The Labour Party is rotten to its very core; that much has long been clear to anyone who has tracked its development over the past three decades. It now seems that the parasitical, orgiastic disease of New Labour has slowly but surely destroyed the party from the inside out. And fittingly, it is the project’s puppetmaster-in-chief who has finally brought about its demise.
Notwithstanding the millions of innocent deaths in the Middle East and millions of taxpayer pounds squandered to PFI contracts, Peter Mandelson’s horrifyingly intimate friendship with the disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein will serve as the most gruesome symbol of New Labour’s legacy. The grotesquely-nicknamed ‘Prince of Darkness’ is the ultimate personification of its perverted, patriarchal, and self-enriching fornication with big business and finance since Tony Blair’s first appearance on Downing Street.
In some senses, Mandelson’s betrayal of peers, voters, and the nation was inevitable, merely taking the Blairite programme to its logical extreme. However, in others, his behaviour merits special abhorrence, as any serial paedophile’s ‘best pal’ would.
Yet as the Metropolitan police raid his £7 million home in Camden and Mandelson desperately seeks to manipulate our taxpayer-funded media regulator to silence his critics, it is difficult not to feel a certain sense of apathy toward the ritualistic humiliation of it all. The recent resignation of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff and determined Mandelson acolyte, will not be the last or indeed the most damning. Further shame is yet to come. Consequently, the second-hand embarrassment felt by onlookers toward the Labour establishment may prove so excruciating that we begin to look away.
That is the real danger; because anger, revulsion, and disgust—in their droves— are the only sentiments befitting the party both on the doorstep, on social media, and at the polling station.
Peter Mandelson, as the apex predator of the New Labour project, has thus left us with one simple question: can the party survive that ire?
New Labour, Old Tricks
The philosophy behind the Labour Party used to be quite simple. In the permanent struggle between labour and capital, the party ought to advance the causes, interests and power of the former. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, representatives of the small number of capital owners, would serve as the counterbalance, often forced to turn to traditionalism or jingoism to stand any chance of electoral success.
Indeed, that was the case for much of the 20th century. It is for this reason that the Conservatives were so dominant during wartime and periods of sustained economic prosperity and Labour at its most popular during the post-WWII bust, when British workers’ bargaining power over capital was at its strongest.
Yet, after the emergence of neoliberalism, and the rise of its British apostle Margaret Thatcher, that dynamic was overhauled. Thatcher’s strategy, to create a new class of owners within the middle class itself largely through the right-to-buy scheme, proved a triumphant success. The formerly-uniform economic interests of the majority had, in one political manoeuvre, been mangled and fragmented for good.
Thatcher herself made her intentions clear in 1981: ‘economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’. In fact, Britain’s heart and soul was not simply changed by the Iron Lady, but fundamentally damaged, rendered confused and incoherent especially to itself.
It was amidst this confusion that the New Labour project was born, led by the young, charismatic Blair who claimed to hold the solution to the irreconcilable conflict between labour and capital. According to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in 1997, we were ‘all middle class now’; and, with that, we would be treated to a new, more affluent, prosperous and equal society.
At least, that is what was promised.
Self-enrichment, rather than reconciliation, was always the real underpinning philosophy of New Labour; and no-one was more successful in enriching and engorging themselves than Mandelson.
In the decades since, New Labour’s grandees, spearheaded by the likes of Blair, Mandelson, and Alastair Campbell, privately corroded the NHS to near-ruin, bombed and devastated vulnerable communities in West Asia and the Middle East, and abdicated all control of immigration, culminating in a Brexit-shaped catastrophe that they supposedly deplored. Having outsourced basic state function to the likes of Serco and Palantir, they neutered local and national government to the extent that billions are wasted annually on American consultants to do the government’s job at a higher price.
And now, it transpires that, in the wake of the economic devastation caused by the Global Financial Crisis, Labour’s very own ‘Prince of Darkness’ saw fit to tip-off a serial paedophile about the €500 billion eurozone rescue deal, likely for the latter’s personal financial gain.
Self-enrichment, rather than reconciliation, was always the real underpinning philosophy of New Labour; and no-one was more successful in enriching and engorging themselves than Mandelson.
Starmer or Survival
After thirty years of rot, it seems near-impossible that the Labour Party could ever be rehabilitated.
The audacity of Starmer to appoint Mandelson as UK ambassador to the United States, despite knowledge of his friendship with Epstein, reveals a deeply-rooted culture of chauvinistic egotism that runs through the organisation.
Such a culture is reinforced systematically by the dominance of New Labour’s heirs: the Labour Together faction which was once led by McSweeney himself and still boasts the likes of Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Rachel Reeves. Having spent the post-Corbyn years monopolising party power and heavily stacking the national executive committee (NEC) either with themselves or loyalists, Labour Together have successfully crushed the mere possibility of dissent within party ranks or beyond. Josh Simons, the faction’s former chief executive, saw fit to employ a PR firm to investigate journalists reporting on the group’s funding—such was the perceived invincibility within.
In times of victory, that impudent untouchability has worked to Labour Together’s advantage; they could take obedience for granted, free from the need to marshall or bargain with party personalities as Jeremy Corbyn was so often forced to do. Yet, in times of desperation, the party’s lack of check or balance may indeed prove fatal.
It is well-known that Keir Starmer is unpopular, arguably the least popular Prime Minister in modern British history; and without a diversity of opinion or personality within his cabinet, he is staring down the barrel of further humiliation in the form of successive electoral defeats. In the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, after the NEC voted resoundingly (and suicidally) to ban Andy Burnham from standing, the Labour Party are all but certain to lose, limping to third place behind the Green Party and Reform. In the Welsh Senedd elections in May, the Labour Party will likely lose again, a distant third behind Plaid Cymru and Reform. And in the nationwide local elections on the same day, if current polling is anything to go by, the Labour Party may even miss out on a podium finish.
It may well be the case, if Starmer survives such an abject beating, that the Labour Party will not. The Prime Minister’s endurance is tied directly to the brazen stubbornness, and impregnability, of the current party apparatus. In a moment of irony that will be lost on no one, the man named after the party’s founder and famed trade unionist Keir Hardie may be responsible for that same party’s death.
If, however, our ire is enough to overthrow Starmer and exorcise not just Mandelson’s ghost but the ghosts of New Labour and Labour Together, it may stand some chance of survival.
In any case, I am not sure that it should.
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