A tangled weave of corruption and profiteering… That’s Capitalism!

By Richie Venton, SSP national trade union organiser

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, said Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – a play suffused with images of corruption, poison, rot, decay, manipulation and murder for power.

Imagine what he’d make of 21st century Britain, or the modern capitalist world in general!

Rape, abuse of women and children, corruption, filthy deals to enrich billionaires at the expense of public services… all that is rotten runs right from the ‘top’ of society through the Royal family, the Tories, Reform UK and ‘modern’ Labour.

Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Peter Mandelson, Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s treasurer Nick Candy, Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Palantir contracts in our NHS… the list of disgusting entitled behaviour, fixing of deals, mutual enrichment and cover-ups is growing daily.

Cesspit of corruption

The Epstein files have pulled back a corner of the curtain to give a glimpse of Hell on Earth, where an elite cabal collude, commit crimes with impunity, and actively corrupt and control capitalist politicians so they will protect their privileges and profiteering, regardless of the wishes of the populations who elected them.

It would be downright dangerous to imagine this is just the grotesque behaviour of a few aberrant, insufferable monsters like Epstein, the former Prince Andrew, or Mandelson. In fact, it’s a mere glimpse of how the capitalist ruling class functions daily, to engorge the wealth and animalistic appetites of what is commonly dubbed the 1%, as they ride roughshod over the rest of us, the 99% who produce that wealth and keep society functioning.

It’s an expression and perfect illustration of the particularly parasitic nature of financialised capitalism, which has come to dominate the western world since the conscious obliteration of much of productive industry since the 1970s and 1980s.

That’s finance capitalism!

Epstein was more than just an indescribable degenerate; he was a finance capitalist, who weaved a tangled web of corporate and political connections to turbocharge his and their wealth, with a reputation in business circles for being particularly helpful in conjuring up the means to dodge corporate taxation.

For instance, he was mentored by Les Wexner – billionaire founder and CEO of Victoria’s Secret lingerie company – who paid him a reported $200million to help Wexner dodge $2billion in corporation taxes. This arrangement provided Epstein with the handy sideline of greater access to young girls, desperate to make their way as models, many of whom he abused in his exclusive circles of sexual exploitation.

Epstein provided the same service to several other capitalist giants, typically slashing their corporate tax bills to 10% of what the US tax laws said they should pay towards the upkeep of society.

Wealth, power and politicians

The wealth of this depraved elite has exploded in recent decades.  Not by accident, but through the conscious theft of public property – and the increased power of big business and billionaires over government decisions on tax policies and the provision of public services.

Recent Oxfam research shows the wealth of billionaires has risen by 81% in the last decade, and in turn that wealth is readily traded for political influence that protects and multiplies it.

Seven of the 10 largest media companies are now owned by billionaires, which allows them to wield a powerful influence over information, to manufacture and mould public consciousness.

Oxfam’s research shows the super-rich are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office themselves than everyone else. And if the wealthy support a policy, it has a 45% chance of becoming law, whereas if they oppose it, the chance collapses to 18%.

Amidst all the stomach-churning revelations of misogyny, paedophilia and sex slavery operating in the murky upper echelons of society, far too little emphasis is given to the other insatiable appetites at work: the endless craving for profits at public expense.

Epstein the venture capitalist

A former Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Ehud Barak (himself a business partner of the paedophile investor), described Epstein as the co-owner of a Silicon Valley venture fund, Valar Ventures, which was controlled by billionaire Peter Thiel.

Here’s where the creepy Lord Peter Mandelson enters the story. Mandelson was one of the architects of Tony Blair’s New Labour project, which transformed Labour into an openly, unashamed capitalist party – as opposed to its previous history of being primarily based on the working class but with pro-capitalist leaders, who were obliged to make concessions to the demands of the trade union movement and working-class communities for social improvements, most spectacularly through creation of the NHS.

Mandelson leaks government secrets

In 2009/2010, during his time as Business Secretary in Gordon Brown’s Labour government, Mandelson leaked UK government secrets to Epstein. In the aftermath of the 2008/9 financial crisis triggered by the bankers’ greed, Mandelson promised Epstein he would lobby and bully Labour government ministers – including Gordon Brown himself – into more favourable banking laws, to the advantage of his ‘close friend’ Epstein, the convicted paedophile banker. 

Five years later, Epstein invested an initial $15million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures; a stake that later rose to over $40m and today is valued at $170m – the largest single asset in Epstein’s estate.

But here’s another link in the chain of capitalist collaboration and skulduggery for profit: Thiel didn’t limit his business interests to Valar Ventures, he was also co-founder of the defence analytics giant, the spyware Palantir Technologies. Thiel’s company was founded with the help of funding from the CIA.

Palantir hires Mandelson’s Global Counsel

In 2018, Thiel’s Palantir hired Mandelson’s own lobbying company, Global Counsel, to help Palantir penetrate UK government contracts. At that point, both Thiel and Mandelson were intimately connected to Epstein, which throws up further questions of how much Thiel knew about Mandelson’s relationship with the serial sex offender when they hired the services of Global Counsel; plenty, if not literally everything, we must assume.

As part of helping Palantir get its claws into public assets in the UK – including the NHS – Mandelson’s Global Counsel in April 2018 hired former TORY Health Minister, Baroness Nicola Blackwood, where she was given the job of providing Palantir with “political risk analysis”.

Swindells swindles the NHS!

The plot thickens! In September 2019, one gloriously named Matthew Swindells (!), who until July that year had been Deputy Chief Executive of NHS England, joined Mandelson’s Global Counsel, and immediately started advising Palantir on NHS contracts.

Swindells went on to become the chair of Palantir’s Health Advisory Board whilst simultaneously serving as joint chair of four NHS hospital trusts, including Chelsea and Westminster hospital, which was the first to use Palantir’s technology.

There’s a thing called nominative determinism, which claims people are drawn to occupations which resemble their name, like the polar explorer called Daniel Snowman, or the real-life weather-woman christened Sarah Blizzard; being named Swindells and carrying out the role he did in robbing NHS assets for Palantir is surely a classic case!

Palantir invades our NHS

In December 2021, Palantir and Mandelson’s company, Global Counsel – which he maintained a large financial stake in even after relinquishing his day-to-day management role – jointly hosted a webinar on “the next steps the UK should take on life sciences”, with Swindells in the chair. Palantir’s White Paper was almost identical to the NHS Strategy document published six months later, in June 2022.

Surprise, surprise, since 2020 Palantir has conquered NHS contracts, including its largest one, in 2023, worth £480million (and had already invested in UK Ministry of Defence contracts since 2014).

Bojo in secret deals

The disgraced Tory PM Boris Johnson had got in on the act. He and his senior adviser Dominic Cummings (remember him, of the poor eyesight?) had a secret meeting with Palantir’s billionaire founder Peter Thiel in August 2019, a mere month after entering Downing Street. Thiel had helped fund Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and was now trawling the UK for renewed political influence and investment opportunities.

Months after this secret rendezvous – hidden from the normal system of logging the PM’s meetings – Palantir graciously managed NHS data during Covid-19 for £1, and then (inevitably) was awarded follow-on contracts worth £60m, and is now embedded in the NHS’s data system – winning an NHS IT contract worth £480m in 2023, analysing hospital data and patient information.

Enter Starmer, stage right

After Starmer appointed Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US – flying in the face of almost universal public knowledge of Mandelson’s close relationship with the convicted paedophile banker Epstein – the relationship between the profiteering Palantir and capitalist Labour deepened further.

In February 2025, Mandelson arranged a meeting for Starmer with Palantir’s bosses in their Washington headquarters, through the British Embassy. Just seven months later, last September, Palantir was awarded a £240million Ministry of Defence contract – without going through the charade of a competitive tender.

Contracts given without competitive tendering

In fact, at least 34 Palantir contracts with UK government departments and agencies have a combined value of £675million; the true figure is widely believed to be much higher.  Overwhelmingly these lucrative contracts have been awarded without the public scrutiny of competitive tendering, through backroom deals, private meetings in the elite networks of corrupt, profiteering capitalists and corrupted pro-capitalist politicians. Palantir’s tentacles stretch from NHS patient records, through police intelligence databases, to MoD operations and the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment.

Streeting stands up for Palantir

Nor is there any prospect of the Labour government reversing this penetration of vital UK public services by a spy-tech giant with its origins in the CIA and a track record of providing the Israeli Defence Force with the technology to hunt down and massacre tens of thousands of people in Gaza – not to mention Palantir’s building of ICE’s data platform to conduct mass deportations and murder 32 US citizens in the streets of Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami and numerous other cities in 2025 alone.

On the contrary, Labour’s Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, is belligerent in his advocacy of further NHS privatisation. And text messages from last June have just been revealed, where Mandelson told Streeting he must plan a visit to the US where there would be “lots of tech companies and people to talk to.”

Streeting’s material interests are plain to see. He accepted donations of £372,000 from donors linked to private health companies between 2015 and 2025 – including £53,000 from OPD Group, which offers “headhunting services to the NHS and private healthcare sector”.

Streeting has vehemently defended the £480m NHS data contract given to Palantir, and when the doctors’ union (the BMA), patients’ groups and others raised objections, he has publicly declared their doubts over Palantir “just don’t wash with me”.

That’s normal for capitalism!

These are but illustrations of the filthy backroom deals, rewards of contracts without competition, and revolving doors of former civil servants, NHS executives, police chiefs and military personnel who’ve been hired by Palantir – including four Ministry of Defence officials in 2025 alone.

That’s capitalism; the tangled web between capitalists, politicians and state officials, all designed to exploit millions of us for profit, regardless of the cost to our health, wellbeing or civil rights.

That’s what they pass off as capitalist ‘democracy’. And it fits the philosophy of Palantir’s Peter Thiel perfectly; he has said “freedom and democracy are incompatible.”

Nor is there any fundamental difference in the behaviours of capitalist big business-people, and capitalist politicians from different parties in the pro-big business camp. Even if not all of them indulge in the more grotesque habits of Epstein and his coterie, they mix in the same clubs, go to the same parties, stay at each other’s villas, adopt the same class outlook, and pursue the same selfish accumulation of pelf and privilege at terrible cost to the working-class majority. 

Clean out the Augean stables

No wonder many working-class people are sickened and angered, driven to think ‘they’re all the same’.

But it suits the robbing ruling class if we just sink into despair, rather than fight back.

We need to redouble our efforts to clean out the corruption that is endemic in capitalism.

Indeed, “something is rotten in the state…” But to switch from Shakespeare to Greek mythology, we need to apply the method of Heracles, who was given the impossible task of cleaning out the filth of 3,000 years’ accumulated horse shit from the Augean stables in one day; he diverted the local rivers and cleansed them instantly!

Combat capitalism and its corruption

It may seem daunting, but rather than descend into despair at all that is rotten in the state of Britain and beyond, join those of us with clean socialist principles. Help turn the tide.

Help build a movement with a socialist vision, where the career ladders to corrupt lifestyles are kicked away.

Where capitalist profiteering and privatisation and privileges arranged through backroom deals is scrapped in favour of democratic collective ownership and decision-making.

Turn the tide by getting socialist MSPs elected who’ll spurn all careerism and corruption and live on nothing more than the average skilled worker’s wage. That’s what SSP MSPs will do – and did in the past.

The SSP have fought capitalist corruption and political careerism throughout our 27 years’ existence. We are different; our incorruptible socialist principles stand out in stark contrast.

Get angry, but also get organised, for a clean socialist future.

Join the SSP!