What is a gentlemen’s agreement? It’s a look, an imperceptible nod of the head, rippled brows – an understanding that needs no signature nor handshake between parties who don’t trust each other but know a gentlemen’s agreement may be mutually beneficial.
Labour Leader Keir Starmer. Photo: Phil Noble/Reuters/Alamy
Keir Starmer must have made a gentlemen’s agreement with Times and Sun boss Rupert Murdoch, non-dom Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, the sultans of the City, lawyers and accountants who construct offshore accounts in Caribbean islands for the British tax allergic superrich.
A gentlemen’s agreement has nothing to do with gentlemen. It is more of a treaty than a contract. It may be oral but is normally unspoken. Nothing is ever written. Starmer was well aware when he made the pact that his silent partners will break it the moment he leans too far to the left. He walks a highwire carrying a hand grenade with the pin half out. Everything he says and does is said and done with extreme caution.
Why have the billionaires, old rich, the City and the Crown allowed Starmer into Downing Street?
After 14 years of the Conservative Party’s astute, calculated decimation of Britain’s social fabric, health and welfare service, water infrastructure, train services, the Post Office, it is to give voters the appearance of democracy. There will be an extra bit of pay for nurses and teachers, a few new schools.
Viscount and Lady Rothermere.
But bottom-line matters like taxing the rich fairly, controlling offshore tax havens, challenging Viscount Rothermere claiming to be French so he pays no taxes in the UK – these things will be ignored. They are the applecart, the reason for Brexit, and Keir Starmer knows that the full force of the billionaire-owned press and media will go nuclear if he meddles in their pool of interest.
A Gentlemen’s Agreement with Blair
Tony Blair went cap in hand to Rupert Murdoch to make a gentlemen’s agreement that resulted in Blair being backed by the Sun in the 1997 general election and Blair in power backing the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blair got a decade in Downing Street and News Corp got a deal over the ownership of BskyB as well as changes in US media laws beneficial to Murdoch.
Having allowed Labour to win the 2024 general election, the Sun, Mail, Times, Express, Nigel Farage and Tory grandees can watch with boundless schadenfreude as Starmer struggles over winter fuel payments to pensioners and the continual pressure to scrap the child benefit limit from inside the ranks of his own party.
The two-child benefit cap was introduced by the Conservative government in April 2017 as part of a wider austerity programme and has had ‘a particularly big impact on the number of children in poverty for two reasons: it mostly hits the poorest households and, by definition, its effects are entirely concentrated in families with at least three children,’ research economist Eduin Latimer told the Guardian.
According to the Tory government’s own figures, published in the Houses of Commons Library, in 2021/22 there were 4.7 million people, or 7% of the UK population, in food poverty, including 12% of children. In 2022/23, the Trussell Trust foodbanks network supplied the highest recorded number of three-day emergency food parcels.
Hard to conceive that people living in the sixth richest country in the world allow 4 million of their own children to go hungry.
Restoring child benefit would cost about £3 billion a year.
To kick off the first year, Britain’s three richest men – hedge fund manager Michael Platt (worth £15 billion), chemical engineer Sir James Ratcliffe (worth £13 billion) and inventor Sir James Dyson (worth £11 billion) could make a gentlemen’s agreement with the Treasury and give a billion each out of their unpaid tax. They wouldn’t even miss it.
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Yep – those non-Doms are in for it alright …
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/david-henderson-648b5485
Just had this guy on the BBC4 radio talking absolute cowpoo. Not admitting that privatising water was a criminal act, and that there must not be profit made from our shared resource such as water. Welcome to the Disunited KingDoom of Greed and Corruption. No hope. Time to leave is nigh 🙁
It is the way commentators always assume the right wing norms. Such as the assumption that all tax is bad and that capitalism is the natural sensible way to run the world. A more nuanced approach would be better and more truthful.
Starmer is running scared of the right-wing media, and he has reason to do so. Such unelected power-brokers wield more influence in the UK than in most other developed countries.
Things will begin to change only when the power of these media moguls not only declines (as it is doing) but is seen to decline; and that will not happen until other voices can outshout them.
The biggest lie that needs to be nailed is the idea that high taxes are bad for us. They’re not, they’re only bad for high taxpayers, most of whom vote Tory anyway. The overall tax burden in the UK is NOT high. It’s BELOW the average for the EU…. and well below the countries whose functional social services we admire – the Nordic countries, France, Germany…. and the sooner this message can be got over, the sooner the government can start rebuilding our national infrastructure and services
How depressing this is. I live in France and so many visiting Brits observe that the trains run on time, the motorways flow and the medical service is prompt and efficient. But when you point out that this is ‘cos taxes are higher they baulk at the idea of the UK following suite. I am not a religious man but to me Murdoch is the anti-christ! Please support Byline Times which tells it like it is and is reader funded. It is up to us to help change this situation.
Sad sad sad!