By Andy Ford, Warrington South CLP member
Ever wondered where the Blairites go when the Labour Party members in their constituencies finally rid themselves of their unwelcome presence? Well, the answer seems to be, to well-paid, but not too demanding, jobs in lobbying and PR, charities or the BBC. And we know these people don’t get out of bed for less than £80,000 a year.
The latest issue of Private Eye has details of the subsequent jobs of both Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna. Luciana, famous for asking “Who is Bill Shankly?” after being parachuted into her lovely safe seat in Liverpool Wavertree, has chosen to grace the offices of the Edelman PR Agency, as their ‘Managing Director of Advocacy and Public Affairs’. Here she finds herself working alongside a former chief adviser to…Boris Johnson. One piece she wrote was bigging up Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak as “ridiculously clever” and “decent and popular”.
What does a PR agency do?
Meanwhile, Umunna has washed up at the same firm to head up their ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ consultancy. One of his first gigs was to chair a panel featuring Goldman Sachs and Price Waterhouse Coopers on the theme of good corporate practice and racial equality.
But what does a ‘PR Agency’ actually do? Well, the Sunday Times reported that one such agency, Portland PR, had somehow been able to email favoured clients with the details of the October 31 lockdown, two days before the public announcement. It must have helped that the chairman, George Pascoe-Watson, had a place as a strategic Covid adviser to government. In these volatile times a little bit of information can make a lot of money.
As it happened, the restrictions were less severe than expected and the stocks in many of companies in leisure, retail and hospitality rose overnight, allowing those in the know to make a killing. So that is what these ‘PR Agencies’ do – they trade in information to help the in-crowd make serious money, and all without really working.
Charity begins at home
And then we have James Purnell, ex-Blairite MP for Manchester Stalybridge, who became Chair of the Institute for Public Policy Research, when he stepped down in 2010 after the expenses scandal, but then a couple of years later joined the BBC as ‘Director of Strategy’ on £295,000 a year. He also worked for a PR/management consultancy, the Boston Consulting Group, as a ‘Special Adviser on the Public Sector’. And when a new Tory Director General of the BBC removed him, he soon popped up as Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Arts London.
And finally, don’t forget David Miliband, ex-MP for the safe Labour seat of South Shields, who takes a £772,000 a year salary, plus a housing allowance of £38,000, from the International Rescue Committee charity. Who would even think of taking that off a charity they believed in?
Should not be pathway to privilege
We often hear talk of the Tory ‘chumocracy’ at work around Covid contracts and track and trace, but there is another one: the New Labour chumocracy which surrounds many at the top of the Labour Party. They all find jobs for each other. Being an MP or any representative of working-class people should be an honour and a privilege in itself and should not be used as a pathway to ‘monetising contacts’. They must know this themselves, deep down, which is why they fight so hard and with such underhand methods to keep their places at the top table.
What a contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, who year after year has the lowest expense claims of any MP. Instead of trading in information, he spends his time at community events in his constituency or on his allotment. Corbyn has probably had more stick from the billionaires’ press over his allotment than Boris had had over 70,000 Covid dead.
A workers’ MP on a worker’s wage
And there is an even greater contrast between New Labour and the three ‘Militant’ MPs, Terry Fields, Pat Wall and Dave Nellist, who not only claimed minimal expenses but also lived on an average skilled worker’s wage, donating the rest of their MPs salary back to the movement. In Liverpool Broadgreen, where Terry Fields was MP, any constituent could make an appointment to come by the constituency office and look through the MP’s accounts. And in 2002 Terry, still resident on the same council estate as when he was a firefighter, charged into a burning house to save a woman trapped in the house. “The old instincts just took over” was his modest and self-deprecating comment afterwards.
The Labour Party needs more like him – workers’ MPs on workers’ wages – and it needs no-one at all from the ‘beautiful people’ who are only in it for themselves.
This song explains it beautifully
December 8, 2020
