 Since Keir Starmer took over Labour this spring, he has made it a priority to woo back the wealthy donors that flocked to the party under Tony Blair. In November the Times reported that one of those cash-riched returnees was property tycoon David Abrams. So according to the Times, Starmer had sent a personal letter to Abrams soliciting donations. Now at the time we raised concerns that these developments would once again make Labour a vehicle for wealthy interests. This is a property developer, remember? I mean there were previous controversies about potentially favours being offered to this property developer because of his closeness to, at the time, new Labour. However there are even deeper problems with this new relationship. They have been revealed in the last couple of days by the Guardian and then also other people on social media who have gone through his internet history which is not a pretty sight. We can take a look at the Guardian story so you can see that Keir Starmer urged return donations from Islamophobic property developer. Abrams tweets included suggestions that Muslims have mixed loyalties, that conservative Muslim culture is inherently violent and that Muslim youth have a propensity for suicide. Don't think I know how to divide political Islam from moderates and fundamentalists, Abrams posted in 2013. It is the very nature of the beast. As recently as this January he tweeted the claim that while Israel was a brand new high tech state with new inventions to benefit mankind, its close neighbours chose terrorism and invented suicide bombers. And it's not just Muslims who are the subjects of racism in his tweets. Not that that would matter, these tweets are all appalling enough. Got a penchant for calling Jews who don't support Israel self-hating. So you can see the worst offenders are self-hating Jews. We have too many of them. And he says self-hating Jews always the worst types. And this is someone who Keir Starmer you've got to remember wrote personally to to ask if he would like to reconsider donating to the Labour Party. On top of this we've got in 2018 when a black woman received racist abuse on a Ryanair flight. He used it as an excuse to complain about a completely unrelated event on a bus in the United States. Let's get this one up. So he writes, totally unacceptable for black women to suffer vile abuse on Ryanair flight. That happened in reverse when travelled on public bus after visit to Graceland. After general abuse almost lynched by a baying mob at Terminus driver had to lock doors before driving to a different location. Completely bizarre response to someone suffering racial abuse, racial discrimination on an airplane. This is definitely the most jaw-dropping tweet though from Labour's new high-profile donor. David Abrams in 2017 tweets, hashtag President Zuma. Most black South Africans spoke to earlier in the year preferred white rule as less corrupt and more viable and professional. He's literally defending apartheid. There are lots of debates in the moment about what you're allowed to call apartheid and not in the Labour Party. Are you allowed to call Israel apartheid? Are you allowed to compare it to South African apartheid? You don't have to worry about that particular debate here because this guy is literally speaking positively about South African apartheid. The thing that everyone agrees was racial white supremacy. Aaron, there are calls for Starmer to give back Abrams' donation but as far as I can tell there hasn't been much comment or beyond this story which was not written by the Guardian politics team, it was written by a different journalist at the Guardian. I haven't seen any of the lobby pick this up. I haven't seen Labour force to really comment on it but this is someone who Starmer personally wrote to to ask to become a donor to the party who has now been sort of found out as having tweeted. I mean I think most people agree that many of those tweets count as latent racism, especially the Islamophobic ones. The comment about South Africa just mind boggling. How is this able to stand? There's a bit of an overblown way of putting it but how can this happen without any pushback whatsoever? It speaks to the complete brazen hypocrisy and duplicity of many of the people in the liberal media, particularly the Guardian, the new statesman, the BBC who imagine if this was Jeremy Corbyn donor. Imagine if Jeremy Corbyn had written to a donor saying please come back to the Labour Party and this was a person who said that actually Black South Africans prefer apartheid. Can you imagine? It would be a story going on for weeks. But this, like you say, only appears in the Guardian because it's not being covered by the politics team. I wonder why, right? How firm is their commitment to anti-racist politics, you wonder? And that's a question, by the way. That's a question if they want to answer it, they want to come on the show, they're more than welcome to. How firm is the commitment of Keir Starmer to anti-racist politics? Again, he's welcome to come on the show. Whenever we write a story, we always go to Labour for comment, we don't get anything and even to this story when Labour are contacted, it's pure boilerplate, you know, and this all comes in the aftermath of that report by the Labour-Muslim network which found that more than 50% or around 50% of Muslim Labour Party member supporters don't trust the leadership to act on this. That's terrible. Furthermore, you've got around one third of Labour Party member supporters have either experienced or observed Islamophobia in the Labour Party. So it's present, it's being observed, they don't trust the leadership to do anything about it. And when you see a story of this scale being reported in the national media, the leadership knows they have to do so little because their backside is covered so much in the Liberal press and that this won't blow up, they can respond with pure boilerplate. And I think it's hugely insulting to a number of people. It's not just insulting to Muslims, which it is, or to black people, which it is. It's also hugely insulting to the many people who've been involved in the debate around anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and have done so with entirely good intentions. Many, many people. And it just seems to me when you look at this story, the way it's being responded to, both by the parts of the media and by Keir Starmer's lot, there was no good faith coming from them on this. It's shocking, it is shocking. You know, he deleted his Twitter account for a reason. I'm sure if people really wanted to look, there was much, much more. And it wasn't that he was just contacted and he started giving money back to Labour again. It was in the Sunday Times, I think a couple of weeks ago. So this was really, this was a story that was actively briefed to the press by somebody. Might not have been Starmer, might have been Mandelson, it might have been somebody else in the Labour Party. Mandelson, by the way, has quoted in that same article saying, this is a sign that people are coming back, the people we want, they're coming back. Is anybody going to Peter Mandelson now saying, do you have a comment about David Abraham saying that black South Africans prefer to partake? Of course they're not. I mean, my God, we knew there was duplicity and hypocrisy in British politics, but this story is just remarkable. It might seem odd that we're critiquing the Guardian whilst talking about a Guardian story and fair play to Damien Gale, who has written up this story. But what I was checking was Jessica Elgert, who is their main lobby reporter, hasn't tweeted about this story, which shows that it's not seen as a politically controversial story. You know, lobby journalists, what they tend to do is they tweet about stuff that they think, oh, this will cause problems for Keir Starmer. But no one thinks this will cause problems for Keir Starmer because no one cares about, well, either this form of racism or they don't have any desire whatsoever to hold Keir Starmer's feet to the fire. Jessica Elgert will not tweet something which is disadvantageous for the Starmer leadership. She won't. And so we, we on Navara Media have had this for years. Oh, you're, you know, you're just propagandist for Corbyn, even though I disagreed with the Corbyn leadership on open selection on the general secretary's office on a whole bunch of things. I thought it should be more farmer accountable to members. We probably disagreed where we publicly disagreed, right? Ash on, on policing or, or, or migration on Brexit policy, right? And yet these people, it was all projection, Michael. This idea that, oh, Navara is just, you know, they're outriders for the leadership. That's what these people are doing. There's a very clear story of public interest, which clearly undermines Keir Starmer and his leadership's claims to being anti-racist labor. Always were an anti-racist party. Oh, except by the way, when we all went round Phil Woolis, gathered around Phil Woolis 10 years ago and said he was a good guy and he hadn't done anything wrong despite the fact his campaign published brazenly Islamophobic campaign literature, you know, we're back to that place again now where people just don't really need to talk about it. But here's the problem for labor is that their strongest base amongst the electorate. Yes, it's renters, yes, it's young people, but it's also people of color and it's Muslims and it's black people. And if, and if they genuinely have the perception, which by the way, I think is warranted, if they genuinely have the perception that their votes are being taken for granted by the Labour Party, there's going to be a problem. If you're taking the votes of Muslims for granted and yet you play silly buggers when it comes to Kashmir, you completely override democratically agreed policy on the party, or you basically basically ignore what your own Muslim members are saying with regards to Islamophobia. Guess what? Muslim supporters and voters are going to be a bit less keen to vote for you next time round. There's going to be an electoral overhead there. You know, we're going to find out. Labour clearly don't think it's a major problem for them that somebody like David Abrams is donating money to the party despite what he said about the key groups that are most supportive of Labour when it comes to election time. It's a real slap in the face. We've got a bit more on Abrams in a moment. First of all, if you're new to this channel, if you're enjoying what you're seeing, do hit the subscribe button. Tiski Sour goes live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. and we put out these clips on a regular basis, so it's worth being subscribed and hitting that notification button. On Abrams, we have spoken about him before because the only problem with him isn't these racist tweets. It's also that his relationship with the Labour Party in the past represented basically everything that was wrong with the Labour leadership's close ties with the corporate establishment that meant that we couldn't really trust that they were working in the interests of the many, not the few. This is a clip from a friend of the show in a previous job explaining why Abrams donations never really reflected well on those in receipt of them. David Abrams' business is property and that means he's routinely involved with seeking planning permission for projects here in the North East. At the highest level, planning is a political process, both in Whitehall and in the Labour-controlled councils of the North East. As you can see, there are quite a lot of them. It's politicians that get to decide on Mr Abrams' projects. So knowing whether he's giving them money is above all relevant to that. Another area of the North East Mr Abrams took an interest in was Sedgefield, the then constituency of Prime Minister Tony Blair. In 2005 and again this year, a Mr D Martin of Acorn Residential Estates is listed as a consultee for Sedgefield's local development framework. Actually, Mr Abrams and D Martin are the same person. So what representations did Mr D Martin make to the borough council? Actually, none says the council. However, with the constituency Labour Party, it was different. He was, said one local Labour politician, a hanger-on. Another said he often sent a note to Tony congratulating him. He was invited to Blair's farewell speech, says one source, as someone you could rely on not to stand up and heckle. Despite not living there, nor having any business with the council, he came along to various things of Tony's as a member. So this is, I mean, someone who it seems, Stalmer specifically sought out to say, oh, we think you should come back into the fold. Labour is once again a party for billionaires. And he would have well known, because this was a big deal at the time. That's why it was on Nudes night, that David Abrams was always a controversial donor to the Labour Party because he was a property developer who it appeared and was getting favourable treatment from Labour authorities after having donated to the Labour Party. A clear conflict of interest there. And this is the kind of thing that, you know, for all his faults, Jeremy Corbyn was moving the party away from him, saying no longer are we going to be, you know, in cahoots with Britain's corporate establishment, because we know that so long as we're relying on donors in the city or property developing donors, then that is going to undermine any potential that this party has to change the country for the better. And if you look at the people who were close to Tony Blair, there is nothing that tells you more about the completely, you know, morally degraded nature of the new Labour regime. And for Keir Starmer to be saying, you know, I want to go straight back to those same old faces who, you know, are completely tied up with the worst parts of new Labour. And now we can see also, send racist tweets. You know, that is pretty goddamn concerning. Well, in their zone two dinner parties, which is all that matters to these people, these people, and it is very much a bubble, it sounds like a glegia, I sound like Nigel Farage saying it, but it's true because of the way this country works, so much political, social, economic power is concentrated in London. My God, Keir Starmer's constituency has the Guardian Office in it. I mean, it's just so absurd. And who are they listening to and whose opinions count and who matter? For Keir Starmer, it's not black and brown members who want to, and white members too, but I'm saying that in the context of this guy making Islamophobic and I think anti-black racist remarks and his tweets, they don't want to talk about Jeremy Corbyn, they want to be talking about a Green New Deal, the housing crisis, by the way, because many of them rent, they want to be talking about universal credit and what kind of economy we build up to COVID. They don't want to be doing this. This is entirely of Keir Starmer's making. This nonsense civil war is entirely of his making. And I think partly because he's actually got no policies. I think that's something nobody's talking about. He wants to stay relevant, he wants to be in the news, but he actually hasn't got anything to offer anybody because he doesn't really know what he believes. He doesn't know what kind of policies he'd want to do. He doesn't know what he'd like to do with power and that presents a major problem. So how do you keep yourself relevant? How do you get pats on the back from the right-wing media? And how can you make yourself look like you're doing something? Because of COVID, he can't do events, he can't do a tour, he can't zoom all day. I mean, he probably is doing a fair bit of that too. So I think that's a big part of that. But it's insulting to members. It's taking members for granted. And if Labour continue to piss off black and brown voters, if they continue to piss off renters, if they continue to alienate young people, if they really don't seem particularly interested in a radical green policy which is fit to the task when it comes to what we have to do with regards to climate change, they're going to struggle. They are going to struggle. Does that mean they're going to lose more seats next time round? Maybe not. We're going to win another 10 seats. I have no idea. By the way, with boundary reform, which is in the background to all of this, which we may get in 2023, it may be academic. You may see a huge change anyway. But my God, Labour haven't got hope and hell if they alienate young people, minorities, renters. No chance. But for Keir Starmer, and again, you go back to materialist analysis, conditions determine consciousness. If you're a wealthy guy, I don't care about his background, right? If you're a wealthy guy and you've been at the top of your game professionally for 20, 30 years, he doesn't know what it's like for renters who are struggling.