Starmer has broken his promise to end sleaze
After a year in power, Labour’s listlessness on corruption risks eroding democracy further
“Labour will end the chaos of sleaze.” So declared the manifesto on which Keir Starmer won a landslide election last July. After years of Conservative scandal, the newly minted prime minister promised a raft of new measures to restore trust in our politics. Covid VIP lanes were out; standards in public life were in.
All this, I admit, was music to my ears. I had spent almost a decade writing about cronyism and corruption in British politics. Now there was a party in power that seemed to care.
But twelve months on, I’m far less optimistic. Time and again, Labour’s warm words about cleaning up politics have not translated into action. Rather than rebuilding faith in democracy, Starmer’s listlessness risks eroding it even further.
Take Labour’s flagship “ethics and integrity commission”. This manifesto pledge, first announced back in 2021, would see Westminster's hodge-podge of under-powered regulators replaced by a standalone body with the power to launch investigations without ministerial approval and impose sanctions on wrongdoers.
The commission now looks far less ambitious than originally advertised. Rather than setting up a new organisation, ministers are now minded just to rebrand the existing watchdogs under a single “umbrella”, according to the Guardian.
Even the news of the ethics and integrity commission’s downgrading was opaque. It was pushed out last week, while Starmer was battling his own party over welfare reforms—and only after parliament’s Public Administration Committee launched an inquiry into the government’s lack of progress on its own ethics commitments. Hardly a radical break with a sleaze-ridden past.
This is far from an isolated incident. Before coming into power, Labour had proposed banning ministers from lobbying for at least five years after leaving office, part of a broader plan to shut the “revolving door” between government and the private sector.
In office, Labour has been less full-throated. Starmer did quickly establish a Modernisation Committee, which closed a loophole that had allowed MPs to work as paid lobbyists—long overdue, whatever disgraced former Tory minister Owen Paterson might think.
But the pace of reform has been glacial. Lobbying watchdog the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), which has no power to enforce any sanctions on malfeasant former ministers, remains untouched. Its former chair, Eric Pickles, recently described Acoba as as “dead in the water”.
David Lammy’s much vaunted ambition to make the UK “the anti-corruption capital of the world” requires action, too. This week four British Overseas Territories—including the British Virgin Islands, notorious as a destination for washing ill-gotten gains—missed a final deadline to introduce corporate transparency measures aimed at tackling kleptocracy. The Foreign Office’s response was limited to welcoming “the progress already made by many overseas territories”.
Closer to home, last year Starmer said he’d tackle the use of strategic litigation against public participation (otherwise known as Slapps) “to protect investigative journalism”. Since then, nothing has happened on that front, though the government did withdraw an educational grant that has funded journalism courses in England.
For all Labour’s talk of valuing transparency and openness, Freedom of Information (FOI) responses are at record lows. In 2024, Whitehall departments and government agencies responded in full to just 29 per cent of FOIs, down from 34 per cent in 2023.
Starmer has gone from saying he will abolish the House of Lords to restore trust to winching out hereditary peers while parachuting in dozens of Labour apparatchiks. Even plans to publish ministerial meetings monthly, rather than quarterly, have been quietly shelved.
Most worryingly, Starmer seems to lack the stomach for the most pressing issue in cleaning up British politics: political finance reform. The scale of money in British politics has grown exponentially in recent years, thanks in part to the Tories’ raising spending limits.
In 2023, over half of the £85 million in reported donations from private sources came from just 19 individuals giving more than £1 million each. Throw in a neutered regulator (another Conservative inheritance), donations in cryptocurrency, and a Maga movement keen on influencing politics far beyond the US, and you can see how a broken system is fast becoming a democratic danger.
In fairness to Labour, it has recognised some of this. Its manifesto promised to “protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties” and the government is developing an elections bill, expected in the next session of parliament.
But experts say that the bill will not go far enough. This week, we can exclusively reveal, the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition wrote to Rushanara Ali, whose housing and communities brief includes electoral reform, calling for the legislation to “rise to the challenge” of safeguarding British politics against “foreign interference and dirty money”.
Among other issues, the letter - attached to the end of this newsletter - calls for new rules on money from unincorporated associations - a haven for dark money and foreign political funding - as well as a cap on donations.
None of this is controversial. A raft of independent expert bodies broadly agree on the problems with our political finance system and what we need to do to solve them. Earlier this year former New Labour minister David Blunkett broke ranks to call for a donations cap. But so far Labour seems to be resistant to anything but piecemeal change.
The perception that Starmer and co want to protect their own donors isn’t helped by reports that, in opposition, Labour nixed a plan to ban foreign political donations after an intervention from Waheed Alli, the peer at the centre of a storm about free gifts that took the shine off the opening months of the new administration.
“The reason this agenda hasn’t moved forward is because people in the Labour family, people who benefit from these relationships with politicians, don’t want it to happen,” a well-placed Westminster source told me.
Cleaning up politics is a complicated business. If it wasn’t, it would have been done already. But it could yet offer Starmer a route out of his current travails. Trust in our politicians has never been lower. Just 12 per cent of respondents in the latest British Social Attitudes Survey said that they trusted the government to prioritise the national interest “just about always” or “most of the time”.
But tackling corruption, and particularly political finance reform, is electorally popular. It’s also both cheap and in Labour’s political interests given the threat of billionaires piling in behind Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
Starmer likes to talk about “delivery”. His government needs to start delivering on its promises to clean up British politics before it’s too late.
A version of this piece also appeared on Prospect. (Follow Prospect’s new Substack here.)
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Bloody Starmer’s gone & sabotaged the link to read the letter at the end of the article n’ all. 😉
Thanks Peter, we need this kind of journalism even more in this day and age.