality of politicians. It is – implicitly – another example of why politics, and so democracy, can’t be trusted, and everything should be left to the market.

But for me, it sits within a different narrative. When I first discovered that these figures were accepting gifts from the super rich, it was as part of a broader piece of research guided by a simple question: who is trying to influence what was, by then, clearly going to be the next government? And how are they doing it?

Looked at this way, big business and multimillionaires handing out freebies is part of a wider strategy of the wealthy to shape public policy. It sits alongside the fact that – as I also revealed – lobbying agencies were being allowed to second their staff to the offices of shadow cabinet ministers, to draft policy and shape the agenda of the government-to-be on behalf of unnamed clients whilst learning who’s who and how to influence them.

It sits alongside the fact that (as my former colleague Ethan Shone has shown) the party is now taking vast donations from hedge funds linked to planetary scale destruction – exactly the same types who formally powered the Tory engine. It runs alongside the reality that lobbying agencies encircling Westminster set up Labour units two years ago, hiring Labour apparatchiks onto their staff to boost their capacity to sell access to the new government.

These presents for the people running the country aren’t random acts of generosity from true-hearted fans. They are part of a strategy to ensure the country is run not in the interests of voters, but of super rich donors.

Take the case of Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s (then shadow) business secretary. In June 2023, Reynolds and two senior staff went to Glastonbury as guests of YouTube (which is owned by Google). Including accommodation and ‘hospitality’, Reynolds estimates his Glastonbury package for two was worth £3,377. Two regular tickets were £335 each.

Until then, Labour was promising to increase the digital service tax from 2% to 10%, which would bring in billions from giants like Google and Facebook. Literally the day after the festival, it emerged that Reynolds had ditched the policy. Voters would have to accept austerity instead.

Obviously none of us knows what Google’s lobbyists shouted into Reynolds’ ear while he was partying on their pound, but presumably they thought he was more likely to be persuaded while dancing to the Arctic Monkeys than sitting in an office.

The corruption taking place here isn’t directly transactional. Senior Labour politicians’ careers are worth a lot more to them than the bribes they’re taking. But the strategy is clearly effective, because it understands that humans are a lot more complex than that. Like all gifts, luxury presents like tickets to the posh bit of Glasto or an exclusive box at the Epsom Derby, or the premium suite at the Emirates stadium (with the gourmet food and drink that comes alongside) are rituals, powerful performances inducting people into Britain’s governing class.

A century ago, as Ralph Miliband showed, this was done by taking the first Labour MPs around exclusive London clubs, introducing them to high society, and slowly squeezing them into a position where they saw things more from the perspective of the powerful than the powerless. For Britain’s modern hyper-rich oligarch class, it looks a little different. But the effect is the same: the point about all of the different gifts given to Labour politicians – notably tickets to exclusive events, and smart clothes – is that they’re things which make people feel special, part of a class apart. They’re meant, as the education secretary put it, to be “hard to turn down” not because of their cash value, but the emotions they imbue in the recipient.

We understand that these sorts of low(ish)-cash-value gifts are bribes when we look at them the other way around. Since 1832, strict laws have banned candidates from ‘treating’ voters – that is, handing out pints of beer and the like, because we know people are influenced by the sorts of convivial feelings these kinds of gifts promote, and so how they corrupt our political process.

But in Britain, we pretend the same process doesn’t work on our politicians. Candidates can’t set up bars and hand out booze to constituents in order to sway how they vote, but lobbyists can – and do. Likewise, the super rich regularly take senior politicians to exclusive free bars at expensive events for the same reason.

The point about this story isn’t a few petty freebies. It’s why those giving them bother to do so. They give these gifts because they know they work. They understand that this is part of how they ensure it’s your granny, rather than oligarchs or corporate bosses, who pays Britain’s bills. Look at Rachel Reeves’ austerity package, and you see these bribes are effective.

What reporters should be asking government ministers isn’t: “Why did you accept the gift?”. It’s: “Why did they give it to you? What do they think they are getting out of it?” Because the answer isn’t “nothing”.