28 Articles by:
Solomon Hughes has been writing about corporate influence in politics for twenty years, mostly for Private Eye. He also has a weekly column in the Morning Star.
Since running Keir Starmer’s fraudulent leadership campaign, Labour Together has raised staggering sums of money from exploitative businessmen to staff the offices of MPs — shaping party policy in the interests of its mega-rich donors.
Keir Starmer says he wants to clean up politics. Instead, he has facilitated a lobbyist takeover of the Labour Party, where predatory gambling firms, big oil and gig economy giants are buying influence at our expense.
As Labour stand on the cusp of power, this year’s annual conference was awash with lobbyists vying to buy influence. They found a party more than willing to accommodate them.
EXCLUSIVE: Tribune can reveal that the NHS’s Tory-appointed chair Richard Meddings was a key figure in disgraced banking giant Credit Suisse, chairing its risk committee before a series of financial scandals destroyed it last week.
When our ruling class preaches virtue, it usually practices vice. The fascistic, eugenicist roots of the Conservative Party’s leading environmentalists are no exception.
Conservative Conference 2022 has been a heady mix of blue-on-blue attacks, naff merch and sadness. But it’s made one thing clear: when it comes to successfully functioning as the party of the ruling elite, they’re having serious trouble.
Liz Truss aspires to Thatcher’s legacy – but her approach so far has been less brutal ideological crusade and more a nasty game of right-wing lucky dip.
The Help-to-Buy scheme is marketed as an effort to solve the housing crisis, but it’s actually about the Tories helping those who benefit from the crisis get even richer.
As the gambling industry preys on millions of vulnerable people for profit, it can be comforted in the knowledge that it will always have one friend it can rely on: the Labour right.
Beyond the platform speeches and right-wing provocations, the real story of Conservative Party conference is the lobbying – with corporations paying for access to the country’s most powerful politicians.
GB News, which launches next week, portrays itself as an insurgent force in British media – but its funding reveals it to be just another attempt by right-wing millionaires to control public discourse.
Peter Mandelson’s return as an advisor to the Starmer leadership doesn’t just drag the party to the right – it also puts a major corporate lobbyist, who represents union-busting Centrica, at the heart of Labour politics.
Tory peer James Bethell once helped Deloitte get government contracts as a private lobbyist. Now, as a health minister, he has overseen a test and trace system which employs 1,127 of their consultants.
England’s privatised test and trace system is failing by all international standards, but two corporations – Serco and Sitel – stand to make three quarters of a billion anyway. It should be a national scandal.
Right-wing lobby group the New Schools Network receives 83% of its funding from the public despite being an ‘independent charity’ – and now it is devoting its resources to attacking teachers’ unions.
Boris Johnson’s government is dominated by landlords, many of whom own multiple properties and make a fortune from rent. It isn’t a fluke that they support policies which harm tenants – it’s class politics.
During their time in government, Jo Swinson and her Lib Dem colleagues set about pricing thousands of workers who were unfairly sacked out of access to justice.
In pledging to freeze corporation tax cuts, Boris Johnson has exposed a decade of Tory arguments that cutting taxes would increase revenue to be little more than a propaganda exercise for the super-rich.
The Tories have despised the public ethos of the NHS since it was founded. In power, they have privatised its services any chance they could – often making handsome profits in the process.
Best for Britain, the anti-Brexit pressure group which received criticism over skewed tactical voting guides, is linked to an explosive spyware scandal targeting journalists and activists resisting dictatorships.