Stained Forever

Stained Forever

Whether Keir Starmer will still be Prime Minister by the time this is published, I don’t know. Perhaps, he will have launched his Chief of Staff, Mandelson acolyte Morgan McSweeney, at the oncoming juggernaut of recrimination over our former ambassador to Washington.

What is sure is that, for Labour, things will never be the same again.

There are two camps: those who actively connived with Peter Mandelson throughout his wretched political career, and those who stood by allowing him to denude their party of moral purpose. From ye olden days when Neil Kinnock betrayed the miners to the nauseating spectacle of Keir Starmer grovelling at the court of King Donald, Labour has been collectively subservient to, and seemingly in awe of capital and those who control it.

The selective release of Epstein files by the Trump administration this week demonstrates how catastrophically Starmer and Mandelson misjudged the UK’s relationship with it.

As far as I know, the Labour Party membership card still states that the party is one of democratic socialism. Mine was ripped up after Mandelson’s faction conspired to throw the 2017 election rather than elect Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.

The New Labour ‘project’ was an exercise not just of style – red roses, purple ties, and meeja training – but of lasting substance.

From Kinnock’s leadership onwards, fiscal conservatives within the party have been spun as sensible, moderate, and responsible. The guiding forces of Thtacherism, which centralised capital in the City of London and blocked its flow to the rest of the UK, were entrenched by Tony Blair, left in place under Gordon Brown, and finally espoused as if they were elemental physics by Rachel Reeves.

Any Labour politician who challenged the inevitability of neoliberal economics has been painted as a crank or smeared as an extremist. When American capital saw the need to kill hundreds of thousands in the Middle East, this Labour Party agreed not only to participate but to act as moral camouflage for the overt theft of resources.

There used to be two restraining forces in UK politics. The Tories had a sense of noblesse oblige that its more aristocratic element took seriously. That was largely eradicated by the blizzard of new, American cash during the Thatcher years but persisted weakly until Boris Johnson eventually shook off remaining adherents like Nicholas Soames and Dominic Grieve over Brexit.

Labour’s purported belief in social justice is a far less nebulous matter. It’s supposed to be the party’s raison d’etre rather than an irritating brake on the accumulation of wealth.

When threatening to cut disability benefits earlier this year, Work & Pensions Sec Pat McFadden sneered that ‘the clue’s in the name’, meaning that Labour is the party of work, rather than benefits. It’s not though, is it?

From the miners’ strike onwards, Labour’s first duty has been to protect capital from the demands of those who work for a living.

State secrets

McFadden was Mandelson’s deputy when, as Business Secretary, the disgraced peer was funnelling state secrets to Jeffrey Epstein so that the late financier could profit from them.

When, as Chancellor, Alistair Darling sought to introduce a tax on bankers’ bonuses – so large even then that they impacted on inflation figures – Mandelson was advising Epstein to have JP Morgan’s CEO call Darling and ‘threaten’ him.

So, when Mandelson-entwined figures like Wes Streeting are pirouetting through interviews this week, condemning his behaviour and protesting shock at it, nobody will believe them.

The fact of Labour’s capture by elite interests is there for us all to see in our derelict high streets, our non-existent dentists, our NHS waiting lists, the potholes in our roads, and the pricing out of everything we enjoyed from working lifestyles.

Mandelson heads towards prison, not as a disgrace to the Labour Party but as the architect and exemplar of what it has become.

The unspoken line of New Labour was that if Mandelson was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, he was commensurately sanguine about the mass of people being impoverished to facilitate it.

Condemnation

Starmer’s ‘changed Labour Party’ found endless condemnation for anybody even remotely connected to his predecessor as leader. It professed moral superiority and technical over the purged left of the party and was content to see the membership drain away as policy after policy was watered down before being abandoned for the status quo.

Now, mired in a scandal of historic proportions, with the economy teetering on collapse and the UK under attack from both Russia and the USA, the party has nothing to point to in its defence.

Hollowed out of ideology, the piggish self-interest and preening solipsism of its elite poohbahs are all the electorate can see of this exhausted institution.

The stain will never wash out.