Sir Keir Starmer has taken a symbolic blow in his backyard after a plan to move his local Labour Party into a new office building in Holborn and St Pancras was quietly scrapped—thanks to a clash with a disability charity.
According to insiders, the Labour team had their sights set on relocating to a building that also houses Camden Disability Action. But the move didn’t go down well with the charity, and for good reason, reported the Daily Mail.
Pat Stack, who chairs the charity’s board of trustees, didn’t mince his words. “We run an advice service for people on benefits. We would have clients distressed about what’s happening walking through the same doors as the people who had introduced the cuts,” he said.
It’s not hard to see why tensions flared. The Labour leadership has come under fire for slashing £5 billion from the welfare budget, and to then share a space with a charity that supports the very people impacted by those decisions would’ve been, at best, awkward.
Rather than risk a confrontation, Labour backed out of the move. But what’s raised a few eyebrows is that the charity extended an invitation to both Starmer and Tulip Siddiq, the neighbouring Labour MP, to sit down and talk about the impact of those cuts. So far, neither has been accepted. Funny that.
The incident comes hot on the heels of Labour’s bruising results in the local elections, where voters handed the party a sharp rebuke—and it’s yet another sign that all is not well between the party’s leadership and its traditional grassroots supporters.
Meanwhile, it’s not just welfare policy sparking tension. Labour’s green agenda is also under fire, even from within. Ed Miliband’s push for Net Zero is proving divisive, with Labour MP Terry Jermy now openly opposing a massive 4,000-acre solar farm planned in South-West Norfolk. His gripe? “Renewable energy does not fall evenly across the country – Norfolk is flat, so it’s easy to get solar panels into the ground.” In other words, he’s not keen on it being dumped in his own backyard.
And Tony Blair hasn’t exactly helped calm the waters either. His call for Labour to ease up on what he labelled “doomed” Net Zero ambitions was met with cynicism. David Clark, a former adviser to Robin Cook, took a swipe: “It says everything about how Blair has spent his retirement that my first thought on hearing this was to wonder which fossil fuel interest paid him to say it.”
As Labour tries to steady itself after a turbulent week, one thing’s clear: discontent is brewing in more places than just the ballot box.
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