 When Keir Starmer stood to be Labour leader, he promised he would bring integrity to the party. However, the key to having integrity is practicing what you preach. And when it comes to employment practices, Labour is doing the precise opposite. All year Keir Starmer has loudly opposed the practice of firing and rehiring workers. He was right to do this. It's obviously a terrible practice. It's a way that bosses can replace their workers who have high rights with workers who have lower rights. It might be the same worker. Often you say we're going to fire you on your current contract and then rehire you on a new contract or it can be different people. Now let's look at some examples of Keir Starmer calling out these practices. In April, when British cash workers were being threatened with fire and rehire, Keir Starmer said the whole Labour movement stands in solidarity with British gas workers. They're defending themselves against the shameful practice of fire and rehire. British gas must abandon this practice and the government must outlaw it. Later that month, he tweeted, As I said at the TUC last year, fire and rehire is wrong and it should be illegal. That's why I'm supporting Unite the Union's campaign to outlaw fire and rehire. And in May this year, in response to a story about Argos, he tweeted, threatening to sack staff unless they agree to worst pay terms and conditions is appalling. Fire and rehire must be outlawed. Those are all very good tweets. The kind of tweets you should see from a Labour leader. However, due to more recent events, they leave Starmer now vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. That's because Labour has just fired a third of its permanent employees while at the same time advertising for new workers on insecure contracts. John Snow in The Independent writes that despite the scale of the layoffs, the party is actually recruiting temporary staff on significantly less secure conditions than those being asked to take redundancy. An advert post on a recruitment website offers potential workers a six month contract and says work is to be done from home. All applicants need their own laptop, a secure Wi-Fi connection at home and must bring their satisfactory firewall and virus protection. The advert does not mention that the job is working with Labour and falsely claims that it is in the public sector, but The Independent has confirmed with the party that recruits will be put to work in its governance and legal unit, which investigates claimants against members. I should say this is by John Stone, not John Snow. The new recruits are being offered a decent wage. They're being offered £19 an hour, but a six month contract does mean they'll have fewer rights than the people Labour are laying off. The many people Labour are laying off. Defending the decision a Labour source told The Independent, this is unrelated to the announcement about the voluntary severance scheme. It was agreed by the NEC several weeks ago as a necessary and temporary measure to help us clear the backlog of complaints as quickly as possible, referring to the redundancy scheme. They said, this is not an easy decision and we recognise it will be a very difficult time for staff. We will fully engage and consult with them and the trade unions throughout. We are reshaping our party's operation with a view towards being fighting fit for upcoming campaigns and the next general election. Ash, what do you make of this? Do you think the charge of hypocrisy is warranted here? I mean, I think it's worse than hypocrisy. I think it's venal. I think it's callous. I think it's cruel. And I think it shows that the Labour Party is neither serious politically under the leadership of Keir Starmer, but also in terms of the management of its own internal bureaucracy. It's simply not fit for purpose. And what is the one thing Keir Starmer promised when he became Labour leader? It was competence. These are not the actions of a competent leader but the actions of a competent General Secretary, David Evans. So if there's one person who needs to be fired and indeed not rehired is David Evans because this is a crisis of his and Keir Starmer's making. They alienated lots of left-wing Corbyn supporting members so their membership dropped significantly and it meant they had less money coming in. And despite the promises of the likes of Peter Mandelson, those big money donors never returned. We also had the unions becoming a lot more circumspect about making payments to the Labour Party so you do have an internal cash flow problem. Instead of that being made the responsibility of the senior members of staff and the leadership who took the decisions which got the party in that state, it's now the case as in the kind of institutions and organisations that Labour would normally criticise that the books are being balanced by the backs of some of the most precarious and vulnerable workers. And you look at where the firing and rehiring is going on in terms of the Governance and Compliance Unit. You think about, well, what's clearly a priority here? When you've got a third of permanent staff being made redundant, you've got an expansion in the Governance and Compliance Unit which means that Keir Starmer's going, while we've got our hands on the tiller of the leadership what we've got to do is crank up the purging operation of left-wing members or people who would be unlikely to vote for a centrist or a right-wing candidate if there is another leadership election. So I think that tells you a lot about the priorities of this particular Labour leadership. I think it's venal, I think it's self-serving and I think it's deeply hypocritical. And obviously, you know, their defence is we needed this particular task to be done which is looking through this backlog of complaints. Now, you might think that if a leadership of an organisation wanted to, you know, look after its workers, it might say, OK, we're going to redeploy you. There are some people in one department that are going to redeploy them to be in the complaints department. I assume the reason they didn't do that, why they don't want to do that, is because they don't necessarily think these employees are aligned with them politically. So they want to get people who will just follow all of their orders and basically purge who they want to purge and I assume they didn't have confidence that many of the staff has hired under five years of Jeremy Corbyn would do that. Now, from things such as the Labour leaks, you'll know that Jeremy Corbyn and his team were far less successful at ridding Labour HQ of people who were ideologically opposed to them. You could look at this and say, well, good for Keir Starmer, he's been incredibly ruthless. Jeremy Corbyn wasn't. But what did you see when Jeremy Corbyn tried to do things that were just one-tenth of this? There would be media outrage. You'd have the MPs on all of the radio shows saying he's a Stalinist. Now this happens under Keir Starmer, so they just get rid of a third of the staff all in one go and no one's calling him a Stalinist. No one's saying anything about it. They just say it's completely unremarkable because Keir Starmer does it, whereas when Jeremy Corbyn did it, it would be an outrage and that's why they kept a load of people on for years, even when they were actively trying to undermine the party's chances. Back to the issue of workers' rights. It was an awkward day for this news to drop for the Labour Party. That's because Angela Rayner was launching Labour's New Deal for working people. Here she is talking to the BBC. People in Britain shouldn't have to go to work and really struggle to feed their families and support themselves in very low-paid, insecure work. So today it's about making sure that everybody gets rights from day one in employment, can have the right for flexible working, not just for the employer, but for the employees as well who have done so much, you know, adapting and working from home over this period and making sure that everybody has a minimum of at least £10 an hour real living wage. And I think that will really boost our economy but also give people some security and respect in work and we think that's the absolute minimum that people should expect. So Rayner tweeted out that clip from the BBC. She wrote, Today we are launching our New Deal for working people to make our economy work for working people, flexible working for all living wage of at least £10 an hour job security and rights from day one on the job, not insecure contracts. At £19 an hour Labour have met one of those conditions. Presumably also these jobs are going to be fairly flexible. You can do them from home. Job security and rights from day one on the job. Now if this is a six month fixed term contract and they've just got rid of a lot of people who had permanent contracts, it seems to me that this move by the Labour Party has created a net loss in job security. Can a six month contract count as job security? Well it seems like they gave four jobs to Angela Rayner and sacked everybody else. I mean that doesn't seem like a great distribution of contracts but like joking aside, what they've done is exactly the same thing that they would rightly criticise any other business or institution or organisation for. You get rid of a sway of the workforce who are on better paid, more secure contracts where they've got rights and more than that. Because they've got those rights and they're securing their jobs it means that they will feel confident to do things like be part of a unionised workforce or really basic stuff like take a sick day or time off to look after their mental health. Whereas when you replace that secure workforce with an insecure workforce on temporary contracts and they're worried about getting their next contract they're hoping that they'll get one in the same workplace so they don't have to jump around from place to place. Those are exactly the kind of workers who don't unionise. Exactly the kind of workers who don't take six days when they deserve them and ultimately suffer a lot more stress and anxiety because of that insecurity. So I don't think it's serious for Angela Rainer to be going around advocating a set of policies which yes I do agree with and I think that some of them are really good policies when you take one look at her own party and they're doing absolutely all of the things that they would castigate a business for doing. They'll say, oh we're not a business we're a political party we've got all of these financial problems etc. Now I remember years when you had MPs who were all on 70 grand a month who talked about workers' rights if you talked about mandatory deselections so they saw democracy as an affront to their workers' rights. Now an MP isn't a worker no one's their boss. You know they're elected, that's stating the obvious but they don't have workers' rights in the same way that everyone else is not employed by anyone they are the boss of their office but you had all of these Labour right MPs who said, how dare you we're supposed to be the party of workers' rights and you're trying to implement local democracy that means we might get replaced by someone else. Why don't somebody think of Neil Coyle Neil Coyle, leader of the precarious workers brigade. I'll bet that very few of the one third of Labour's staff members who have been made redundant were on 71 grand. These are much lower paid workers than the Labour MPs who went on all of the national radio stations to say, oh how dare these bullying members even consider replacing us with someone more aligned to their politics. The hypocrisy is impossible to ignore unless you're the mainstream media who just love ignoring it. And this was something which I said when Corbyn was leader and I say it now that he's not leader as well which is that the Labour Party is a toxic workplace it really, really is. Some of the stories that I've heard coming out of the leader's office as well as MPs' offices and then also Southside which is the Labour Party HQ would absolutely horrify you. I'm talking people behaving in ways which are so egregious you would think that they wouldn't be tolerated in any normal workplace and the reason why such bad behaviour is able to flourish within the Labour Party is because people come under factional protection so there are political interests in keeping people in certain positions even if they treat their colleagues or people who work under them like absolute trash. And I'm talking about stories I've heard about sexual harassment about workplace bullying about people who have been made to work doing jobs within their role which aren't part of their actual role and are really demeaning and awful and I'd like to say that oh it's only the Labour right who've done this no this was something which was actually a non-factional phenomenon but because everyone is so concerned with looking after their own little empire they're just horrible behaviours which have been normalised and effectively cosigned within the Labour Party it is a toxic workplace I would never ever work there in a million years because I value my own mental health too much