https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/keir-starmer-handouts-hypocrisy
In June 2024 Keir Starmer lectured benefits recipients about how "handouts lack the dignity of work", yet he's addicted to raking in tens of thousands in handouts for himself and his wife.
Another Angry Voice
Sep 17, 2024

In June 2024 Keir Starmer lectured benefits claimants that "handouts lack the dignity of work" which is offensive enough in its own right coming from the leader of the political party that laid the foundations of the welfare state.

There’s no way that the leader of the labour movement should be regurgitating the hard-right trope that receipt of social security is some kind of moral failing in comparison to hard work.

The vast majority of Britain’s social security system exists to support those who cannot or should not work: Old-age pensioners; children; the sick and disabled; parents with new born children … and of the benefits that are paid to able-bodied working-age adults, a dramatically increased proportion is going to working poor families to top up the poverty wages they receive from their exploitative employers.

And even when it comes to pure unemployment benefits, the majority of those goes to people who are temporarily out of work, and who have already paid into the system while they were in work.

There is no shame in people claiming the social support they’re entitled to, especially when they’re living in poverty, and it’s beyond abhorrent to see millionaires like Starmer seeking to stigmatise people who do claim what they deserve.

But what makes it so much worse is Starmer’s egregious addiction to handouts for himself.

Starmer raked in £76,000 in personal freebies during the last parliament, which is more than all previous Labour leaders since 1997 combined!

He’s been showered with gifts such as clothes and glasses, Taylor Swift and Coldplay concerts, and more than twenty executive tickets to football matches.

He’s also just been caught red-handed hiding another £5,000 donation from one of his millionaire backers to buy designer clothes for his wife.

There’s absolutely no excuse for it given that the Starmers’ net worth is estimated to be between seven and ten million, and when their combined salary of over £200,000 per year places them comfortably in the top 1% of earners.

Even after getting caught red-handed, Starmer is insistent that he won’t be giving up his addiction to handouts, claiming that without "hospitality" it would mean he can’t see his beloved Arsenal FC play!

Somehow the thought of buying his own Arsenal tickets simply hasn’t crossed his mind!

You couldn’t ask for a clearer demonstration of double standards than this.

Starmer is cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance to millions of pensioners living on as little as £11,000 per year because he considers this form of social support as some kind of unacceptably generous handout, even though Labour’s own research demonstrated that means testing the winter fuel allowance could cause an estimated 4,000 excess deaths.

Starmer also outright refuses to end the diabolical poverty-spreading Tory two-child social security cap because he believes that families with children living in poverty don’t deserve "handouts".

And yet he believes that he’s entitled to free tickets to watch Arsenal, and thousands of pounds more in extravagant handouts, despite having plenty of wealth to afford his own clothes, glasses and footy tickets.

It’s not just profoundly narcissistic that Starmer believes he’s entitled to free football tickets, while he punishes pensioners and children living in poverty, and derides their social support as "handouts", it’s also insanely poor optics.

If Starmer had picked anyone with any common sense at all to join his inner circle, they could’ve told him how awful it would look to be lavished with luxury freebies as he blocks and rescinds social support for people living on a tiny fraction of his enormous earnings.

But Starmer’s created an inner circle out of the most rabidly right-wing Thatcherites in the Labour ranks, and a bunch of shockingly unprincipled nodding dogs and yes men without the courage to tell him where he’s going wrong.

You just have to see clips of Angela Eagle’s excruciating car crash interview about Starmer’s handouts to see how utterly craven his acolytes are.

These contemptible lickspittles outright refuse to criticise their beloved leader, despite everyone knowing that they’d be performatively spewing outrage if it had been a Tory like Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak raking in handouts as they blockade social support for millions of the most vulnerable people in society.

They didn’t have the common sense to avoid these appalling optics, and even now, Starmer shows absolutely no contrition while his acolytes perform the most degrading acts of mental gymnastics to evade admitting that it’s hypocritical and wrong.

The nauseating Starmtrooper brigade are trying to downplay their idol’s egregious hypocrisy as a "storm in a teacup", but this handouts scandal is exactly the kind of thing that grabs people’s attention.

It wasn’t Boris Johnson’s endless lying, his bigoted tirades, his incompetence, or his corruption that finally turned the tide of public opinion against him, it was the outrageous double-standards of hosting boozy parties in Downing Street while the rest of the country were suffering social isolation under his lockdown orders.

And apparently none of Starmer’s inner circle or capitalist media outriders seem remotely capable of grasping why the public would be angry at their beloved leader’s selfish and hypocritical "one rule for me, and another rule for thee" mentality.