In the summer of 1985, Dale Vince found himself happily living in a variety of vehicles, among them an ambulance and a fire engine. It was a decade of fear of nuclear war, and Vince had dropped out of school to take LSD and join a peace-loving convoy of New Age travellers. After visiting peace camps to show solidarity with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the convoy set off towards Stonehenge. The mysterious neolithic monument, thought by many New Agers to be an epicentre of Earth energy, is a beacon for hippy culture.
The convoy never arrived. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher banned the travellers from staging a free festival and truncheon-wielding police intervened. What followed, over hours of violent clashes leading to dozens of injuries and more than 500 arrests, became known as the Battle of the Beanfield. Pictures of the bloody incident shocked the public. For Vince, it was a formative if traumatic moment. “I slept with one eye open after that,” he recalled years later.
Vince was still living in an old army truck when he first decided to try his hand as a green entrepreneur, starting out with a single wind turbine on a hill in Gloucestershire. By the turn of the century, he had set up a company called Ecotricity and was selling green electricity from local landfill gas and windmills to the Body Shop and the Millennium Dome. Soon after, he branched out into supplying customers’ homes directly. Ecotricity now has about 200,000 customers, making its founder an estimated fortune of £100mn.
Vince’s attitude to his business success has seemed ambivalent at times. “Business is a sad waste of life, on the whole, and the free market’s an oxymoron,” he said in an FT interview in 2009. Now in his early sixties, he retains his edgy hairstyle and piercings, along with his activist streak. He remains dedicated to environmental causes and has taken part in direct climate action. Just last year, he joined Just Stop Oil protesters on a slow-walk protest in central London.
Sitting in his modern offices in Stroud as the clammy winter fog envelops the Cotswolds, he is preparing to become a megadonor to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party. He is one of three very different business leaders who have pledged to provide the financial firepower to an opposition party that has always struggled to match that of its Conservative opponents. Like Lord David Sainsbury, the scion of a British supermarket dynasty, and Gary Lubner, an almost unknown South African businessman whose social conscience was forged during apartheid, Vince is expected to give up to £5mn to the opposition party before polling day. The coming vote, says Vince, “is the most important of our lifetimes”.
The idea of being able to draw on big donors from the business world wasn’t high on Labour’s agenda at the last election. Under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s 2019 election manifesto promised higher corporate taxes and a plan to seize 10 per cent of the shares in every major company in the UK — worth £300bn — and hand them to employees over a decade. With businesses fearing the worst, donors took fright. As it campaigned to win over voters, the party was outspent not only by the Tories, but by the much smaller Liberal Democrats. When the results came in, Labour had crashed to its heaviest election defeat since 1935.
Having watched a succession of chaotic Tory governments preside over the upheavals of Brexit, Liz Truss’s calamitous 2022 budget and the fallout from Boris Johnson’s infamous “fuck business” edict, Starmer’s been making a serious pitch for Labour as a party of business. One that’s fit to run the economy. He recently praised Thatcher, loathed by many on the left, for unleashing the British people’s “natural entrepreneurialism” when she was prime minister.
Not everyone is comfortable with the change in Labour’s tone. Born out of years of working-class struggle, the party has usually prided itself on keeping its distance from big business and on preserving its financial ties to the trade union movement.
British elections are fought on the cheap compared with the US, where spending in the 2020 White House presidential and senate contests hit about $14bn. According to Lord Jon Mendelsohn, a fundraiser in Tony Blair’s government, “The £19mn cap at the last election is what you’d spend on a junior Congress seat in the US.”
The money is largely spent on online and billboard advertising, rallies and party election broadcasts. Since then, however, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government has almost doubled the limit on how much each party could spend on the coming election to £35mn, considerably raising the stakes in the race to attract generous donors.
Sunak’s gamble is predicated on the Conservatives extending their financial advantage over Labour in election campaigns. Starmer’s new donors could change that — and play a significant role in deciding the direction of Britain’s next government.
Labour’s love-in with business reached its zenith on February 1 at the Oval in south London. Overlooking the green sward of one of the world’s iconic cricket grounds, guests from Goldman Sachs, Google, AstraZeneca and others munched on mini-hot dogs and onion bhajis. Executives mingled with Starmer and his shadow ministers, including shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves.
In the early stages of what party insiders call the “smoked salmon and scrambled egg offensive” on business, Starmer and Reeves had to visit companies at their offices. But as the election nears, with Labour well ahead in the polls, business is beating a path to the party’s door instead. This particular event, which cost at least £1,000 per head, was sold out in four hours, evidence of corporate Britain’s desire to schmooze with the men and women who could form the next cabinet. “It’s so funny seeing all these people who used to blow smoke up the arses of the Tories sitting here,” said one business attendee.
Labour has been quick to adapt. Wes Streeting, the Blairite health spokesman who grew up on an east London council estate but now embodies a new sharp-suited managerialism in the party, is often deployed by Starmer as a star turn at events. Jonathan Reynolds, the business spokesman, has spent years affably courting the City. But it is Reeves, a former Bank of England economist with a self-professed “ironclad fiscal discipline”, who is at the heart of the effort. “Companies are always being invited to sponsor tables or tickets at party events, where they get to meet members of the shadow cabinet,” said one City lobbyist and former Tory adviser who was full of praise. “Labour have monetised business engagement in a way I’ve not seen before.”
In his speech, Starmer promised “friendship”, saying he wanted to work alongside business leaders to rebuild Britain. “Your fingerprints are on every one of our national missions,” he said. Reeves pledged that corporation tax would not rise above 25 per cent during the next parliament. “This Labour party sees profit not as something to be disdained, but as a mark of business,” she told the group.
Their remarks went down well with the business chiefs in the audience. Carl Ennis, chief executive of Siemens UK, praised the “very professional” event. Shevaun Haviland, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, seemed delighted by the coming together of Labour and business. “It is really important that they do that, and realise that’s the only way to get economic growth.”
Revelling in the atmosphere, Starmer invited his audience to recall Corbyn’s time as leader. “Let’s cast our minds back to 2019,” he said. “Let’s imagine if you were invited to an event like this, a Labour business conference, before any of the changes to our party had taken place. The question is — would you go?” The audience laughed. “There’s a reason they are called rhetorical questions,” Starmer said, smiling.
Starmer’s views on business have evolved since he edited a small Marxist magazine called Socialist Alternatives. In a 1987 interview with Tony Benn, a hero of the left, Starmer was full of earnest questions about the future of trade unions. Should Labour become the united party of the oppressed, he asked, rather than “the party of any one section of the oppressed, for example the working class”? That year, Starmer was called to the bar. Going on to co-found the crusading law firm, Doughty Street Chambers, he played a leading role in the long-running “McLibel” trial in the 1990s, defending two environmental activists against fast-food giant McDonald’s.
By the time he ran for Labour leader in 2020, Starmer’s policy pledges remained left-of-centre, including higher income tax for top earners and extensive nationalisation of key industries. Most have since been dropped. Quizzed on his youthful radicalism by the Desert Island Discs radio programme in November 2020, he said, “Certainly, I started by thinking I had all the answers.” Starmer went on to explain that time had taught him how important it is “to hold your ideas up to the light and see if they withstand scrutiny”.
Labour’s devastating 2019 election defeat was surely one such moment for reappraisal. Having become leader, Starmer decided that some of the party’s ideological baggage would have to go if it wanted to win again. In the months that followed he sidelined the left, pushing Corbyn out of the Parliamentary Labour party for saying antisemitism within Labour had been “dramatically overstated”. Then Starmer took over the machinery of the party, ensuring a largely centrist slate of candidates for the upcoming election.
Under Corbyn, unions provided more than half of the party’s funding. That proportion has dropped to 30 per cent under Starmer, as private individuals have stepped up. For some, Labour’s friendliness with business is just another reason to be sceptical of the party’s direction. Corbyn’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell says: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Trade union funding is on the basis of its members and members determine how they want their funds used. The overriding concern about donations and offers of support in kind is: what are the donors and corporations selling?”
That was the question Dale Vince found himself having to answer last June, when controversy erupted over his donations to both Labour and the green protest group Just Stop Oil. Sunak pointed the finger at Starmer: “It does appear that these eco-zealots at Just Stop Oil are writing Keir Starmer’s energy policy.” Soon Vince was being put on the spot about whether Labour’s decision to back ending new drilling licences in the North Sea had been influenced by the £1.5mn worth of donations he’d given the party. Vince denies having any direct influence on Labour policy.
Vince otherwise made a natural champion for Starmer’s “green prosperity plan”. He has not taken a flight for five years and the Forest Green Rovers football team he owns has been declared by Fifa as the greenest team in the world. Like Starmer, however, Vince concluded long ago that idealism on its own is not enough. Though he initially doubled down on his support for Just Stop Oil, pledging to match funds donated to the group over a 48-hour period, a few months later Vince ended his funding.
Realising the Tories were intent on weaponising the issue, he says he wanted to focus on the next general election and give generously to Labour instead. “It was blindingly obvious that we’d reached the end game of peaceful protest,” says Vince. “I concluded that we could not just stop oil with protests. You could only do it at the ballot box.”
Vince has met Starmer just once, he says, during last October’s party conference in Liverpool, although he has known Labour’s energy spokesman Ed Miliband for more than a decade. He does not deny the amount he could give before polling day could come to £5mn, a figure touted by party insiders. “I believe Labour believes in green economic growth and will wean us off fossil fuels,” he says. “We’ve never had a bigger, better chance to elect a green government in my view, and they will be the greenest government we have ever had.”
He remained sanguine a fortnight ago when the Labour leader cut his proposed £28bn-a-year investment programme in green projects to less than £5bn a year, blaming the Tories for “crashing the economy” and making the original plan unaffordable. Critics claimed it was further evidence of Starmer “flip-flopping”, but Vince reiterated his support: “I think Labour are entirely right to say the economy matters the most.”
In person, Vince exudes the zen that comes from spending much of the year living on a canal boat. “It’s lovely, it took me back to my roots of being a traveller, with a wood-burning stove and the challenges of the weather . . . the sink just goes straight into the river.” He remains supportive of direct climate protests, in contrast with Starmer who, despite his past as a legal defender of green activists, has described efforts to bring cities to a standstill as “arrogant”.
“Protesters, by definition, are against the government of the day or the orthodoxy of the day,” says Vince. “Is it arrogant to be against that? I don’t think so actually, because quite often protesters are proved — in the course of history — to be right. Look at the suffragettes. What were they considered to be back in the day? Very annoying.”
Gary Lubner first met Starmer at a June 2022 business breakfast event. A quietly spoken 64-year-old who rarely gives interviews, Lubner made his money running a vehicle glass repair company. He was born in South Africa to Jewish refugees from Russia, and Lubner’s formative political experiences came from being conscripted into the country’s police force during apartheid, seeing its “brutal, brutal” consequences first-hand. He moved to the UK 13 years ago, intent on giving away a large chunk of his fortune. “I liked the way [Starmer] went about the meeting, the way he listened, the way he took notes,” he recalls. “I thought, wow, this is impressive.”
Lubner had been funding Labour ever since a meeting with Reeves at a PwC-hosted dinner in the autumn of 2021. At that time, the party still looked a million miles away from power but Lubner recalls, “we just got chatting and she invited me to her office”. Arriving at Reeves’ bare-bones digs, he came face to face with the realities of Britain’s budget democracy. “She was possibly the next chancellor, but she was booking her own train tickets,” he says. “I suppose I was more familiar with CEOs and their offices, with chiefs of staff and experts around them.”
Like Vince, Lubner is determined to use his wealth to evict Sunak from power and give Labour a shot. He is thoroughly “disenchanted” with the Conservative government that has run things since his arrival in the UK, singling out Brexit as “the biggest own goal ever”. He hates the government’s current migration policy, which aims to eventually deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Some of his money has gone into supporting youth employment projects and helping more women win seats in parliament. But Lubner’s biggest donations are aimed at helping Starmer into Downing Street. He insists he does not want an honour or a role telling Starmer what to do. “I haven’t really got any advice to give,” he says.
He admits to a profound urge to get rid of his money, at least a significant amount of it. “We are in a system where businesspeople are rewarded for hard work and risk taking, but there comes a point where the accumulation of wealth feels a bit out of kilter,” Lubner says. “Lots of people work hard — doctors, nurses, teachers and so on. So yes, I do feel uncomfortable. Or I did. I don’t feel uncomfortable now because I’m giving it all away.” He too has not denied that by polling day he will have given £5mn to Labour.
Sunak’s decision to raise the campaign spending cap to £35mn was seen by Labour as a clear attempt to seek financial advantage at the next election. In 2019, Labour under Corbyn raised £12mn for its campaign. Its three megadonors alone are set to pledge in excess of that this time round, though more will be needed. One Starmer ally was bullish that Sunak’s plan to tilt the playing field in his party’s favour would not succeed: “We will be able to spend up to the limit. No question about it.”
The struggle between the parties to win business’s affection erupted during last year’s Labour conference. Keen to brandish its newfound success with corporate Britain, the opposition party decided to announce a British Infrastructure Council, endorsed by some of the most powerful CEO names in the country. Within 45 minutes of a draft press release being circulated, the Conservatives were in a state of fury. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt became involved in a high-level campaign to urge them to take their names off what he regarded as a partisan stunt. Downing Street’s business adviser Franck Petitgas, a former Morgan Stanley executive appointed by Sunak last April, was assigned to exert pressure on the CEOs.
“Suddenly people were getting fairly aggressive WhatsApp messages,” said one of those on the receiving end from Downing Street. “First from the chancellor’s operation, then Number 10. It was an interesting test of nerve of who could be swayed. It was telling about the success Labour has had in building relations with business.” Another said: “They were on the warpath. They said that anyone signing up was making a direct political statement.” Labour claims that people “felt threatened”. Blackstone and Aviva pulled out, but Reeves did eventually set up the body with a host of the original big names, including leaders from Lloyds, Santander and HSBC. Petitgas declined to comment. What was not in doubt, was that the Tories had been rattled.
Of Labour’s three megadonors, the one with the deepest pockets is the man some refer to as “Big Dave”. The title befits the first British philanthropist in history to have donated £1bn to charitable causes but is comically at odds with the appearance of this unassuming 83-year-old. Lord David Sainsbury is far from a household name, even if most are familiar with the supermarket dynasty he hails from. He has a shy, modest manner and appearance that is less lordly and more “provincial store manager”, in the words of one columnist. In fact, he was the company’s finance director before rising to chairman in 1992.
Sainsbury, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was just 26 when he inherited a vast shareholding in the company founded in 1869 by his great-great-grandfather. From an early age, he established himself as a prominent donor to an array of causes. One associate describes Sainsbury as someone who is “interested in good things rather than the good life”. He joined the Labour party in the 1960s, later defecting to the newly founded Social Democratic party, aghast at actions of militant leftwingers in the early 1980s.
It was not until 1996 that, impressed by Tony Blair, he re-emerged as a Labour donor. Under Blair, Sainsbury’s daughter Fran Perrin, acted as an adviser in Downing Street (Perrin became Labour’s biggest ever female donor last year with a £1mn gift). Sainsbury got a seat in the House of Lords and became Labour’s science minister.
Post-Blair he drifted away from the party again, giving £8mn to the anti-Brexit Lib Dems at the 2019 election, one of the biggest donations in British political history. It was when Starmer dragged Labour back towards the political centre ground that Sainsbury reappeared on the party’s list of most generous donors. According to data from the Electoral Commission, he has already given Labour £5mn since late 2022.
The return of Big Dave is a coup for Starmer, but Sainsbury is a controversial figure with Labour’s leftwing MPs. His association with Blair furthers the suspicion that Starmer could take the party back to the New Labour era, when prominent cabinet figure Peter Mandelson famously claimed he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”.
Starmer has recently repeated Mandelson’s quote, but he will not want to repeat the lobbying scandals that blighted New Labour. In 1997, Blair personally intervened to secure an exemption for Formula One from a tobacco advertising ban; the sport’s boss Bernie Ecclestone had recently given the party £1mn. And in 2006, Sainsbury, who was science minister at the time, had to apologise for “unintentionally” failing to tell his most senior civil servant that he had lent the party £2mn.
Conservative fundraising efforts in recent years have also drawn scrutiny, in particular the revelation that a secret “advisory board” of major Tory donors won preferential access with senior ministers, usually giving £250,000 to the party for the privilege.
Today the person charged with vetting Labour donors is chief fundraiser Lord Waheed Alli, a media entrepreneur and gay rights campaigner said by colleagues to “work day and night” to bring in new benefactors. “He’s massively strict on who we do and don’t take donations from,” says one Labour insider. “We have the luxury of not having to take donations from everyone. If they become high maintenance, we don’t take their money.”
Looking ahead, corporate Britain is clearly hoping that its engagement with Starmer will shape what critics claim is the sometimes opaque business agenda of a prospective Labour government. Some in the City fear that, despite protestations to the contrary, a Prime Minister Starmer will be forced to raise their taxes to fund cash-strapped public services. Labour is already planning a tax raid on private equity bosses and “non-doms”. Blair is said by colleagues to be worried that Starmer has not done enough to clearly set out his stall on business issues. “Tony thinks that a lot of people are cosying up to Labour not knowing exactly what they are cosying up to,” said one colleague.
What will business want — and should Labour care? Matt Wrack, who leads the Fire Brigades Union, sums up a view widely held among those on the left when he says that Starmer should be more concerned with redressing imbalances in the workplace by restoring trade union rights. “We don’t need another government pandering to corporate interests,” he says. Not surprisingly, Lubner believes the interests of businesses and workers don’t have to be mutually exclusive: “I just want a better Britain with social justice and young people at the helm.”
George Parker is the FT’s political editor. Jim Pickard is the FT’s deputy political editor
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