Starmer left Britain vulnerable to malign foreign influence

According to a new book on Starmer's rise to power, he cancelled a clampdown on malign foreign influence on our politics on the say so of one of his mega-rich donors (the guy who paid for his glasses)

At a NATO summit in Brussels Keir Starmer repeated his familiar old refrain about Russian election interference and destabilisation efforts against Britain and the EU, but it’s ringing even more hollow now that Elon Musk is boasting about handing £100 million to the Faragists to boost the extreme-right into Downing Street, and Donald Trump is threatening to impose trade tariffs on British and European produce.

The threats of interference and destabilisation aren’t just coming from Russia, and everyone knows it.

In fact, given what’s going on in Washington DC right now, there’s a strong case that Trump and the tech-billionaires pose a much bigger threat to British economic and political stability than anything Vlad Putin can muster.

Meanwhile a new book by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire (a couple of well connected lobby journalists) claims that Keir Starmer trampled down Angela Rayner’s plan to limit foreign interference in UK elections, allegedly under instruction from the mega-rich Labour donor Waheed Alli.

Apparently Angela Rayner and Gordon Brown were on the verge of announcing their plan to strictly limit party political donations to British citizens and companies registered in the UK, when Starmer pulled the plug, on Alli’s say-so.

Alli was the guy at the centre of the donor-gate scandal, having handed Starmer and his wife tens of thousands worth of freebies including glasses and thousands of pounds worth of clothes, as well as lavishing over £300,000 in donations on Starmer’s inner circle of Labour right-wingers since 2020.

When Starmer became PM-by-default in the summer of 2024 he gave Alli a Downing Street pass, inspiring some hacks to call Starmer’s donor-gate scandal "passes for glasses".

Starmtroopers rallied around at the time to insist that Starmer and Alli had done nothing wrong, and that accusations of influence-buying were beyond outrageous.

But now we find out that Alli hasn’t just been benefitting from unusual levels of political access, he was apparently also using his influence as a major donor to direct Labour Party policy.

So it turns out that a much-needed clamp down on foreign interference in our democracy was squashed on the say-so of the guy paying for Starmer’s freebies.

Starmer and Alli have both refused to comment on this latest scandal, and few traditional media journalists seem interested in kicking up a fuss or demanding answers.

Instead of preaching to the converted at NATO by feebly attempting to rabble-rouse about the Russians, surely Starmer needs to address the elephant in the room.

The biggest threat to British democracy is coming from overseas tech-billionaires who are quite open about allowing more propaganda and misinformation on their social media platforms, and completely brazen about their threats to buy political power in the UK with vast political donations.

A subsidiary threat being that of the mega-rich donors, who have already wormed their way into positions of influence by bribing our politicians and political parties with lavish freebies and huge donations.

Nobody should be expecting Starmer to do anything effective to sort this mess out, given that he’s already taken more in gifts and donations than all Labour leaders combined going all the way back to Tony Blair, and because this latest Waheed Alli scandal is further proof that he believes that it’s the natural way of things that politicians like him take their orders from wealthy donors.

One easy way to stamp out the the threat of overseas mega-donations would be to strictly limit individual party political donations.

The IPPR thinktank suggests a donation cap of £100,000 per year, but why should any company or individual be allowed use way more than the annual income of over 90% of Brits to buy political influence?

A donation cap of 10% of the average UK salary would make a lot more sense, so people can chuck a few grand in the pot, but individual donations of hundreds of thousands, or hundreds of millions are completely out of the question.

Politicians like David Cameron and Keir Starmer have proven time and again, that in return for donations of hundreds of thousands or millions, they’re quite happy to hand out honours and political favours, and even allow donors to direct party policy.

Who could forget that David Cameron’s unlawful imposition of £1,200 upfront fees for workers to take bad bosses to tribunal came about as a result of him allowing one of his millionaire donors to draw up government policy?

It seems a lot less likely that politicians like Cameron and Starmer would hand out peerages and party political control in return for pocket change like £3,000.

Unfortunately, a hopelessly compromised useful idiot like Starmer is highly unlikely to put the nation’s interest before his own, and drive mega-rich donors out of our political system.

He’s already proven that he’ll prioritise access to free designer clothes and glasses for himself and his wife, over protecting our country from malign overseas interests.

So he can continue giving his rabble-rousing little speeches about "Russian interference" to his heart’s content, but it’s just meaningless noise now that it’s public knowledge that he decided to leave our country defenceless against exactly the kind of foreign interference he’s fulminating about, under instruction from one of his dodgy mega-rich donors.

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