Squaring The Circle

In relation to political parties, private companies do not and should not make donations. They make investments. The arms traders and private healthcare merchants at Quadrature Capital have invested four million pounds in the Labour Party. What will be the return that there will certainly be on that investment?

What with this, Sue Gray, and the fact that Keir Starmer had taken two and half times as many freebies as even the next MP on the list, and this Government would stink even without the retention of the two-child benefit cap, or the means-testing of the Winter Fuel Payment, or the pointedly not ruled out abolition of the single-occupier discount for Council Tax, or any of the rest of it.

The claim that these measures are necessary to meet the trade unions' pay claims is economically illiterate to the point of innumeracy. Since those making it are many things, but they are not that, then they stand exposed as the rankest opportunists. The TUC resolved unanimously against the means test, and Unite, which is my union, is bringing the matter to the floor of the Labour Party Conference. Either the direct or the indirect result of that will make the case for disaffiliation.

After all, who do we think we are? A hedge fund based in a tax haven? A tax haven that Britain could close. The Cayman Islands are a British Overseas Territory. An Act of Parliament could legislate that each British Overseas Territory that was a tax haven (Saint Helena is not), and each Crown Dependency since they all are, would have to bring its affairs into order by six months after that Act had become law, or become independent on that date whether it liked it or not. We know why Starmer will not be introducing any such legislation.