Mandelson crisis lifts lid on greed and corruption at heart of the ‘free market’

By Ken Ferguson

JUST A COUPLE of Voice issues ago, we recalled Lenin’s remark that there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. We are now living through such weeks.

The release of the Epstein papers has lifted the lid on a world of revolting sexual abuse, financial corruption and power politics, and blown apart the relentlessly projected lie that the so-called “free world” is a model for how a human-based society should be run. The picture now revealed — largely in the words of the rich and powerful at its heart — is one of exploitation for personal and financial self-satisfaction in a world where ordinary mortals were used and abused on an almost unimaginable scale.

The contempt on the part of the rich and powerful is in itself horrifying, but it goes beyond the character traits of debased individuals and opens the curtain on the reality behind the society in which they — politicians, financiers, supposed pillars of society — satisfy their cravings. It is worthwhile recalling that this hidden world has only been revealed by the release of the papers of the dead paedophile Epstein, and in particular through his close relationship with New Labour luminary Peter (Lord) Mandelson.

Mandelson sits at the heart of a 40-year project to purge the Labour Party of any suggestion of commitment to socialist ideas and politics, in a bid to make the supposed ‘People’s Party’ the acceptable government
for the money moguls, capitalists and the super-rich.

In close partnership with the abominable Tony Blair, he worked with great success to transform Labour from a party imperfectly representing the working class into the party it is today, beating the drums of war, grovelling to Trump and serving the money markets. This process was briefly interrupted in the Corbyn years, but Mandelson and his acolytes, ably assisted by the media and a shrill, largely fabricated campaign branding Corbyn as anti-Semitic, defeated any hopes of change.

Largely engineered by the departed Morgan McSweeney, the now tottering Starmer regime is the result of this latest round of factional warfare by the battle-hardened apparatchiks of the Labour right.

This is a formation drunk on power, in command of a party with a massive majority based on a tiny 30% vote share, elected on a manifesto so vague as to be — as it has been — largely ignored.

It was not for nothing that victorious Roman generals were accompanied on their triumphal parades by a slave who repeatedly warned them, “remember you are mortal”. Starmer could have used such a reminder in July 2024.

Any puzzlement as to why Starmer took the risk of appointing Mandelson is dispersed when we understand that he was a central figure in the ideology that remains at the heart of the Starmer regime.

In pursuit of empowering this ideology, the human consequences of bedding down with the rich — whether for sacked workers or the numberless women trafficked to their salons for gratification — were of no consequence. This explains the fevered spinning, oaths of loyalty to the leader — for now — and the staged cheers and clapping for Keir, designed to close ranks in a spirit of hang together or hang separately.

It is not just the future of Starmer that the Labour right rightly worries about, but their hold on Labour as a compliant tool locked in a Faustian pact with big money and the City. When — and it is surely when, not if —
Starmer falls, it will unleash a war between the hard-right candidate, probably Streeting, and that of the so-called soft left, likely Rayner.

All this will almost certainly be fought out amongst the ashes of electoral defeat, either in Gorton or the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and English councils, and in the ever-looming shadow of the far-right menace in the shape of Reform. This is a battle in which the left has little participation in today’s purged Labour Party, but that cannot mean we accept the role of mere spectators.

Diverting as it is to watch the great and the good — from the monarchy through leading politicians, financiers and philosophers — struggle vainly to escape the web spun by their friendship with Epstein, the reality is that there are urgent tasks to hand.

That is why the Scottish Socialist Party is contesting all eight regions in the May Holyrood elections and working day by day on picket lines, in council schemes, on street stalls and opposing demonstrations by the
anti-refugee far right. Faced with the perils of the far right and the centrism of both Labour and the SNP, who either menace or fail the urgent needs for a massive housing programme, a boosted NHS, an end to fuel and food poverty and rejection of the gathering war drive, a mass movement of active resistance is vital.

This approach has been at the heart of the politics of both the Voice and the SSP over the near 30 years since its formation, based on the core principle that unity is strength. In these perilous times, it is an urgent lesson
all socialists should endorse as we face the dangers posed by Reform and the thrashings of business-friendly centrism from Starmer, Sarwar and Swinney