IT IS shocking to see Labour balancing the books on the backs of the poor and disabled. Even the cowed and compliant Labour MPs are wondering why Keir Starmer’s Cabinet claims there is a financial emergency that can only be solved by taking away PIP money or universal credit rather than taxing the rich.

But look at the register of MPs’ interests and it becomes perfectly obvious this is the fault of the poor and disabled themselves.

For example, Health Secretary Wes Streeting says that between now and December 2025 a company called OPD Group Ltd will be giving £53,000 in four instalments to help pay for “staffing costs in my constituency office.”

It’s very unusual for a Cabinet minister to accept a big sum like this. The donation comes on top of public funding for Streeting to run his offices in Westminster and Ilford North of around £280,000 a year — that’s money Streeting rightly uses to hire staff and fund premises to help him deal with constituents’ problems and Westminster admin.

This may be because Streeting has a very small majority. In the 2024 election, local activist Leanne Mohamad stood against Streeting in protest at Labour’s support for Israel as their war on Gaza killed thousands of civilians. Mohamad also stood to the left of Streeting on other issues, including opposing NHS privatisation. Streeting only got 15,647 votes — much less than he got in the Jeremy Corbyn years — which was only 528 more than Mohamad. If Streeting becomes any more unpopular, he could be out of a job.

So Streeting has turned to OPD Group, a firm controlled by businessman Peter Hearn, for help.

If people who depend on PIP or universal credit wanted Streeting to help them, they only needed to come up with an extra £53,000 to help him keep his job.

Obviously, that is a bit easier for Hearn and his firm. The accounts of OPD Group are a bit limited, but they do show his firm has assets worth £14 million. Let’s say you had a £73 a week PIP to help with your serious disability, which helps pay for some adjustments — maybe including a car to get to your part-time job — well, it’s going to be hard to save up enough to have a spare £53,000, let alone £14m in funds.

Of course, you could band together with all the other working people, join a trade union and use some of the funds to pay for a Labour Party to get MPs elected. Only people already did that.

In 2023 — the latest year for which full figures are published — unions gave Labour around £10m in affiliation fees and donations. Typically unions give around this amount every year. But it seems that Streeting, Rachel Reeves and Starmer just take this union money for granted.

Meanwhile, Hearn’s cash has funded the Labour right for years. Hearn funded Yvette Cooper’s 2015 leadership bid, Dan Jarvis’s doomed attempt to unseat Corbyn as party leader, and now the Labour right is back in charge, Hearn is funding their frontbenchers, Cooper and Streeting. Hearn even gave £10,000 to the Tories in the 2010 election.

Hearn’s money says he likes the Labour right a lot, the Tories a little, but has no time even for Labour’s “soft left,” let alone socialist MPs.

Hearn made his money in “executive search.” This is where businesses, and more worryingly, public-sector bodies, hire consultants to help them appoint their top staff. Instead of just putting an ad in the papers, “executive search” consultants go out and find who they think to be suitable staff. In my experience, they often have a sort of “stable” of chums and hangers-on that they put forward for jobs.

Hearn founded the recruitment firm Odgers and serves on the board. Hearn’s Odgers is a very Tory-friendly firm. Hearn sits on the Odgers board alongside former Tory health secretary Virginia Bottomley, who chairs Odgers’ “board practice” — meaning recruitment to top boards. Fellow Odgers board member and overall chairman Richard Boggis-Rolfe has given the Tories around £200,000 over the years.

As an example of how Odgers works, it helped to foist Tory hanger-on Dido Harding on the NHS. Harding says she got her first big public-sector job, the chair of NHS Improvement, because “I met the team at the headhunters Odgers Berndston, and it is they who first suggested that I consider applying for” the NHS job.

This in turn led Harding to become the head of NHS Test and Trace, a politically friendly appointment which led, in my mind, to a crony who wasn’t up to the job getting this key role. Hearn’s Odgers heavily relies on public-sector contracts, “headhunting” for top NHS and other government jobs.

Hearn’s big enthusiasm for promoting the Labour right and occasional Tory gesture arguably flow naturally from his interests. He has a lot of wealth — like the £14m of assets he owns through OPD Group. So it is no surprise he backs Labour politicians who reject the idea of “wealth taxes” or other tax increases on the rich and their firms. The Labour right will stop the Labour left from doing any of that.

He likes outsourcing because his firm Odgers relies on government outsourcing. The Labour right will not limit outsourcing, so it seems natural that Hearn would be comfortable with their politics and antagonistic to even the soft left of Labour.

What is less natural is that Labour, as a party of reform, a party that hopes or claims to represent working people, a party that should be about redistributing wealth, not defending it, allows men like Hearn to use their money to shape its politics.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.