Starmer is toast. But the dark forces that brought him to power are as strong as ever

Some 30 years ago, British politics became, by design, a black box – an arena for moneyed power brokers to wield political influence hermetically sealed off from the view of voters.

Only now, with the release of a portion of the Epstein Files, is a dim light being shone into its recesses, indicating how completely the billionaire class has captured political life in Britain.

The process began in the 1990s, when then-Prime Minister Tony Blair reinvented the once democratic socialist Labour Party as “New Labour”, accepting the neoliberal presumptions of his Conservative predecessor, Margaret Thatcher.

Blair progressively ditched traditional trade union support and instead turned Labour into a managerial party for capital, promising to serve the interests of the world’s largest corporations.

The figure who personified this trend was Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour. In 1998, during a trip to Silicon Valley as trade secretary to meet newly emerging tech billionaires, he famously said: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

He likes to point out that he added, “as long as they pay their taxes”. But Blair and Mandelson helped engineer preferential terms that ensured tech giants barely paid any tax in the UK – all in the interests, of course, of “attracting investment”.

Neither party had any incentive to call out the growing capture and corruption of British politics by the billionaire class

The problem was not simply that New Labour’s priorities came to resemble the Conservatives’.

Nor was it only that Labour’s cosying up to the super-rich drove the Tories ever further rightwards in an effort to distinguish themselves, a process that ultimately led to the Conservative Party’s implosion and the emergence of a new pretender to the right’s throne in the form of Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

No, the gravest problem was that, as New Labour and the Tories vied equally for favour with the super-rich and the media outlets they owned in the hope of being ushered into office, neither dared reverse the economic windfalls the billionaires had accrued.

Nor did either party have any incentive to call out the growing capture and corruption of British politics by the billionaire class – because that capture had become the very point of the political game.

Thus was born the black box of British politics – until the Epstein Files, released by a Trump administration more concerned with protecting its own secrets than those of British politicians, prised open the lid just enough to reveal what was going on inside.

Laboratory-grown PM

British police are now investigating Mandelson for “misconduct in public office” over allegations that he leaked insider government information to Jeffrey Epstein in 2009 and 2010 – information Epstein was in a position to use to enrich himself.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a less formal part of the political system, appears to have done much the same in his capacity as Britain’s trade envoy.

Around the same time, Mandelson is known to have lobbied the Treasury, at Epstein’s suggestion, to water down a planned tax on bankers’ bonuses. He encouraged the chief executive of the investment bank JP Morgan to “mildly threaten” the then-chancellor to dissuade him from backing the tax.

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Mandelson and his now husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, had earlier received large payments from Epstein.

Since the revelations, Labour politicians have competed to distance themselves from Mandelson – even those, such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who were known to be close to him.

But in reality, it is difficult to imagine that Mandelson, the consummate Labour insider and mentor to the circle of officials who brought Keir Starmer to power, was some kind of outlier.

Pause for a moment to digest Britain’s last four prime ministers: three Conservatives – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – followed by Labour’s Starmer.

They are proof enough of how successfully the billionaire class has hollowed out British political structures to the point that they can no longer produce serious leaders.

Johnson was not just a serial liar, but even managed the astonishing feat of turning a lifetime of clowning around into a leadership qualification. He was the ultimate bread-and-circuses politician.

Truss arrived in office so intoxicated by billionaire-fuelled fantasies about unregulated markets that she promptly crashed the very system she believed she was liberating.

In Sunak, the billionaires had one of their own in charge – in his case, a near-billionaire, worth about as much as King Charles. As chancellor, Sunak was so out of touch with the real world that he did not know how to use a contactless credit card.

And now, in Starmer, the billionaires have found their synthetic, laboratory-grown “man of the people” – one so clueless about politics and power that his closest advisers, hidden from view, told journalists that he was an empty vessel through which they ran the government.

Or as they put it, using a metaphor that resonates chiefly with London’s banking and media elites: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR” – a reference to the automated, driverless Docklands Light Railway that connects the business, banking and media hub of Canary Wharf to the rest of London.

‘Nowhere else to go’

Starmer, the most unpopular prime minister on record, is clinging on to office by his fingernails.

He is managing to do so largely because Mandelson and his proteges – including Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, who was forced to quit last weekend in a bid to save his boss – long ago gutted the Labour Party of anyone with talent or independence of mind.

Why? Because Mandelson’s Labour rejected substantive politics that require confrontation with the rich. It no longer saw itself as representing workers’ interests in opposition to exploitation by a corporate elite.

His only goal was to reassure billionaires that protecting their profits was paramount. Everything else was secondary.

Jon Trickett, who once served as Mandelson’s private secretary, notes that New Labour assumed that “working-class voters had nowhere else to go. By this logic, the government didn’t need to use the power of government to secure their votes”.

He concludes: “New Labour was ultimately to be less a movement for renewal and more a reorientation towards elite networks of global capital.”

Former Labour activist James Schneider observes of Mandelson: “He worked to modernise Labour’s language and rewire its loyalties – to make the party safe for boardrooms, pliable to lobbyists, and hostile to any revival of its older commitments to trade unions or public ownership.”

It was this intimacy with the billionaire class that ensured Mandelson kept returning to government like a bad penny, however often he was sacked in disgrace.

Target practice

The proper lens through which to assess Labour’s current crisis – and the Mandelson scandal – is Starmer’s predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

The political and media class that once venerated Mandelson – and now rushes to disown him – is the same class that spent five years destroying Corbyn.

In fact, Mandelson and Corbyn served as the two axes in Labour around which different visions of Britain’s future coalesced. 

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Under Blair, Mandelson set about remaking Labour’s MPs and party bureaucracy in his own image: as a managerial party for the emerging class of tech overlords.

But he failed to bring Labour’s third power centre – its members – along with him, which is why Corbyn slipped past institutional safeguards in 2015 and found himself elected as leader. 

By then, Labour had long been a soulless, technocratic party competing with the Conservatives to do the bidding of the wealthy – while holding out the fragile hope that, by miraculous osmosis, a little of their riches would trickle down to the rest of us.

Corbyn’s political priorities were the antithesis of everything Mandelson stood for – and the opposite of what the billionaires who for decades were allowed to ransack Britain’s public services wanted.

He called for rebuilding a fairer redistributive economy based on democratic socialist principles. He wanted to take back control of national utilities and expand public services. His emphasis was on building community and class solidarity – “For the many, not the few”.

In 2017, Mandelson revealed that getting rid of Corbyn as Labour leader was his political mission: “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be – an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene – every day, I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his leadership.” 

The billionaire-owned media, of course, were only too willing to help.

Corbyn was deemed too “scruffy” to be prime minister. He was sexist. He was either not patriotic enough or a threat to national security. He was either too dim-witted to lead the country or a Russian spy.

And finally, of course, he and the hundreds of thousands of new members attracted to Labour by his message of change and hope were antisemites for being critical of Israel’s permanent and illegal occupation of the Palestinians.

In the shadows, contingency plans were readied in the event of a Corbyn victory. An army general told The Sunday Times that the officer class would mutiny to overthrow any Corbyn-led government. Leaked images showed soldiers in Afghanistan using his face as target practice.

‘Run the gauntlet’

Behind all this lay the might of the United States – the imperial core whose politics is even more thoroughly captured by the billionaire class.

In a leaked 2019 recording, US Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo warned that it was vital to stop the Labour leader from reaching power, suggesting that an organised campaign to discredit Corbyn was already underway.

“It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible,” Pompeo said. “You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

Why were the US and British establishments so determined to stop Corbyn’s advance, even if it meant openly sabotaging the UK’s democratic political process? 

Why were the US and British establishments so determined to stop Corbyn’s advance, even if it meant openly sabotaging the UK’s democratic political process? 

Precisely because Corbyn was the only major British politician who had not been captured.

During his tenure as Labour leader, Britain’s elections stopped being pure political theatre. The vote mattered. Politics, for once, was about substance. A leader emerged who did not equate ordinary voters’ interests with billionaire wealth.

Had Corbyn managed to run Pompeo’s gauntlet and entered 10 Downing Street, he would have been able to root out the Mandelson clique controlling Labour and give a voice back to ordinary people.

Corbyn planned to end the now 16-year regime of bipartisan austerity in the UK – the economic policy that justified the billionaires’ permanent raiding of the public coffers.

Wealth taxes, curbs on excessive pay, workers’ part-ownership of large firms, nationalisation and windfall taxes would all have severely hit billionaires in the pocket.

Corbyn’s red lines

It is equally hard to imagine that British foreign policy would have taken the same bipartisan course of the past few years under Corbyn.

He would never have prioritised the profits of weapons makers over the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

He would never have agreed to use British planes to transport 2,000 lb US bombs to Israel to level Gaza, or operated RAF spy flights over the enclave to supply Israel with the intelligence used to target Palestinians.

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It goes without saying that he would never have agreed, as Starmer did, that Israel had a “right” to starve Gaza’s population of food, water and fuel.

And he would have rejected the panoply of resulting restrictions on speech and protest at home to protect Israel from opponents to its documented genocide – now reclassified as “terrorists” – that are incrementally paving the way to a police state.

More widely, he would have been against continuing British support for “forever wars” – the lifeblood of a billionaire class that needs to control global resources for itself and grows ever fatter from the profits of the arms industries.

He would never have agreed, as Starmer has, to more than double UK spending on the Nato war machine – a nice little earner for the billionaires insisted on by billionaire Donald Trump.

Under Corbyn, would Britain have handed control of its enormous NHS database – that is, data about you and me – over to a US spy-tech giant like Palantir, which is already pivotal in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Trump’s fledgling fascist militia, ICE?

We know the answer, because Corbyn has told us.

Would one of Corbyn’s ministers be calling, like Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, to use AI to reinvent an 18th-century idea for surveillance, the Panopticon, that will make sure, in her words, that “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”?

Murky ties to billionaires

There is a reason why it is now open season on Mandelson. Because the billionaires – and their media – would rather you were directing your hate at their arch-creature than at them directly.

The “one bad apple” theory – or two, if you count Mountbatten-Windsor – helpfully redirects our attention away from who and what was being served.

The focus is on Mandelson’s personal relationship with Epstein. But his network of business ties extended well beyond one sexual predator.

Until this month, when he was forced to divest under intense scrutiny following the release of the Epstein Files, Mandelson was the founder and senior partner in the lobbying firm Global Counsel. Its clients are some of the most powerful corporations on the planet.

Several are now bailing out to avoid association with Mandelson. But existing or recently departed clients include tech behemoths such as Palantir, TikTok and OpenAI; fossil fuel firms such as Shell, Anglo American and Glencore; financial services such as JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, Barclays and Bank of America; and consumer firms such as Nestle, Shein, BMW and the English Premier League.

It is not that these companies have done anything illegal in being represented by Global Counsel, or that Global Counsel itself does anything illegal. It is that the largely unseen interface between the world of politics and the most powerful companies in human history has shaped what is considered lawful.

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The murkiness of this system is its very point.

In 2010, Mandelson told Epstein that Global Counsel, which he was then establishing, would provide “advisers on the politics of deals you want brokered and issues you want resolved or regulatory changes needed for your commercial protection/success”.

At least now, under pressure, our captured political class is starting to ask very limited questions about what has really been going on.

For example, how did Mandelson’s client, Palantir, win a £241 million ($329m) contract with the UK Ministry of Defence without an open tender? And why was an official meeting in Washington DC, between Mandelson, Starmer and Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, not minuted?

Another Global Counsel client, OpenAI, which recently signed an agreement with the UK to explore integrating its AI into justice, security and education systems, recently appointed George Osborne, a former British chancellor, as its lead representative. He will be responsible for working with governments worldwide on their artificial intelligence policy.

Character assassination

It is impossible to imagine Corbyn having willingly networked into this world of corporate control, now the minimum entry requirement for any politician aspiring to a role in government, which is why not only the billionaires and their media, but the Labour Party’s bureaucracy too, worked tirelessly on Corbyn’s character assassination.

The rise and fall of Morgan McSweeney, until the weekend Starmer’s chief of staff, exemplifies this dark joint venture by the political and business elites.

McSweeney cut his political teeth in the early 2000s, developing for Mandelson a political database known as “Excalibur” to refine Labour campaign messaging and gather information to be used against political opponents, including Labour MPs, often by releasing it to sympathetic journalists.

McSweeney was not only central to creating the ultimate plastic prime minister in Starmer, but also critical to Labour’s earlier self-harm campaign to bring down Corbyn, as investigative journalist Paul Holden sets out in his recent book The Fraud.

Soon after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015, McSweeney took over the reins of a factional group that formed a think tank called Labour Together, whose covert mission was to destroy the new leader and promote a replacement more favourably viewed by corporate donors.

McSweeney was not only central to creating the ultimate plastic prime minister in Starmer, but also critical to Labour’s earlier self-harm campaign to bring down Corbyn

Labour Together effectively became a secret slush fund primarily for wealthy donors – one deeply concerned with laundering Israel’s image, another with major investments in private healthcare – to help the cause.

By the time of the 2020 Labour leadership election to replace Corbyn, Labour Together had amassed a small fortune.

By law, some £730,000 ($996,000) should have been declared to the Electoral Commission. But McSweeney failed to do so, and in 2021 the Electoral Commission found the group guilty of more than 20 separate breaches of the law. He was later fined.

Holden argues that McSweeney’s evasiveness served a political purpose: to prevent scrutiny of Labour Together’s operations.

The think tank used the undeclared funds to covertly establish astro-turf groups – pretend grassroots movements corporately funded – that advanced a campaign of smears against Corbyn and his supporters as antisemites. At the same time, Starmer was promoted, especially among Labour members, as a clean pair of hands who would largely follow in Corbyn’s footsteps.

Once leader, the scene had been set for Starmer to purge leftwingers from the party and eviscerate its grassroots membership so control could be returned to corporate donors.

Holden concludes: “The political project that delivered us a Starmer government has been a reckless and arguably lawless endeavour whose misconduct threatens the health of British democracy.”

Damaged goods

Notably, Holden and a small group of journalists who have also been trying to peer into the black box of British politics under Starmer discovered this month that they themselves had been targeted for secret investigation by an ally of Starmer’s.

In 2023, Josh Simons, now a Labour government minister, paid £30,000 ($41,000) to a crisis-management PR firm to identify journalists, including Holden, who had been digging into Labour Together’s activities, as well as their sources.

At the time, Simons was the director of Labour Together, a successor to McSweeney.

The goal appears to have been either to scare off the journalists or to smear them with planted stories in the media.

Holden opens The Fraud with an account of the Guardian, in the wake of Simons’s surveillance operation, warning him that they were about to publish claims he was being investigated over an illegal hack of the Electoral Commission in 2021.

When Holden threatened a defamation suit in response, the Guardian backed down.

The truth is that the scandals involving Mandelson, McSweeney and Starmer have been only too obvious to Westminster journalists for years.

Those journalists chose to collude by remaining silent – protecting the black box – partly out of fear of directly crossing these powerful political figures and partly out of fear of crossing the powerful owners of the media platforms that employ them.

Mandelson and McSweeney are already out, and Starmer is surely not far behind them. They are now damaged goods beyond repair. But the system that created them is still as strong as ever. And it will soon find a new set of avatars to do its bidding.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.