 This may, local elections across the UK, as well as elections to the Scottish Parliament, will be Keir Starmer's first real electoral test as Labour leader. And if the Guardian are to be believed, officials inside the party are concerned that Starmer has failed to win over enough Tories to stop the elections being a bit of a damp squib. Now, in fact, officials are briefing they would consider a standstill a good result, as only 4% of Tories tell pollsters they've switched from the Tories to the Labour party. Now, this is too small a swing, given the huge majorities of Tories built up in 2019, presumably because Labour backed a second referendum. They, in general, backed Labour in 2017, Corbyn was leader in 2019, when we were the second referendum party, they're gone. And if we want to win the kind of council seats that we won in 2016, so that was when the last elections were because these elections are ones which have been delayed from from last year because of the pandemic, then you're going to have to win back people who were Brexit voters. It doesn't seem like Keir Starmer is doing that yet. What I want to focus on now, though, is not so much voting behaviour, but funding in the Labour Party, because there was a very interesting nugget in that piece I just showed you about the party finances. So they wrote, strategists have also told Shadow Ministers that the party's finances are in a perilous state, a situation that could worsen due to numerous court actions against the party. Now, we've talked a lot on this show about court actions against the party. What we're going to focus on now is the revenue side, how much money the party is getting in, not the cost it's having to pay. And because of stupid court battles it's got itself into, for example, by suspending people with no due process. Why is it interesting that the Labour Party might be struggling financially? And I say it is because it shows that a big part of Keir Starmer's strategy for Labour isn't yet adding up. Now, you might remember us covering this report from the times in October. It outlined how Keir Starmer was wooing rich donors to try to replace the unions that had backed Corbyn. So from the piece they wrote, Labour has established a free-tier fundraising strategy to convince wealthy supporters to make regular contributions. Donors are invited to join the party's Rose Network for £100 a month. With £200 a month they can join the more exclusive Ambassador's Circle, while membership of the Chair's Circle costs £416 a month. Now, we talked at the time about how stupid all of these titles are for the different sort of magic circles. Ambassador said, it reminds me of Ferrero Rocher, that one. You can join to make yourself sound very fancy because you're denoting a large amount to the Labour Party every month. Now, we spoke about how this was concerning because it was a signal that Keir Starmer, instead of being responsive to trade unions, the organised voice of the working class and to members, ordinary grassroots people who want to change the country, he was shifting the Labour Party in a direction where it would be answerable to the wealthy and the powerful. And that's obviously a problem because it limits what Labour would be able to do in government. For example, new Labour was quite dependent on big financial interests. Not only did that lead to controversies involving sleaze. So, for example, with tobacco advertising on F1 vehicles, that was because of a donation scandal, not the kind of thing you want to be involved in, but also it was probably related to their unwillingness to raise tax on the top 1%, which was why, by the end of 13 years in power, we still had quite low tax rates. So, it matters on that level. What this is showing is that it also matters on the basic financial level. Even on its own terms, Keir Starmer's strategy isn't really working. So, he's pissed off the trade unions, he's pissed off the members, and lo and behold, the funders, the big money people, aren't coming in and putting their money into the party. So, he's struggling. The bet at this point doesn't seem to have paid off. For some more details on, you know, it's maybe a bit much to call it a funding crisis, but let's call it a squeeze, and we can go to a telegraph piece at the end of last year. This is a report when Labour released its declared donations. So, they write, the 6.3 million publicly declared since April the 4th, 3.95 million has come from short money. So, that's the annual payment given to opposition parties, that's from the government, while 2.1 million has come from unions, including Unison, GMB and the Communication Workers Union. And while Labour has launched a charm offensive to win back wealthy donors, just £199,000 has been donated by private individuals. In comparison, under Mr Corbyn, the central Labour Party received 5.1 million from trade unions during the first 244 days in charge, while individuals donated £627,000. So, it seems that Starmer has lost the backings of some big unions, mainly Unite, he's pissed off Len McCluskey, and undermined some of the membership income because you've got members leaving, and because they're pissed off, especially at Corbyn being suspended, but also at some of the policy announcements coming out. And you might ask, why did he do it in this order? If you have a strategy for, let's get big money in, and that will reduce our reliance on members and on trade unions. Why wouldn't you wait for that money to start flooding in before you piss off the members and before you piss off the unions? And it's a good question. The reason I think he hasn't done that is because you can't do both at the same time. So, you can't get big money to invest in the party if they still think that Keir Starmer is being responsive to the organised working class and to party members because big money interests, know that their interests are in conflict. They're mutually exclusive to the interests of the working class and to ordinary grassroots out to this and members. So, you can look at it. Now, this is potentially the bet messing up for Keir Starmer. It's also potentially him playing a long game. Maybe he thinks he has to prove that he's willing to cut loose members, he's willing to cut loose trade unions so he can show that he won't necessarily be responsive to their concerns before he can get the big financial money to roll in. So, you could see his very sort of public attacks on the left as laying the ground for maybe big backers who still it seems have cold feet. That's something we'll have to wait to see. Darla, I wanna bring you in on this because me and Aaron have talked about this before and I've tended to be of the view that Labour wouldn't have problems with funding under Keir Starmer because if I was a big wealthy backer, I would as a priority, even if I didn't think Keir Starmer was gonna enter power, I'd be quite keen to keep the organised left out of control of one of the main two parties in the UK. And so by giving Keir Starmer money, you can let him have independence from members and trade unions and you can ultimately push the party's direction in a right to the right. Aaron said that was unlikely. Why would they bother investing in the Labour Party? And it seems to me that actually the evidence seems to bear more in common with what Aaron was suggesting. Do you expect big money to flow into the Labour Party or do you think that Keir Starmer's bet hasn't paid off? Well, I mean, it's all about that kind of, the connection between sort of funding source and political agenda that you bring up is pretty key here. And if you think about it, the reason that wealthy individuals and business people sort of think about, they think about donations to parties like investments, right? So they think, okay, I will invest a donation in this party because I've made a call that doing so will give me a larger return on that investment than what I put in. So in order to be able to make that investment on that basis, they sort of needed, and this explains why Keir Starmer did what he did, they needed that reassurance that their interests which are, as you mentioned, more often than not in conflict with those of the working class. So those would be like the membership or the trade unions. So they need to know that they're gonna be prioritized over that. So the material and kind of performance of cutting off unions from the Labour Party, both through sort of failing to take leadership in big union struggles over the past few months and sort of pissing off Len McCluskey, that wasn't a bug, it was actually a feature of Starmer's leadership. And in a sense, that's what I've always said sort of the primary aim of Starmer's leadership sort of is and maybe these donors are kind of waiting to see if he's able to pull it off. And that is, it's not so much to kind of win elections because the most important election is still quite a way off but it's to kind of restructure the party in a way that not only undoes what Corbynism did to the party but makes it essentially impossible for it to ever happen again or tries to make it impossible for that to happen again. So that includes kind of going away as far as possible from being a large membership organisation and that's through pissing the membership off so much that a lot of them just leave or it's through kind of actually just reducing the power of the membership constitutionally. So that instead of winning through people power, the model of winning kind of relies on these big donors and through positive mainstream media coverage. The problem with that model is that the big donors and the mainstream media, they're always gonna favour the Tories, right? Because they are actually, why get the copy when you can get the original? So as long as the Tories are like a viable electoral force and able to win elections, then they are gonna always be the favoured horse in this race. Part of the reason that they backed Blair that the big sort of capital and the media backed Blair was because the Tories became literally unelectable and in that vacuum, Blairism was going to kind of reanimate and sort of like resuscitate the status quo. So in this whole thing, when they're playing this, when the Labour Party is playing this game in this way, what they fail to realise is that they're always going to be essentially like a backup side chick in this scenario. And that might be why Stammer's Gambit isn't paying off right now.