The early period of the Labour Government has seen a sustained focus on gifts and donations to Ministers and their potential political impact.
The amounts are mostly limited and no doubt much worse can be found in the 14 Tory years. The point is that Labour is meant to be a break from all that.
In The Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson writes of the sinecures and money given to friends and relatives of Ministers in the period before the 1832 Reform Act.
It was known as Old Corruption. After Waterloo in 1815 for example Wellington was gifted £400,000 (millions today) to buy land and a mansion
Britain nearly came to revolution in 1831/2 before such practices were curtailed. Keir Starmer take note
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