Starmer Is Toast

Some 30 years ago, British politics became, by design, a black box—an arena for moneyed power brokers to wield political influence hermetically sealed off from the view of voters.

Only now, with the release of a portion of the Epstein Files, is a dim light being shone into its recesses, indicating how completely the billionaire class has captured political life in Britain.

The process began in the 1990s, when then-Prime Minister Tony Blair reinvented the once democratic socialist Labour Party as “New Labour”, accepting the neoliberal presumptions of his Conservative predecessor, Margaret Thatcher.

Blair progressively ditched traditional trade union support and instead turned Labour into a managerial party for capital, promising to serve the interests of the world’s largest corporations.

The figure who personified this trend was Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour. In 1998, during a trip to Silicon Valley as trade secretary to meet newly emerging tech billionaires, he famously said: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

He likes to point out that he added, “as long as they pay their taxes.” But Blair and Mandelson helped engineer preferential terms that ensured tech giants barely paid any tax in the UK—all in the interests, of course, of “attracting investment.”

The problem was not simply that New Labour’s priorities came to resemble the Conservatives’.

Nor was it only that Labour’s cosying up to the super-rich drove the Tories ever further rightwards in an effort to distinguish themselves, a process that ultimately led to the Conservative Party’s implosion and the emergence of a new pretender to the right’s throne in the form of Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

No, the gravest problem was that, as New Labour and the Tories vied equally for favour with the super-rich and the media outlets they owned in the hope of being ushered into office, neither dared reverse the economic windfalls the billionaires had accrued.

Nor did either party have any incentive to call out the growing capture and corruption of British politics by the billionaire class—because that capture had become the very point of the political game.

Thus was born the black box of British politics—until the Epstein Files, released by a Trump administration more concerned with protecting its own secrets than those of British politicians, prised open the lid just enough to reveal what was going on inside.

Laboratory-grown PM

British