Peter Mandelson: arch Labour Party careerist (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A friend and former Labour councillor reported to me how Peter Mandelson spoke at an online seminar. He had been impressed by one comment, summed up as: ‘If you have a good idea, don’t bother asking everybody, just go ahead and do it’. This seems to sum up all that was wrong with the New Labour project, even if you are achieving good results, not asking people makes them feel divorced from the outcomes. Even worse, it can lead to disastrous and unintended consequences, as those who know more could warn you about in advance.

Mr. Starmer thought appointing Mr. Mandelson as ambassador to Washington was a good idea, and he just went ahead and did it. The consequences have been disastrous for him.

Mandelson’s biography is well known. Grandson of wartime Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, he had a natural ‘in’ into the Labour Party and movement, beginning his career (much like many Labour figures, including Jeremy Corbyn) as an employee of the trade union movement, working for the TUC.

It’s not necessary here to reprise his whole biography: it is widely available. Suffice to say that, apart from a short stint working in television, he worked as a Labour movement staff member, specifically in charge of communications. Once in parliament and then in government, he twice stepped down as a cabinet minister: once for taking an unsecured loan from a cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, for a house worth (at the time) £475,000. The second scandal was around him intervening in the passport application of billionaire businessman Srichand Hinduja. Although in both instances formal inquiries cleared him of any wrongdoing, the perception was that he was into palling around with – and getting favours from and doing favours for – very wealthy people.

It’s notable, now, that he lives in a £12 million house. This was paid for by the infamous revolving door of government ministers going into private lobbying and well-remunerated directorships after leaving office. While a well-known phenomenon, thanks to the publication of all of the notorious paedophile Jeffery Epstein’s correspondence, we now get a glimpse of the process working in practice.

Epstein advised Mandelson on how to apply for directorships, including with Deutsche Bank, that could have been worth $4-10 million per year. In the end, Mandelson didn’t want to work full time, and so got a job with a firm called Lazard for one day a week, worth a mere $1 million per year. He also set up his own lobbying firm, Global Counsel, which, as Mandelson said in one email to Epstein, paid his expensive mortgage. Epstein advised him on how to find clients for that firm. Global Counsel has had firms such as JPMorgan, Palantir and Anglo-American as clients.

These roles sought were, in part, to avoid regulation around former ministers taking jobs that relied on their former political roles or were intrinsically linked with them: and it is clear that what was for sale was general political, not financial advice, how to get things done, including introductions and network access. This is clearly not an uncommon situation. Epstein, it seems, also gave similar advice to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. After all, as we have written in these pages before, this was Epstein’s business, helping manage other people’s wealth, for a cut.

Itch to live like them

It is, perhaps, not surprising that people who find themselves rubbing shoulders with the fabulously wealthy should not feel the itch to be able to live like them, especially as, when entering the room as government officials they are functionally treated as peers of the wealthy: individuals of power and respect. It is equally understandable that the wealthy should want to encourage such feelings and throw a few crumbs to the politicians to win their loyalty.

As the case of Mandelson demonstrates, it does not have to be the naked bribery of plain brown envelopes. Continued loyalty (in his case as Business Secretary in the UK, and Trade Commissioner of the EU) can be generally rewarded by these advisor roles, directorships or other supposed jobs where the ultra-wealthy can name the price. We’ve noted before that the book-publishing and speaking-tour game is a simple way to transfer substantial sums to former politicians in ways which no set of rules could ever stop. Any attempt to ban such channelling of funds will always simply be circumvented, as Mandelson and Epstein managed to do.

Epstein gives us a great example, in one of his emails, where he leadenly says ‘supporting [Gordon Brown] will be seen as bad form commercially’: Mandelson’s own interests in the subsequent selling price of his skills and contacts depended on him being seen as helpful to commercial interests. That he had the lack of sense to forward secret and commercially sensitive government documents to Epstein will certainly come to be seen as bad form commercially. It is inconceivable that other ministers through the ages have not, in private conversations and communications, given wealthy friends and acquaintances tips and winks about what was coming up, but that would never be provable. There have just never been email dumps like this one before to let the cat out of the bag. And even if, again, Mandelson is formally cleared, his misjudgement in leaving evidence behind will be remembered.

What should also be remembered is that all of this flows, not just from personal cupidity, but structurally, from a society of immense inequality. A society in which a handful live in luxury, and can spare some of their wealth to tempt and buy whomsoever they please. Journalists have come out, after Mandelson’s fall, with stories of how he would threaten their jobs because he knew their boss (shades of the Savile playbook). Where people depend for their livelihood on their job, such threats have power.

His wealth of money and connections fed back into his ability to influence the machinery of the Labour Party, and restore it as a party safe for capital. But, again, it is not him alone as some sort of cuckoo in the nest – any party that seeks to manage an unequal society will inevitably end up being run for the benefit of the people who benefit from that inequality.

Pik Smeet

Politicians: public face of the capitalist class (2021)

From the World Socialist Party of the United States website

What are politicians for? What do they do?

At school we are taught that politicians are chosen by us, the voters, to represent us in the making of laws and in the government of our city, state, and country. This arrangement supposedly ensures that the views of the majority prevail – the essence of democracy (rule by the people).

This picture is not totally false, but it is also very far from the full truth. It does not account for the persistent divergence that researchers have found between policy outcomes and public opinion.[1] For example, no mainstream politician favors ‘Medicare for All’ even though the scheme has the support of a clear majority of Americans – 69% according to one recent poll. 

The main problem with this picture is what it leaves out. It leaves out the most powerful people in our society, who are not the politicians but the capitalist class – that is, the wealthy and those who represent their interests in the top management of big banks and corporations. (There is admittedly some overlap between the two groups – Donald Trump, for instance.)

Almost all candidates for public office depend on capitalists for money – it is extremely expensive to stand for office – and for coverage in the capitalist-owned media. Capitalists play a crucial though largely hidden role in narrowing the range of choices offered to the voters.[2] Capitalists exploit this dependence to exert a strong influence on the processes of lawmaking and government, either directly or through lobbyists and trade associations. 

To understand the role played by politicians we must therefore examine the triangular relations between capitalists, politicians, and voters. The basic relationship is that between the capitalist class and the mass of the population – the 1% and the 99%, to use the terms favored by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Apart from a few mavericks, however, capitalists prefer to remain in the shadows and deal with the public through hired intermediaries such as pollsters, specialists in Public Relations, and politicians. These people, and politicians in particular, are the public face of the capitalist class in the realm of public policy.

ALEC

One institution specifically designed to facilitate interaction between politicians and capitalists in public policy is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Founded in 1973 by conservative activist Paul Weyrich and a group of Republican state legislators, ALEC aims to ‘make national policy by acting incrementally at the state level.’[3] Through an array of ‘task forces’ – currently ten of them — ALEC prepares ‘model bills’ for the use of its members. State legislators belonging to ALEC need not know how to draft legislation: they can just select texts from ALEC’s online library of model bills, introduce them in state legislatures, and push them through the legislative process into state law.

The internal structure of ALEC accurately reflects the division of labor between capitalists as the power behind the scenes and politicians as their public face. There are two boards of directors – a public board consisting solely of state legislators and a ‘private enterprise board’ consisting solely of representatives of big corporations. Only the identities of members of the public board are made public. Meetings of task forces are held in secret, so outsiders do not know how the legislators and corporate representatives on them interact.

ALEC has recently extended its activity down to the city/county level by setting up a new division named the American City County Exchange ‘for local elected officials and the private sector.’

Of course, ALEC does not represent all local and state politicians – only those most subservient to the capitalist class. Nevertheless, it has an extensive presence and is very active. The Center for Media and Democracy has identified about a thousand current state legislators in all fifty states, mostly Republicans, ‘known to be involved in’ ALEC as well as hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions.[4]

How politicians talk to us

As we have seen, capitalists wish to conceal the extent of their influence from the general public. In general, they seek to minimize their presence as political actors in the public consciousness. That is why politicians, when they address the public, never so much as mention their close relations with capitalists. A taboo is placed on an essential aspect of their professional activity in order to sustain the pretense that the picture painted in civics textbooks corresponds to reality. 

This also helps explain why communication between politicians and the public is so one-sided. They talk to the public. No opportunity is provided for open-ended dialogue. The only questions tolerated are those posed by establishment journalists who can be trusted to observe ‘the rules of the game’ — and politicians can evade even their questions with impunity if they wish. Members of the audience who interrupt politicians’ speeches with comments or questions – ‘hecklers’ – are ignored or told off like naughty children. They are liable to be thrown out or even beaten up.

Perhaps fearing that they may inadvertently break a taboo, politicians are loath to talk in public at length about substantive policy matters. Consider the victory speeches of Harris and Biden on November 7. Harris spoke first. Most of her speech consisted of vague rhetoric and personal recognition of colleagues, friends, and relatives, but she did devote a few carefully chosen words to policy issues (omitting healthcare, no doubt in deference to Biden’s opposition to ‘Medicare for All’). Biden said nothing at all about policy.  

It is worth pondering why American politicians feel obliged to sacrifice their domestic privacy and put their whole family on public display, including young children or grandchildren – arguably a form of child abuse. Isn’t this a desperate attempt to compensate for the alienation caused by their structural inability to relate to their fellow citizens in an open and honest way? They cannot reveal to voters the factors that shape and constrain their policy positions, but at least they can grant them the illusion of an intimate connection. What should be private is made public because what should by rights be public has to be kept private.    

The ultimate function of the politician is to be like a buffer protecting the capitalist class from mass discontent. In order to be effective as a buffer he may sometimes find it necessary to give voice to the grievances of ordinary people, but this need not lead to any corrective action. 

Barack Obama was a master at this double game. Campaigning in the mid-West, he thundered against regional companies such as Maytag and Exelon. And yet these same companies, confident that he would do nothing to harm their interests, gave him large donations. Speaking to audiences of workers, Obama denounced Maytag’s decision in 2004 to close the refrigerator plant in Galesburg, Illinois, entailing the loss of 1,600 jobs to Mexico. But he never raised the issue with Maytag directors Henry and Lester Crown, despite his ‘special relationship’ with them.[5] Later, as president, having bailed out the banks during the financial crisis of 2008, Obama expressed dissatisfaction that they were continuing to operate as before. When he met with the CEOs of fifteen top banks in spring 2009, they complained about his ‘populist rhetoric’; his riposte was that his administration ‘are the only ones standing between you and the pitchforks’ – a vivid expression of the buffer metaphor.[6] Obama never did do anything to reform the banks.

What about Bernie? 

Some politicians do not depend on capitalist donors but collect small donations from ordinary people. This occurs mostly at the local level, where campaigning does not require so much money. At the national level Bernie Sanders pursued this strategy with a measure of success in his bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He broke the taboo and spoke openly in public about the dependence of his political rivals on ‘the billionaire class.’ I suspect that this, rather than any of his specific policy positions, is the main reason for the hatred that the political establishment has for Sanders.   

However, when Biden won the nomination Sanders undertook to support him and stopped talking about this subject. Since then he too has observed the taboo. His silence has not sufficed to win him the trust of the establishment or a place in the new administration.

Stefan 

Notes

[1] Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press, 2008). The author teaches at Vanderbilt University. See also: Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (Routledge, 2016) 

[2] See: ‘Selecting a US President: The Invisible Primaries,’ World Socialist Review, No. 22, pp. 68-70.  

[3] For more detailed discussion of ALEC, see: Joe R. Hopkins, Link. 

[4] https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

[5] ‘The Politics of the “Lesser Evil”,’ World Socialist Review, No. 22, p. 75. 

[6] Barack Obama, A Promised Land (Crown, 2020), pp. 295-6; Link.

Power to the people (1988)

From the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Standard apologises for being a little late with the news but last month Margaret Thatcher became the longest-serving Prime Minister of the century. The great, national sigh of gratitude and relief which greeted the fateful day when she passed the record of Herbert Asquith was quickly blotted out by the sound of frantically hammered typewriters, as political scribes launched into yet another assessment of her time in office, now compared with that of Asquith.

Modern capitalism demands that its executives in the state machine work a great deal harder now than they did eighty years ago. Thatcher, for example, rises at 6am and carries on throughout the day until the small hours of the next one. Only under protest does she take one brief holiday a year. Asquith, who was accustomed to taking several leisurely breaks, would have been horrified; but Thatcher revels under the pressure, drawing energy from the sense that she is at the centre of decision-taking, where policies are laid down and changes are wrought. She is, the scribes were agreed, politically dominant now; amid the column inches of awed admiration for her, a certain phrase began to creep in more and more often elective dictatorship. It means that Thatcher, having won power through the votes of millions of workers, uses that power as if she has an eternal grasp of it — as if she is a dictator. Her method is to ensure that British capitalism is run as she wants it to be by purging her government of all doubting or dissident influences and surrounding herself with people who, although nominally her advisers, rarely if ever question what she is doing.

An example of this was in the appointment of the new Cabinet Secretary, to replace Robert Armstrong who will be remembered for his squirming euphemism about being "economical with the truth" long after all his other work is forgotten. Poor Armstrong, going faithfully into the jaws of a ruthless cross examination on the other side of the world and, as always seemed inevitable, ending up an international laughing stock. But at least it proved one thing; it laid to rest the old myth that it is the Civil Service which runs capitalism rather than the people who are elected to be the government. Armstrong's successor, Robin Butler, is renowned as a Thatcher devotee, having been her principal private secretary. An all-powerful Civil Service would hardly have allowed such an appointment, so soon after Armstrong s humiliation.

But as the myth of the omnipotent Civil Service faded, it was to some extent replaced with concern over the influence of the lobbyists. These are the people who operate behind the scenes of government, with the object of influencing decisions in favour of the organisations who have hired them. Lobbying is a growth industry — if that word can be applied to it — which has expanded over the past few years from a few small firms competing for a small total annual fee into a business with some big companies, often subsidiaries of advertising agencies (of course Saatchi and Saatchi has one) able to command fees in tens of thousands for their services. The lobbyists need to know their way around the corridors of power; many of them once worked as senior civil servants or advisers to politicians. Recent events where they were active were the Westlands affair, the Guinness bid for Distillers and the SAS attempt to take over a slice of British Caledonian. While there is no reason to accept the lobbyists' estimates of their own influence — they have an obvious interest in exaggeration — it is true that they are an addition to what seems to many people a mass of confused influences, all operating on the government, which effectively blanket out any democratic content. There is Thatcher behaving as if she is a dictator; there is the civil service, through their position of the permanent factor whichever government is in power; there are the lobbyists, working behind the scenes to distort and frustrate governmental decisions. In all this, what happens to the wishes of the voters? To the promises on which the government was elected? Is there any point in ever voting again?

Anyone who suffers nightmares about a Britain in the grip of the faceless mandarins of Whitehall, or of the slick operators in the public relations business, can be re-assured. Whatever influence these people may be able to exert they can operate only within a certain system (after all, no recalcitrant civil servant has ever sabotaged a minute so as to help along the case for abolishing capitalism). We live under a social system based on a class division, into owners and non-owners — into capitalists and workers. This society cannot be democratic — it has to have its secrets, whether they are military, commercial or governmental (as Robert Armstrong knows only too well). The owning capitalists hold a privileged social position — privileged in their access to wealth, to information, to power and to the process of decision taking. The working class are never asked about decisions like the take-over of British Caledonian; it is simply not within the scope of their social position under capitalism.

This situation exists because the working class allow it to. At present the capitalist class — the ruling class — hold power but they do this through the fact that the working class agree to it. The workers are the majority; they are the useful, productive people who design and produce and operate all that society needs. As the majority they have the potential power; at present they surrender this power to the capitalists by voting in their millions for one or other of the parties which, whatever their incidental differences, are agreed that capitalism should continue. People who are concerned about the subversive distortion of governmental decisions should consider where the responsibility lies — how it is that an undemocratic system can be energised, again and again, through millions of democratic votes.

And that brings us to the important question of what can be done about it. How do we bring Thatcher's elective dictatorship to an end? How do we unmask the shadowy figures behind Whitehall's desks? How do we see off the subversive lobbyists? Well it is possible to have a society in which all people stand in equality in the sense that they all have the same rights of access to what society produces, whether it is wealth or a service or information. This will be a society which will work on majority consent, in the interests of the majority. It will have a universal, human unity in its objects and its achievements. Minority class interests will not exist and neither will the mess of deceits and cynicism which they entail. So there is no need to be down-hearted at Thatcher's record; like all the events of capitalism, it puts some important questions and offers some illuminating answers. We can change things; as soon as the society of common ownership and free access arrives, the Socialist Standard will not be late with the news.

Ivan