Keir Starmer’s team fined for multiple breaches of electoral law via nearly £1,000,000 of unregistered donations from backer of Tory-Lib Dem splitter group “Change UK”
Tags: UK Politics, Corruption, Brexit, Politics, Labour Party

Keir Starmer’s team fined for multiple breaches of electoral law via nearly £1,000,000 of unregistered donations from backer of Tory-Lib Dem splitter group “Change UK” ForestWolf Nov 14, 2021·3 min read

Labour’s “Tory sleaze” line undermined by secret donations to Starmer’s team.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

A Labour Party group (“Labour Together”) directly tied to Keir Starmer’s office has been fined for failing to declare donations.

A former managing director of Labour Together is Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer’s chief of staff until June 2021. Companies House records for the company behind Labour Together show McSweeney was secretary from July 2017 to April 2020, when Starmer became leader of the Labour Party.

Figures published by the Electoral Commission suggests more than £800,000 was not declared properly, resulting in multiple breaches of electoral law.

Amidst a media frenzy over Tory sleaze, the electoral breaches by Keir Starmer’s team have received very little coverage from Britian’s biggest news outlets.

Some in the Labour party have suggested the “Labour together” organisation — the group fined for the secret donations — have been used as a front group for substantial political donations from Israel-lobbyist Trevor Chinn and Mayfair hedgefund manager Martin Taylor.

The group was allegedly formed in order to assess how to bring Labour’s factions together, recently producing a report on how to move forward after the 2019 election. Although the report’s findings — based upon uniting disparate groups behind a transformative economic message — have been roundly ignored by Keir Starmer’s team.

While the donors themselves have been cleared of any wrongdoing, they’re a curious pair to be associated with the Labour movement. Both have a history of vehemently anti left-wing views.

Martin Taylor. In 2015, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed him to be a Mayfair hedge fund manager who had given the party more than £600,000. He has given Labour Together £806,992 since October 2015, and gave Starmer £95,000 in March 2020 during the Labour leadership contest.

In 2015, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed him to be a Mayfair hedge fund manager who had given the party more than £600,000. He has given Labour Together £806,992 since October 2015, and gave Starmer £95,000 in March 2020 during the Labour leadership contest. Trevor Chinn. Executive committee member for BICOM — Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation. The group flies journalists [including Guardian staff] to Israel on fact-finding trips and organises access to senior government figures. Journalist Simon Childs, who was invited on a sponsored Israel visit, said of BICOM:

“BICOM ‘simply dispenses with international legal principles as an explanatory framework’”. The only Palestinian refugee camp that featured on this BICOM tour was seen as a “speck on the horizon as we looked from Israel into Gaza — abstracted to the point of near-invisibility”.

Chinn has given Labour Together £245,500 in unregistered donations since August 2017. Chinn also donated £50,000 to Starmer’s leadership campaign and has previously donated to deputy leader Tom Watson.

The Sunday Times linked Trevor Chinn as a donor to the 2019 splitter party ‘Change UK’, which included former Tory and future Lib Dem MPs, though the group’s financial records were curiously destroyed. Further, Chinn donated directly to CUK member Joan Ryan who was exposed by a 2017 investigation to be fabricating antisemitism accusations and accepting money from an Israeli government source.

Hannah O’Rourke, director of Labour Together, said on Tuesday: “We accept the findings of the Electoral Commission today, and have already paid the fine.