Hugh Fitzgerald: Jeremy Corbyn and Laura Alvarez, Salon Bolsheviks
Here’s a biographical bit about Jeremy Corbyn:
Jeremy Corbyn was born in Chippenham, England, in May 1949. He was raised in considerable comfort at Yew Tree Manor, on the Duke of Sutherland’s estate, a “splendid house” which he likes to refer deprecatingly as “an old farm,” part of his downplaying of his upper middle-class background. He graduated from North London Polytechnic. He has been in politics for his entire adult life. He was elected to Haringey Council in 1974, at the age of 25, and continued to serve locally until he became a Member of Parliament for Islington North in June 1983. He became the Leader of the Labour Party, as well as the Leader of the Opposition, in September 2015. Corbyn“has been known for his activism and rebelliousness and supports policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and military non-interventionism. He is a member of Amnesty International, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.”
So for the past 35 years, Jeremy Corbyn has had one job: Member of Parliament. And in the nine years before that, he was involved in local politics. That’s all he’s ever done — hold political office. Yet his net worth is now reported to be above $4 million. His house in Islington is worth at least one million pounds, or $1,300,000. When he finally leaves office, he will receive a Settlement.
How has he done it?
The basic annual salary for an MP from 1 April 2018 is £77,379. MPs also receive expenses to cover the costs of running an office, employing staff, having somewhere to live in London or their constituency, and travelling between Parliament and their constituency.
Since Jeremy Corbyn has always lived in London, he would require almost nothing for travel to his constituency. I assume he would receive a housing allowance. A very generous estimate for that allowance would be £33,000 a year, for a house that he already owns. So let’s assume he now receives, in salary and housing allowance, £100,000 a year, or $130,000. In previous years, all the way back to 1983, let us also assume he was paid an amount equivalent to that $130,000. The income tax rate on incomes from £46,351 to £150,000 in the U.K. is 40%. That would leave Corbyn with an after-tax income of $78,000.
But Jeremy Corbyn’s net worth is now over $4 million. How did he manage that? No doubt by taking every conceivable financial advantage his position as a Member of Parliament allowed him. Housing costs can be inflated; so can the cost of paying staff and maintaining an office. The main point is: he’s done extraordinarily well to have ended up with a net worth of $4 million.
Corbyn likes to travel, especially to the Middle East. He took a trip to Syria to meet kindly President Assad in 2009, a trip paid for by a Palestinian group. In 2010, he took a trip to Israel — or rather, to “Palestine,” since he only met with Arabs — paid for by the Friends of Al-Aqsa and Middle East Monitor. He initially failed to declare his trip to Tunisia in 2014 to attend a wreath-laying ceremony for Black September terrorists buried in a cemetery, and who paid for it. It remains a mystery to his day. He failed to register at least three of his trips, breaking strict Parliamentary rules: his trip to Syria in 2009, to Israel/Palestine in 2010, to Tunisia in 2014. Who paid for them? He was paid£20,000 ($26,285) for appearing on several Iranian television programs, on a station that had previously broadcast the forced (by torture) confession of an Iranian dissident. His last appearance on that Iranian station occurred six months after the station had been banned in the United Kingdom for broadcasting that forced confession.
In Corbyn’s campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015, two of the three main individual donors to that effort were people later exposed as supporters of terror. One was Dr. Ibrahim Hamami, a vitriolic opponent of the Oslo peace accords and a supporter of the wave of stabbings [in 2015] of Jews in Israel. When it comes to Muslims, Corbyn doesn’t mind the company he keeps or the checks he keeps cashing. Might Corbyn have received other generous payments for speeches, or all-expenses paid travel (on his second trip to Tunisia, as a guest of the President, Corbyn, as befits his kind of socialist, stayed in a five-star hotel), not declared, from Middle Eastern admirers? The mystery of Corbyn’s accumulation of millions deserves a thorough investigation.
Corbyn is old-fashioned leftist, except that he’s very interested in money — for himself and for his wife. He uses the word “comrade.” He likes to denounce capitalist exploitation. At the latest party conference in Liverpool, he quoted a verse by a 19th-century poetaster, Ernest Jones, who turns out to have been an antisemite and racist: “‘And what we get, and what we give, We know, and we know our share; We’re not too low the cloth to weave, But too low the cloth to wear.’ The poor workers can weave the cloth for the rich, but cannot afford to wear it themselves.” Corbyn’s associate said “he was making the point that workers know the reality and injustice of their position. Labour believes a worker’s position is on the board.”
Corbyn’s professed concern for “the worker” does not extend to the poor workers exploited by his third wife, Laura Alvarez. Originally from Mexico, Laura Alvarez imports what she calls “fair trade” coffee beans, and advertises them as such. This “fair trade” label is taken to mean that the coffee-producing farmers get a fair price and are not exploited. But it turns out that the farmer who produces the coffee that she sells for 10 pounds for a 500 gram package nets only 93 p.
Here’s more on the story of the ruthless exploitation of coffee growers in Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico,’ by Corbyn’s wife Laura Alvarez:
Wake up and smell the coffee, comrade: Jeremy Corbyn’s wife sells ‘fair trade’ beans sourced from ‘happy workers’ in Mexico. Guess what? They live in shacks and are dirt poor, exhausted… and very angry.A farmer pleaded with company director Miss Alvarez, 46, to ‘think about us.’Luxury coffee sold from the home of Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn is produced by poverty-stricken Mexican farmers, some of whom have earned less than the country’s minimum wage, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.Laura Alvarez, the politician’s third wife, runs a business selling organic beans, and boasts that those who make it are paid ‘a fair wage and enjoy good conditions of employment’.But this newspaper has discovered that Café Mam is produced by farmers in Mexico’s poorest state, who earn just 93p for each 500g bag that Ms Alvarez sells for £10.Workers take turns to sleep in their factory to stop thieves stealing the machinery and wrecking their livelihood.Our investigation found:One farmer took home the equivalent of just £260 in a year after paying his workers – a quarter of the regional minimum wage;A woman gets up at 4am each day to begin her back-breaking work, and wept when she was told how much her coffee is sold for by wealthy Westerners, including Mr Corbyn’s wife.Itinerant workers are being paid between 80 and 130 pesos – £3.15 to £5.10 – a day to pick coffee.
Jeremy Corbyn apparently does not mind his wife exploiting these poor Mexican workers who grow the coffee beans, and, who live and work in nightmare conditions, and earn a pathetic pittance. But why should he care? It’s not as if they were Palestinians.
Jeremy Corbyn, with his net worth of at least $4 million, accumulated in all sorts of doubtful ways, and his wife Laura Alvarez, with her Cafe Mam, who is doing extremely well as the hypocritical promoter of what is falsely advertised as “fair trade” coffee, deserve each other.
They are comrades in cupidity. Or more exactly, they are both Salon Bolsheviks.
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