-- Advertisement --

Petition To The Labour Party: Keir Starmer must release his FULL list of donors immediately

Labour leadership frontrunner Keir Starmer is refusing to be honest with Labour members about who is funding his campaign.

The donations he’s declared amount to less than £125,000. This is a drop in the ocean compared to what his campaign will have spent overall. It doesn’t even come close to covering the cost of sending his mail shot to over half a million members which would have cost up to £300,000, let alone his staffing costs, the cost of renting office space, hiring venues for events and travelling across the country.

Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy have published their donations in full. Keir Starmer has no excuse for not doing the same.

This isn’t about factionalism or opposing any candidate. This is about members having a right to know who’s funding the candidates asking for their votes before they vote, not afterwards.

You can watch Keir Starmer evading the question of who is funding his leadership campaign on last night’s Andrew Neil Show below:

 

If you’re a Labour member, sign this petition calling on the Party to uphold the basic principles of transparency and democracy by demanding that all leadership and deputy leadership candidates publish their donations in full now and update them in real time.

It’s time to end the secrecy.

Petition To The Labour Party: Keir Starmer must release his full list of donors immediately

Dear Ian Lavery,

We write to you as Chair of the Labour Party to express our dismay at the lack of financial transparency in our Party’s leadership election.

As Labour members we have a right to know what lies behind the candidates who are asking for our votes. Publishing this information after the election is pointless. We need to know now, before we cast our votes, not afterwards.

While some candidates have published their donations in full, one candidate for the leadership and several candidates for the deputy leadership have refused to do so and are only declaring donations through the Register of MP’s interests. As the Register shows, these donations account for a fraction of candidates’ campaign spending.

When declaring donations through the Register, MPs can delay accepting a donation for up to 30 days and then delay declaring it for another 28 days. So it can be 58 days before these donations are made public. At this rate, members won’t know who is funding these candidates until after the election is over. That is unacceptable in a party that is committed to democracy and transparency, and which campaigns against the corrupting influence of money in politics.

There are hundreds of thousands of pounds unaccounted for from financial backers who could be seeking influence in return for their donations, whose identities are being kept secret.

We ask that you, as Party Chair, demand that all leadership and deputy leadership candidates publish their donations in full themselves, rather than via the Register of MPs interests, and that they update these publications on their campaign websites every week for the duration of the leadership election.

Standing to be Leader of our Party and Deputy Leader of our Party should require a commitment to being open and honest with Labour members. We look to you, as our Party’s Chair, to ensure candidates uphold this commitment in the interests of transparency and democracy.

Signed,

%%your signature%%

809 signatures

Share this with your friends:

     

A small favour...

We have absolutely no corporate backers or political funding, meaning we rely on the generous support of our readers to maintain our independence and integrity.

So, if you want to help Evolve Politics continue taking the fight to the Establishment, please consider making a regular financial contribution or a one-off donation:

For alternative methods to support Evolve, please visit our Support Us page via this link.

-- Advertisement --

Support Evolve Politics

Subscriber-Only Comments