Sauce For The Goose

Ben Wildsmith

There’s a particular look of wounded incomprehension that Labour Party politicians adopt when they have been caught with their paws in the cookie jar.

For all the initial protestations of innocence and labyrinthine justifications, their real complaint is that the Tories are much worse.  So, focussing on Starmer’s free clobber, or Abbott’s private schooling arrangements, or Rayner’s stamp tax escapades is, of itself, an injustice. ‘What about the PPE scandal?’ their eyes blaze as they are led away and fed into the Daily Telegraph’s socialist mulching machine.

On a human level, I suppose it’s understandable. The figures involved are rinky-dink next to allegations levelled at people like Baroness Mone, for example. Angela Rayner has managed to plunge her party, and by extension the government, into chaos for the sake of forty grand. Forty grand! That much is likely lying around in David Cameron’s sock drawer. Somebody will have won more on a scratchie this morning.

The comparative figures, though, are not the point. The Tories, their defenders in the press, the investment class, and the landed gentry are doing a simple job that everyone understands. They have the nation’s loot and, not unreasonably, they are keen to hold on to it and add more if possible.

Any allusion to ideology by these people is window dressing and will be abandoned if it interferes with the prime directive to acquire and protect wealth.

Occasionally, they will indulge some airy-fairy nonsense from the universities about personal liberty, freedom of speech, or family values, but none of that ever lasts. ‘Show me the money,’ is the only constant in conservative politics.

Hardcore Marxists

If the Labour Party were as described in the Tory press, a nest of hardcore Marxists playing the long game, then it would mirror the Conservatives in bracing simplicity. Such a party would be nationalising wealth as a matter of urgency on the rare occasions it found itself in power. Strict banking laws would be enacted with personal liability for individuals. Every move the government made would transfer wealth from the elite to the proletariat.

But that’s not Labour, is it? The party hasn’t interfered with the structure of the nation since the Attlee government. Recent squawking on the right that Tony Blair was a revolutionary force signifies nothing except the desperation of free-marketeers to find someone on whom to shift the blame for UK PLC’s imminent bankruptcy.

Let’s be kind to Peter Mandelson for a minute, after all it’s probably the last time anybody will be in print. He’s often quoted as saying that the Blair government was ‘intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich.’ He did say that, but the second part tends to be omitted. ‘As long,’ Mandelson added, ‘as they pay their taxes.’

‘Filthy rich’

We have seen, in lurid detail, what ‘filthy rich’ looks like. Nearly half a century of Thatcherite economics on both sides of the Atlantic has created a class of people to whom taxes are no longer an issue. The political clout of billionaires is such that no tax regime could ever disadvantage them in any way. You can’t vote away Elon Musk’s influence, he has been allowed to inflate into a one-man foreign state.

Labour, in our lifetime, has never minded all that. The rich and, latterly, super-rich have been treated as immovable, natural features around which we all must clamber to survive. In their vision, the closer one is to wealth, the better. Lord Sugar, surely the most pimp-ass moniker in history, was ennobled by Labour because he embodied the Thatcherite dream, not despite it.

So, lacking enthusiasm to redistribute wealth, Labour has been left with the mouldy notion that it trickles down through our system. Every time Earl Syrup cashes his BBC cheque, the nation opens its 65 million beaks and is nourished, once again, by Amstrad bugmush.

More debt

Instead of redistributive reform, Labour’s pitch has been that cozying up to the wealthy will persuade them to invest in a fairer society.

Gordon Brown’s public-private partnerships were to see the fortunes of wealth and social justice harnessed together in joint endeavour. What actually happened is that we got saddled with yet more debt whilst the wealthy gained assets at our expense.

The only route out of poverty that Labour has offered in our time has been the invitation to position ourselves in proximity to established wealth. Your community will languish without services or meaningful employment, but as an individual you might be able to jostle your way towards the laden table and see what drops from it.

Unburdened by ideology

Keir Starmer is reportedly proud that he is unburdened by ideology. The job as he sees it is to manage the existing system competently and fairly.

Beneath him, on the streets and timelines of the nation, is screaming confirmation that the system is not delivering for the populace. It is one thing for the political representatives of wealth to defend it, we expect that. When those elected to tip the scales in our favour are seen benefiting from the status quo, it is another matter.

A non-ideological Labour Party exists only for the people who staff it.

The vision of Peter Mandelson lounging around Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion whilst its owner was in prison should be the end of all this.

From QUANGO-sitting apparatchiks to green energy millionaires to £800k seaside flats and rental empires, Labour represents everything it was founded to upend.

The movement was supposed to make us the bosses. Instead, it has shown us how to suck up to wealth; to mollify and beg from it. We don’t need a political party for that; we can do it ourselves.

I’ll be intensely relaxed when Labour is removed from the space where radicalism ought to be.