Poor Keir Starmer. One of the first things he did after becoming prime minister was to stuff the unions’ mouths with gold – with his government signing off bumper pay rises for striking train drivers, teachers and junior doctors. Still, as he should probably have known at this Labour conference in Liverpool: money can’t buy you love.
It certainly didn’t stop the RMT’s Mick Lynch from sticking the knife in over the growing controversy over wardrobe-gate this weekend.
On Friday, Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner were all forced to announce that they would no longer accept clothes as gifts, after receiving thousands of pounds worth of freebies from the Labour donor Lord Alli. This weekend, Angela Rayner also had to defend her use of a New York apartment for a holiday stay, again gifted by Alli.
Luckily for the fully kitted-out Labour team, union man Lynch was available to, errr, take the mick out of them this conference.
Lynch began an event on public transport by pointing out there had been lots of public declarations recently and he therefore had his own to make:
There’s lots on the news this morning, and there was a lot of people making declarations about all of their interests… So I’ve got to make a public declaration: all of my clothes are from my wife. And she gives a full consultation with my personal designers: Marks and Spencers. On the table, everything is under £49.99.’
A pointed dig if there ever was one…
Elsewhere in the event, Lynch suggested that his union would inevitably go on strike again in the future, saying:
Under previous Labour governments. NUR and Aslef members took on very heavy periods of industrial action to get what they needed from those governments… That will happen again in the future.
Who could have predicted that Labour paying the union Danegeld would be a bad idea?
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