Labour after Gorton and Denton

It wasn't even close. While the pollsters kept coughing up the Gorton and Denton numbers that put the three parties inches from one another, the outcome was the Greens 12 points clear on 41%. Reform managed 29%, and Labour mustered a poor third on 25%. Also, shout out to the Tories for losing their deposit and managing their worst ever parliamentary by-election result. Behind this survey of the scores after the doors is a profound shift in British politics - the first time since the war when neither of the two main parties of government came first nor second, the first time the momentum behind Reform has been stymied despite receiving their customary flattery, hype, and media over-exposure. And, for the Greens, its first ever parliamentary by-election win. A day for the history books, and more signs that the Greens are becoming the new party of working class Britain.

It was also, without a shadow of a doubt, a catastrophe for Labour. They threw the kitchen sink at Gorton and Denton. Campaigning by the Prime Minister, virtually every available MP timetabled for door knocking, huge events that scraped together thousand-strong campaign days. Dodgy leaflets, off-the-scale negative messaging, all of it came to nought. The margin of victory between the Greens on the one hand and Labour on the other, while Reform cornered the constituency's right wing vote, had something more than tactical voting behind it. Like Caerphilly, Labour's traditional backers wanted change and in Hannah Spencer elected a working class woman on a socialist platform. The size of the win was also an endorsement of a different kind of politics instead of the miserabilism with dashings of racism offered by the other parties.

The cope though, the Labour Party cope, it's been a pitiful sight. Doing the rounds on breakfast TV this morning Heidi Alexander put the rejection of her candidate down to "impatience". This is the narrative that has emerged over the last six months to explain electoral reversals. After 14 ruinous years of Tory government, the punters want to see change for the better and are impatient for it. The implication being that once Labour delivers Beijing-levels of annual economic growth, wages go up, new workers' rights are bedded down, and parents feel the benefit of breakfast clubs the polling numbers will recover, delivering a renaissance at the ballot box when 2029 swings around. What poppycock. People aren't fed up with Labour because they want to see a better world yesterday, they're disgusted because the government made decisions that made life worse. Scrapping winter fuel payments for everyone bar pensioners on the lowest incomes, stupid. Relishing the opportunity to cut £5bn worth of social security support to disabled people. Stupid. And getting caught with their muzzles in the freebie trough, and then defending it. Utterly, utterly stupid. Throw in their support for the genocide in Gaza, its Farage cosplay, and the unforced error of appointing Peter Mandelson, is it any wonder that Labour's base is splintering?

Going by the commentary offered by sundry Labour MPs on social media after the by-election, it's telling that those closest to the realities of working class life understand the issues. Clive Lewis's criticisms were particularly blunt and spot on. But what chances does Labour have of learning from this disaster? The track record is not looking good. When the SNP annihilated Scottish Labour in 2015, did the party pause and reflect? Did it think about who its voters are, or ask why so much of its working class base demonstrated little loyalty to the party's unionist shibboleth and switched from voting for an anti-independence to a pro-independence party? It did not. There was scant movement for the next nine years, hoping that the vote would return without changing much. And, as it happened, enough voters were cheesed off with the SNP in government to give Labour another go. And as polls now show, most of them now have buyer's remorse. That's the record, and in his leader's letter to MPs, Keir Starmer has argued that carrying out "change" means not changing anything at all.

It's an entirely predictable epistle. There's the retread of Alexander argument that it's all "impatience", and the woe today will surely be followed by jam tomorrow. And that the Greens' win is a one off. They "simply do not have the resources, the activist base or the local knowledge to replicate this victory across the country". Brave words from a campaign that spectacularly misread the constituency's mood in what was, before yesterday, Labour's 34th safest seat. He goes on and blames the "endorsement from George Galloway" and "sectarian" politics. This latter charge is typical of a party that is just itching to attack Muslims if they have the temerity to vote for anyone else. As plenty of people have pointed out, how sectarian is a vote that has endorsed a white women standing for a party led by a gay, Jewish man? Labour think they have the Greens bang to rights because the party issued a leaflet in Urdu that pictured David Lammy with Benjamin Netanyahu and Starmer with Narendra Modi. Proof that the Greens are in the gutter of communalist politics? Only someone utterly ignorant could make such an argument in good faith. Netanyahu is on there because his government has murdered over 100,000 Muslims, with the support of Labour. Modi is on there because under his premiership, he has encouraged Hindu extremism and anti-Muslim pogroms, all the while subjecting Muslim-majority Kashmir to brutal occupation. How dare British Muslims care about their friends and relatives and be disgusted at Starmer's efforts to cosy up with the BJP. If Starmer wants to lecture others about division, he might want to reconsider his own policies first.

Starmer's letter pledges to carry on regardless. Just as his campaign tried to ignore the Greens by pitching the by-election as Labour Vs Reform, he's as intent on ignoring the reasons for Labour's defeat. An obviously suicidal attitude to take, but one typical of Labourism. Nevertheless, most Labour MPs quite like being Labour MPs and will be drawing their own conclusions. For every Clive Lewis or Nadia Whittome prepared to break ranks, there are scores of others who, quietly, know what the issues are. Yet, paradoxically, despite a humiliating defeat Starmer's position is probably strengthened in the short term. His reason for existing, to absorb the body blows of the coming meltdowns in Wales, Scotland, and the English local elections remains the case - ahead of the party selecting a new leader. Meanwhile, the Green insurgency continues. A new MP, 200,000 members, a confidence that left wing politics can see off Reform, whoever comes after Starmer it's hard to see how Labour can win back the activists, supporters, and voters it has so carelessly and needlessly shed. On the occasion of Labour's 126th birthday, Starmer's gift to the party has been a new historic low. One that, on its current trajectory, could be the first of many.

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Where Now for Your Party?

It's been one of the most bad tempered elections seen in many a year. Opponents accused opponents of all manner of things as the contest itself descended into mudslinging and skulduggery. No, this is not the Gorton and Denton by-election but the vote for Your Party's Central Executive Committee, the results of which were announced on Thursday morning. The Jeremy Corbyn faction, For the Many, won 14 seats. The Zarah Sultana-backed Grassroots Left took seven seats, and the remainder went to independent candidacies. Corbyn and Sultana are also two of the four elected public office holders under the collective leadership arrangements, with Corbyn set to be YP's parliamentary leader.

Following the results, Corbyn released a mom and apple pie statement that said he wanted to build a "positive and inclusive party" and congratulated members on voting for a "mass socialist party that takes the fight to Starmer and Farage." Sultana likewise put out an emollient piece that emphasised the need to work together, but that calls for accountability and transparency "need to be respected". After the heat, may there be light?

Unfortunately for YP, it's likely this leadership election is going to leave lingering bad feeling. As late as yesterday Laura Alvarez, Corbyn's famously combative significant other, was absurdly musing about infiltration from Labour Together into YP. Which invited supportive comments that, in terms of tone, one might expect of a frothing conspiracy theory Facebook group. And this was typical of the standard of debate that raged across social media. There was precious little discussion about strategic direction, and a great deal of questioning the motives of those unwilling to extend Corbyn saintly status. Those supportive of the Grassroots Left were little better, as false character assassination and boilerplate Trot denunciations were flung in the opposite direction.

It might be possible to overcome the entrenching of divisions in YP this election has thrown up, but there remains significant obstacles to internal harmony. The first is the propensity of the nascent bureaucracy to trample over membership decisions. For instance, the instruction from conference was to allow dual membership with other parties (i.e. keeping YP open to other far left organisations), but it was down to the CEC to sort that out. This was ignored as "known" and "suspected" members of said outfits were barred from standing in these elections. A case of starting as they mean to go on? And then there was the edict that suggested people who served as officers in active unofficial YP branches would be ineligible to run for lay positions when they're finally inaugurated. A right recipe for the "inclusion" Corbyn waxed about in his statement.

And this is before we get to the main problem: how YP has spectacularly wasted its opportunity, and in so doing allowed the Greens to almost triple in size, become a true mass party and is now the vehicle for the political recomposition of the working class. A prize that was in front of YP's leadership cadre, but decided to pass it up for criminally petty reasons. That said, politics buzzes with volatility. If YP is able to stabilise, set aside its internal nonsenses, and start facing outwards it could build up a presence through consistent community, workplace, and street campaigning. And if it does, this would be a good thing for British politics. A small but viable presence could, in the spirit of socialist competition, act as a means of keeping the Greens honest. It could threaten swathes of inner city Labour-held seats where the Green presence is hitherto patchy, and a second strong radical force could work to tilt British politics as a whole further left. Cue a return to 2015-2020 levels of mainstream media hysteria and howls of outrage from politicians who treat their Commons sinecures as private property.

This is where YP can go. But it's now up to them - is this where they want to go, or is further recrimination and needless bloodletting more its style?

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Why Labour Can't Argue with the Left

Desperation. The word that, seen from afar, sums up Labour's campaign in Gorton and Denton. And the source of their fear is not the prospect of losing yet another seat to Reform, but conceding ground to the resurgent Greens. Having nixed Andy Burnham, the candidacies say everything about the two parties' respective trajectories. The Greens' Hannah Spencer, a plumber drawn to the party out of disgust with the political establishment. And Labour's Angeliki Stogia, a corporate lobbyist trudging a path into the parliamentary party beaten by so many others. Please tell me which is the pro-capitalist, petit bourgeois party and who is the organisation standing up for the working class in this by-election?

There have been two phases to Labour's campaign. It started with a studied failure to acknowledge the Green Party's existence. This is a fight between Labour and Reform, goes the party line, and progressive voters must get behind Angeliki to keep Reform out. The party even provided a Liberal Democrat-style bar chart putting the Greens in third place, which was hung from the property neighbouring Green campaign HQ. The problem, however, is that constituency polling - such as it is - have the Greens out in front and Labour in third. The betting markets, not that they have any special insight, also favour this outcome. Having decided pretending the Greens don't exist isn't working, they've moved on to gutter politics.

You might have thought that Reform's Matthew Goodwin, former pol prof and full-time far right grifter would have attracted Labour's ire. He's provided enough targets. He, after all, has called for a system of punitive taxation against women who do not have children. In Labour land, if it is between them and Reform then surely, surely their fiercest attacks should be turned toward the right. Instead, we get Keir Starmer calling the Green Party's public health-led approach to drugs "disgusting", and Sarah Jones, his policing minister, saying Zak Polanski wants to turn Britain's playgrounds "into crack dens". Brave considering the fondness several highly placed Labour figures have now or formerly had for the old nose powder. Labour's attitude is best summed up by Mike Tapp, the part-time home office minister and full-time clown from Dover and Deal. His vitriolic attack on the Greens stands out on his Twitter feed in sharp relief against a series of mild admonitions, at best, of Reform.

Writing in the New Statesman, John Elledge argues that Labour's hostility to the Greens, and bracketing them alongside Reform is only going to hurt Labour. What's left of their support knows there's no equivalence between the two parties. One party wants to welcome refugees, the other wants to deport Britons who don't meet their arbitrary criteria of national purity. One wants to help renters, the other wants to give landlords carte blanche to rinse tenants. You get the picture. And so do most Labour MPs, even those who performatively affect otherwise. They also know that the party's coalition has cracked and supporters are streaming to the Greens. It's not Reform that is Labour's biggest headache.

Which begs an interesting question. Labour's pandering to Reform and its attempt to outflank them from the right was and is justified by needing to win over Nigel Farage's fans. But this never applies in the opposite direction. Why doesn't Labour go harder on renters' rights, wages, workplaces, etc. to keep existing support on board? To my mind, there are two answers, both of which are baked into the party's politics. Firstly, according to the wisdom passed down from the disgraced Peter Mandelson, the electorate respond favourably to ... the spectacle of Labour attacking the interests of working class people. In this way, the stupid mistakes Starmer and Rachel Reeves made shortly after entering Downing Street - taking away winter fuel payments from "better off" pensioners, then threatening to cut support to disabled people - makes sense. They, or at least the dearly departed Morgan McSweeney, thought this would win plaudits with the press and therefore admiration among the punters. Imagine their confusion when this article of Blairist faith turned out not to be.

And the other? An inability to combat left wing critiques politically. Or, to be more accurate, offering convincing counter-arguments. The right won back control of Labour by lying its head off, and then using the bureaucracy to chase out the left. During the Corbyn years, it was the smears, the cry-bullying, and using remainerism as a proxy. None of them came up with an alternative programme that could persuade and convince. And the same is true today. Compromised by the government's support for a genocide, its scapegoating of the powerless, and a programme of weak and meek changes, Labour's biting back at Green Party criticisms would be a vain effort at gumming them to death. This is a consequence of the managerialist cadres Labour selects for its parliamentarians, typified by the man at the helm. These people are unaccustomed to hearing the word "no". But this comes on top of the Labourist tradition that, for over a century, had a political monopoly on the most organised and conscious sections of the working class. When its opponents to its left were the official Communist Party or the extra-Labour Trotskyist left, they could be ignored. When it was internal, as per Militant, they could be excluded. And on occasions when a left wing challenge pushed through, such as George Galloway's trio of election victories, or when Jeremy Corbyn and the so-called Gaza Independents won their seats, it could be put down to local circumstances. Labour has serious difficulties facing a mass left wing challenger party because it's never had to.

The result of all this is what we see today, peddling smears against the Greens that wouldn't be out of place in a Sun editorial or, for that matter, a Reform leaflet. If by some fluke Labour hold on to Gorton and Denton on Thursday, or if they somehow come ahead of the Greens, these points remain. Labour is unsuited and unprepared for a challenge from its left flank, and there's no sign, at least under this leadership and its heirs apparent, that it ever will be.

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Reform's Toryism

There are fewer people in politics worse than Robert Jenrick. So a plague on Nigel Farage for accepting his defection to Reform, and then installing him as their economics spox. Because the party is still ahead in the polls, when Jenrick now gives a speech we have to have some awareness of what he has to say. And on Wednesday it was Reform budget time. What would Farage in Number 10 mean for economics and public spending? And the answer is ... we've seen it all before.

Top of Jenrick's pops was the restoration of the two child benefit cap. This had already been trailed by Farage, with him suggesting earlier in the month that he wants the cap brought back so punters can save 5p a pint down at Spoons. Performative cruelty for pocket change? The most spiteful sections of Reform's support would lap it up. But how this sits with Matthew Goodwin's view that women should be fined/taxed punitively if they don't have children, and the generalised panic on the right about birthrates is anyone's guess.

Also on Jenrick's agenda was a pledge to keep the OBR, and the supremacy of the Treasury in state spending matters. And with that, the continued "independence" of the Bank of England. Something the establishment would be happy about, seeing as the symbiotic and interpenetrating relationships these institutions have with each other and the City of London are a crucial nexus of class power in this country. He also committed Reform to a low inflation strategy, which - as per previous governments - would be wheeled out as a technocratic wonky argument against increasing public spending. Which, funnily enough, never applies to splashing out on the military.

There wasn’t much else to Jenrick's speech, but as with such things it's the silences that are pregnant with meaning. Wanting to force hundreds of thousands of children back into poverty, dressed up as instilling "some realism into this business" could have come from any speech of George Osborne's during his time as chancellor. Indeed, one might expect Reform to go down the path of the Tories' 'austerity populism'. The arguments the Tories deployed in the run up to the 2010 general election that successfully persuaded enough people that the crisis in state finances was caused by public spending and social security commitments, and not the global response - largely led by the British government - to bail out the banks. Blaming the poorest for Britain's woes would be right up Jenrick's street. There has never been a group of vulnerable people he didn't want to punch.

This also definitively kills any suggestion of a "left turn" on Reform's part, which was always a stretch, despite Farage toying such a position for a bit of attention-seeking. Likewise, combine Suella Braverman's rants as their education spox against universities and mickey mouse courses. This is the completion of a movement back into the Reform leadership's preferred policy diet, a menu of foul tasting warm ups from the last decade. As the party's position as the main political force on the right is consolidated, making an offering that looks like traditional Tory fare might, they hope, extend Reform's reach into what is left of the Tory coalition. And perhaps those softer, more liberal-inclined elements that might otherwise go Liberal Democrat because the liberalism they care about is more of the economic than the political kind.

On the other hand, this comes with a set of difficulties. Reform's success derives from its distance from the Tories, of being the owners of Brexit in our post-Boris Johnson politics and the scapegoaters du jour of a range of powerless people. Reform aren't about to drop their racism, their anti-environmentalism, nor their soft anti-vaxism and conspiracy theory dog whistles, but sounding identical to the Tories on economic matters and getting former Tories from the last, failed government to front it? That's like exposing a swathe of ankle and renaming themselves Achilles. The populist posturing starts looking just like that, a poor cover for a programme that made life more difficult for significant sections of Reform's volatile voter coalition when the Tories were last in charge. There are political costs to positioning Reform as a racist mk II Conservative Party, and it could be a move that is already starting to depress their polling numbers.

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On Andrew's Arrest

The former Prince Andrew arrested on his birthday? It's certainly one he won't forget in a hurry. His being taken into police custody and questioned all day over misconduct in public office allegations at least offers a suggestion that powerful people can be held to account for their activities. In this case, it regards correspondence in the Esptein files that purport to show Mountbatten-Windsor passing on documents to the world's most notorious paedophile. Allegations very similar to those levelled at the disgraced Peter Mandelson.

Obviously, as there's now an investigation with the possibility of charges, this corner of the internet won't be making further comment about the substance of this case. But the politics? That's a different matter. The establishment have spent the last couple of years disentangling itself from Mountbatten-Windsor. On several occasions, Keir Starmer has gone on the record to say he should submit himself to questioning. The press, naturally, have taken a prurient interest in the sex abuse allegations against him, diminishing his already poor standing further in the public's eyes. And the King has moved with some haste to put clear distance between the playboy prince and the family firm.

Where our most gracious sovereign is concerned, dealing with Andrew efficiently and ruthlessly was the only option available to him. For too long, Andrew enjoyed the late Queen's favour, and that preferment undoubtedly shielded him from proper accountability. The police didn't want to go there, knowing that the upset caused might have discomfited the increasingly frail Elizabeth II to expire. And with obvious ramifications for any senior officer in charge of such a probe. Instead, it was the audience with Liz Truss that saw her off. But for the King, this is a headache. Despite his strong statement on the matter. If the investigation strays into who in the Palace knew what and when, there is a possibility of major embarrassment. And if the Queen is directly implicated, which even the dogs in the street know she would be, this has ramifications for the legitimacy of the monarchy itself. Which has taken a few knocks of late.

With politics dropping to bits before our eyes, Starmer's ratings in the toilet, and a widespread impression given by the government itself that it can't affect basic levels of competence, the corrosion of the British state's major legitimating institution is very bad news for the establishment. And this is only the beginning of what will be an excruciating spectacle.

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What I've Been Reading Recently

It's been some time since we last had one of these, so rather than a mega list here's a more manageable chunk: the books I got through in January.

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession
The Transparency of Evil by Jean Baudrillard
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place by Jean Baudrillard
The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard
Cold Allies by Patricia Anthony
The Food of the Gods by HG Wells
Baudrillard Live edited by Mike Gane
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Clash by Night by Henry Kuttner and CL Moore
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
Baudrillard's Challenge by Victoria Grace
The Forge of God by Greg Bear

Once again, Baudrillard is gently simmering on the back burner, so no commentary about these works here. But I will say the book by Victoria Grace is by far the best one-volume treatment our hyperreal hero has received. At least among the not inconsiderable secondary literature I've read. Her target are the feminist debates around subjectivity that dominated proceedings in the 1990s, and makes a cogent and compelling case that Baudrillard offers a way out of the impasse it butted up against. Yes, really. Baudrillard, by way of Haraway, opened a path to a materialist feminism of the 21st century - one that could grasp the specificities and new patterns of power in the postmodern era. Published in the futuristic year of 2000, it's now a very old book, but its relevance lies not only in the feminist case for Baudrillard, and the fact much contemporary feminism did take the Harawayan road. The possibility of a fruitful engagement remains.

As mainstream novels went in January, it's a real case of chalk and cheese. Leonard and Hungry Paul was the sort of book that made me want to hulk out and rip in half. A twee story of friendship between two socially awkward, and implicitly autistic men, it inspired nothing but hostility in me. It would have been a DNF were it not a book group read so I endured ... and then couldn't go because of illness anyway. I don't mind plodding and inconsequential as long as it's done well, but this was an irritant. The very opposite of calming. And now it's been filmed as a TV series. I won't be watching. What a welcome difference Young Mungo made. About the titular Mungo, this is a coming-of-age story about a young, gay working-class Glaswegian. The ever present backdrop is alcoholism, child neglect, violence, abuse, and sectarianism. Life is brutal, and it's as far from a cosy read you can get. Yet it's a novel full of love as well. A shocker it never made the Booker short list.

Up there this month with Young Mungo is The Man Who Fell to Earth, a stunning work of loneliness and despair. What a cheery read! Thomas Newton is on a mission from Mars, and that's to save his people! He uses their advanced technology to make millions so he can build a fleet of ships and ferry what's left of his civilisation to Earth. But nothing is ever straightforward. The preceding sentence does not do this book justice. It's one of the greatest SF novels I've read, and sure to be on the year-end list. A good way for the mainstream literary reader to sample science fiction without the tropy stuff getting in the way. Also very good, but this time super-tropy was Chasm City, a slab of a book typical of British new space opera, but one that is extremely polished and compelling. Chasm City is an exciting mix of generation ship, spy, and hard-boiled SF noir. A recommend if you like that sort of thing.

And the rest, sadly, was quite average. Bear's The Forge of God was over long, and half-way through I couldn't wait to see the Earth destroyed. Clash by Night by golden age power couple, Kuttner and Moore was high seas hi-jinks on Venus. It had a certain sharpness and quality, but by the same token it didn't grab me. Mercifully, it was short. I was expecting good things from The Food of the Gods, Wells's tale of oversized plants, animals, and (eventually) humans, and how Edwardian society dealt with them. Not a patch on his better known stuff. And lastly was Patricia Anthony's future war novel, Cold Allies. Europe is fending of invading Arab armies, driven north by run away climate change. And as the former teeters on the brink of defeat, a set of mysterious aliens show up. Friend? Foe? Sadly, you'll be indifferent to the answer by about a third of the way through.

What have you been reading recently?

What is the Point of Keir Starmer?

This is the worst 24 hours of Keir Starmer's leadership! Or, as the Simpson's meme has it, this is the worst 24 hours of Keir Starmer's leadership so far. The day didn't start great for the Prime Minister. Still reeling from Sunday's departure of our chum Morgan McSweeney, from out of nowhere the head of the dire Downing Street press operation, Tim Allan, threw in the towel. Whether this had something to do with weak vetting, who can say. He once handled press in this country for one Vladimir Putin, so perhaps it's merely a coincidence. Things carried on looking shaky for Starmer, before Anas Sarwar lobbed a bomb from afar. The Scottish Labour leader was calling a press conference to tell the PM to pack his bags. It looked like curtains, especially as rumours swirled that the Welsh First Minister, Eluned Morgan, was set to follow. Matters were uncertain.

Until they weren't. She denied reports, and then cabinet member after cabinet member came out to offer Starmer their backing. It ranged from a lukewarm "he doesn't need to resign" from Wes Streeting to the usual boilerplate from everyone else. You know, "he led us to a landslide victory", and "change takes a long time!", and "we have wonderful new breakfast clubs". Writing at the end of the day, it appears that Starmer survives. For now.

Ironically, this position of precarity confers on him a new reason for living. For Sarwar, calling for Starmer's head is calculated to salvage Scottish Labour's chances before this May's Holyrood elections. He's hoping that some oppositional cache will fall to his crew. I'm not so sure. After all, the few dozen Labour MPs who splashed their support for Brexit across their 2019 literature found it didn't save them. And the fact Starmer dumped Richard Leonard out of office so Sarwar could take over. Few other-party-curious Scottish Labour voters are likely to forget this, and will see it as cynical politicking. Something the SNP will no doubt remind punters of at every opportunity.

For the rest of the party, it's in no would-be leader's interest for Starmer to go. Wes Streeting has decided not to wait for the humble address and released his batch of toe curling messages between him and former best pal, Peter Mandelson. Likewise, Angela Rayner, who saved the government from an embarrassing Commons defeat last Wednesday, has to wait for the HMRC to give her "controversial" tax affairs a clean bill of health. And even those not immediately in the frame need someone to carry the can for the battering due at the Denton and Gorton by-election, and the May local and devolved elections. No new leader can afford to start their premiership with two crushing defeats.

Therefore, Starmer has use again. For Mandelson, via McSweeney, he was the marionette that would win the party back from the membership. He was then the empty suit animated almost entirely by oligarchical interests. And now that his days are numbered and the Labour right have suffered an historic embarrassment, he remains the tool of others, a meat shield whose sole purpose is to take the electoral beating coming the government's way. And when that's done, with Starmer lying bleeding and broken on the floor, that's when the up-and-comers will step over his body. Perhaps one of them will be kind enough to roll him into a ditch, but most are likely to not linger at the scene lest the miasma of poor judgement and failure clings to them.

A Farewell to Morgan McSweeney

What a fantastic week. Peter Mandelson toasted to charcoal, the government being forced to make public all communications about him, the possibility of massive reputational damage hitting Wes Streeting when private messages between the pair come out, and capping it off Morgan McSweeney falls on his sword. Rare are the times when the doings of the worst people in politics catches up with them, but this is one such spectacular occasion.

It's not true that McSweeney was the most malignant presence in the contemporary Labour Party, because we found out that he willingly, happily had his strings pulled by Mandelson. We've learned that Uncle Peter had a hand in nodding through and barring candidates for selection ahead of the general election, displaying the customary contempt for data protection laws that the Labour right normally has for their own party rules. And that Mandelson effectively reshuffled the cabinet after Angela Rayner's departure, ensuring a leadership team more right wing and authoritarian than anything Mandelson had a hand in during the New Labour years.

That McSweeney, like large chunks of the Labour right, lionised Mandelson is common knowledge, but why? As argued here previously, McSweeney is no genius, and was only ever an "operator" when he was secure in a position of unaccountable power. McSweeney was Mandelson's apprentice, and only ever approached his master in cynicism and mendacity. His actual achievements are somewhat lesser, and among them one can count hollowing Labour out before it entered government, relying on antipathy to the Tories and the split right wing vote to win an election, and securing a weaker public endorsement than Jeremy Corbyn managed in 2019. It is under his direction that the party's support has eroded to a historical nadir, to the point where Labour's actual liquidation is on the cards, and McSweeney's relentlessly racist push on immigration has boosted the extreme right.

Obviously, none of this happened without the nod from Uncle Peter. But there is a significant difference between the two. Mandelson, like Blair and Gordon Brown, were political. Working their way up and through the party in the 1980s demanded skill, of knowing the balance of factions, the importance of the unions, the strength of the fiefdoms in the apparat, how to play to constituency parties and, where necessary, deploy political arguments to secure quiescence from opponents and find new allies. This isn't to say Labour was a nice place, far from it. But it was an institution that was significantly more than a bureaucracy for organising campaigning teams, which is what the party has become. New Labour was not inevitable, and Blair, Brown, and Mandelson had to win political fights to win the leadership and push it further to the right. The problem was they created a desert and called it peace. By battling and clearing out the left, and reducing trade unions to piggy banks that would occasionally complain but never rock the boat, successive generations of councillors, MPs, internal office seekers, and party full-timers came of age when the party was becalmed. Even in the Iraq War did little to nothing to challenge the leadership's writ.

This was the Labour Party McSweeney joined in 2001. He did the unglamorous hard yards of carrying bags, drawing up countless road groups, knocking on doors, all the things that party campaigning staff are expected to do. And, as we know, he organised campaigns too. But internal struggle? He undoubtedly listened to what Mandelson told him, heard all the stories of 1980s shenanigans from the John Spellar/constituency bore wing of the party. There will be a copy of John Golding's The Hammer of the Left lying around somewhere, but he never actually lived it. And that showed when the 2015 Labour leadership election rolled around, and his campaign - the Liz Kendall effort - mustered only four per cent of the vote. He, nor Kendall, hadn't realised that New Labourism had no base in the party outside of sections of the PLP, the bureaucracy, and the leaders' offices of a couple of tame unions. The lesson McSweeney took from this was not to wage a political struggle to make these positions popular, as the evidence of his own eyes showed he was completely clueless on this front. Instead, to defeat the left and return Labour back to its rightful professional/managerial leadership cadre, there was only one thing for it: lying.

If McSweeney has a genuine talent, it's as a con man. Because McSweeney and mates couldn't resist telling all and sundry about how clever he was, we know he ran Labour Together as a Janus-faced operation. Outwardly a soft left can't-we-all-just-get-along kumbya outfit, in reality it was a front for organising hit jobs on left wingers, left wing publications, of providing friendly media with copy targetting party members and the leadership, and once Corbyn was gone it, despite denials, ran Keir Starmer's leadership campaign - a confidence trick in which every single one of his pledges turned out to be a lie. And once McSweeney was at the top of the tree, the power of the bureaucracy was turned against the left. No persuasion, no alliance-building across party constituencies. Nothing but a petty-minded, vindictive pursuit of real and imagined enemies. There was never anything "genius" about any of this. Wielding power against the small and weak is the easiest thing in the world.

The rest is history. They say that if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies come floating past. Many people across the labour movement have waited decades for Mandelson's cadaver to bob along with the current. And dragged in his wake is the fast festering foulness of McSweeney's former career. But unfortunately for the survivors of this last week, the damage these pair have done is so great, the dispersion of their natural constituency and core support so advanced, that something else is teetering on the bank further upstream and looks certain to topple into the water. And that is the swaying, barely-living figure of the Labour Party itself.

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From Your Party to the Greens

Had a chat with the Byline Times podcaster and producer, Adrian Goldberg yesterday. We talked about Your Party, the changing character of British politics, the Greens, and why I decided to join them.

Suitable for the Job

One thing ends now. And that's further speculation about the Peter Mandelson scandal now the police are "investigating a 72-year old man from London" over allegations of misconduct in public office. What we're not going to stop talking about is the Peter Mandelson debacle, and who was responsible for his elevation to one of the highest offices of the British state. This isn't a hard question to answer. The buck stops with Keir Starmer. It doesn't matter how hard he disowns Mandelson, the Prime Minister appointed him US ambassador. This is a charge he cannot escape from. The question then is how much Starmer knew, and when. It's this that determines whether "Mr Rules" himself should get chucked, or be pushed into falling on his sword.

The Times's Patrick Maguire has argued that this is possibly the greatest political scandal since the Profumo Affair. I'm not so sure. The Tories handing out Covid procurement contracts to their donors springs to mind. As does the wrecking campaign, subversion of democracy and undermining Labour's election efforts by the Mandelson-friendly Labour Together faction and their allies. But to be sure, allegedly leaking market sensitive information that financier pals could profit from while government was grappling with the meltdown of global capital circuits is right up there. And it is reasonable to suppose that Starmer knew nothing of this. To him, Mandelson was just a grandee that hung around the party, and whom his advisors and subordinates looked up to as The Master.

What he did know was that Mandelson was associated with Epstein, courted the global oligarchy, counted many a billionaire as paying clients and associates and, of course, had to resign in disgrace from government twice. With such a history behind him, any government with modest centre left ambitions - and Starmer's ambitions for his government are very modest - would surely steer clear. But this is the Labour Party and, of course, this is Britain. For Mandelson's meat puppet, the overrated Morgan McSweeney, what was scandalous about his mentor were ample qualifications for his putative suitability in the court of King Donald. They had a mutual friend in the late Epstein, he was totally on board with Britain being a lapdog state and saw eye-to-eye with the Trump White House on foreign policy. He was good at sucking up to the rich and powerful and, unbeknownst to Starmer and McSweeney, the Epstein files suggest Mandelson was the match for any of Trump's circle for corruption,. Minus the brash crudity. For McSweeney, elevating his mentor meant he would never be too busy to advise on what the Starmer government should be doing. And for Starmer, a man experienced with ensuring Labour never strayed far from the right and proper interests was in situ to secure the US relationship.

Starmer might not have had much interest in Mandelson until fairly recently. But from the inner party shenanigans and through McSweeney, we knew Mandelson was interested in him. When he took McSweeney's advice and appointed him ambassador, his story publicly became intertwined with Mandelson's. It becomes a question of Starmer's political judgement, which has been poor since the first day of this government. The Mandelson revelations should be the final word on the Prince of Darkness's career at the top of British politics. And, by right, it should call time on Starmer's stay in Number 10 too.

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