The Labour Party under Keir Starmer clearly doesn’t give two shits about a) the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, b) working-class people, and now c) the planet. This is because shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has teamed up with right-wing shitrag the Sun. However, it’s not the first time Starmer and his team have endorsed the right-wing tabloid.
Labour: giving the Sun exclusives
As the Sun itself reported, Reeves has ‘backed’ calls to freeze fuel duty for motorists. The tabloid marked the article as an ‘exclusive’. This means that the party has given the Sun first dibs on the story. It noted that:
Reeves is demanding Jeremy Hunt spares drivers from an increase at the pumps in his next Budget.
She points to official analysis showing motorists face a 12p per litre hike if Ministers raise the petrol levy by inflation and end the temporary 5p cut.
The Sun quoted Reeves as saying:
With so many families and businesses reliant on their cars, the government must rule out yet another fuel duty rise at the Budget to ease some of those pressures and prevent yet another shock to our economy.
The tabloid also quoted the founder of campaign group FairFuelUK, Howard Cox, who called Reeves’ announcement:
gobsmacking political about-face that will secure votes for Labour…
The traditional party of lower taxation, the Tories, are being trumped by Keir Starmer’s common sense and surprising new support for drivers.
Of course, the Sun failed to mention that an investigation by openDemocracy found that Cox has a financial interest in lobbying for lower fuel tax. This is because he:
owns a business that markets a fuel additive called Ultimum5, for which he owns the trademark.
Cross the floor, Starmer, and be done with it
So, Labour has not only happily given exclusives to the Sun but has also (maybe inadvertently) been backing a right-wing lobby group in the process. If you need reminding why the party should not be anywhere near this tabloid, the Canary‘s Joe Glenton wrote:
The Sun‘s reporting of the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster led to the newspaper being despised and boycotted in the city. Following the disaster, in which 96 people died, the Sun made false claims, including that fans pickpocketed the bodies of victims.
On top of all this, Labour has also shoved its climate crisis-fighting credentials up its own arse. This is because fuel duty is one way of limiting carbon emissions. As DeSmog wrote:
According to analysis by Carbon Brief, the [freezing of fuel duty] policy has led to road transport emissions being as much as 16 percent higher (or 5 percent across the whole economy) than they would have been, had the last Labour government’s fuel duty “escalator”, which upped the levy by slightly more than inflation each year, been maintained.
Lose-lose all round for the Labour Party, then. On top of this, as Glenton previously wrote, Starmer has already written for the Sun as Labour leader. Moreover, he allowed the shitrag to be at the party’s 2021 conference. There is nothing ‘Labour’ about endorsing a lying tabloid to win votes – but then, Starmer and his motley crew would be more at home in the Tory Party anyway.
Featured image via Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 pixels, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 and Wikimedia
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
