10.10.2024
How to buy a government
Labour is supposed to be the party of working people, but its recent troubles show how bourgeois politics and big money interweave, argues Paul Demarty
Hard luck to Sue Gray, the lifelong Whitehall bureaucrat who took a chance on running Kier Starmer’s staff. It turns out that the staff have had the last laugh - most especially Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s campaign consigliere, who now replaces her as chief of staff. Gray will take up a new role as “envoy to the nations and regions”, which sounds to us like a ridiculous make-work job, but at least it will get her out of the house …
Her resignation - likely under heavy manners - comes as part of a wider reshuffle, by means of which Starmer seeks to regain the initiative after relentless scandals over petty corruption, and the cheerful abandonment of one already meagre election pledge after another. There has been no honeymoon period to speak of, really. Gray’s own role in all this is largely incidental. The great kerfuffle over her salary was silly enough stuff, though it gave a clear picture of the main motivations of the average government functionary. It seemed to be a secondary symptom of her perceived control-freakery (although what else is a chief of staff supposed to do?) and obstructionism at a time when the government is relentlessly under fire.
But the endless scandals have always had the feel of not really being about what they should be about. We are not too terribly concerned about the prime minister’s trousers, or his spectacles, though a fondness for splashing quite so much cash on them seems a little vulgar (perhaps he is more than usually prone to losing his glasses). Focusing on the Waheed Alli-Keir Starmer angle gives the impression that this is a matter of one businessman engaging one politician in an improper, though legal, financial arrangement. Even the wider ‘gift economy’, uniting Labour MPs to an adoring public of rich benefactors, fades into insignificance next to the ordinary business of parliamentary lobbyists.
Next scandal
Lobbying is a very good issue for a leader of the opposition to bring up. David Cameron waxed solemn about it back in February 2010, when he commented that lobbying is “the next big scandal waiting to happen. It’s an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long - an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money.”
Cameron was maybe wrong after all. Lobbying has never quite exploded into the sort of scandal it should have done; and so the circus has continued. Instead of exploding into a great calamity, lobbying has just become the default condition of politics. It is like the old joke about two fish: the first asks the second, ‘How’s the water today?’ The second replies, ‘What the fuck is water?’
Cameron himself, of course, got wrapped up in a minor scandal, when Greensill Capital, a bank specialising in ‘supply chain financing’, collapsed in 2021; Lex Greensill, the bank’s owner, employed Cameron, who allegedly used his contacts in government to get Greensill business applying his financial voodoo in the public sector. Greensill had been an unpaid advisor to several government departments during Cameron’s years as prime minister (how very public-spirited!). Cameron survived well enough to get hurled into the Lords and to become foreign secretary last year. He joined a government which had shed people repeatedly over funnelling lucrative contracts to their mates, especially during the pandemic. And that is precisely it: people survive lobbying scandals. It is baffling that an MP can do more damage to their career by going on I’m a celebrity than by inviting one’s businessman mates to ‘advise’ the government.
The Tories tend to get away with this, perhaps because nobody expects any better. The old cliché is that it is sex scandals that topple Conservative governments, and financial scandals that do it for Labour. That is too glib by half, but Labour is in the end haunted by its remaining links with the wider workers’ movement. It is supposed to be the party of working people (or “hard-working families”, or whatever the branding is this week). Yet it, too, is rotted away with lobbyists.
An interesting recent piece in the London Review of Books by Peter Geoghegan, entitled ‘Labour and the lobbyists’,1 offers a quite thorough inventory of all the ways Labour is in hock to loyalists, and its own contributions to the comical lack of transparency and regulation around lobbying. There is, for starters, the enthusiasm with which business is tapped for ‘advice’ and services rendered. Geoghegan notes that
… in opposition, shadow ministers with minimal experience of governing worked alongside staff seconded from HSBC, NatWest, PricewaterhouseCoopers and a number of consultancy and advisory firms. In the days before the general election, senior Labour figures reportedly asked various companies - engineering firms, tech companies, management consultancies - to send more staff to help with policy work.
There is the revolving door - the way ministers, MPs and even staffers walk out of their politics jobs and straight into PR firms working on behalf of vast corporations. At the top end, we find people like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, who start their own ‘consulting’ firms with little obvious to recommend them except the useful connections of their founders.
The revolving door is a two-way thing, of course, and plenty of people filter into politics from having been corporate flunkies. There is the recent example of Rachel Kyte, who was given a climate job in the government. having come from a charitable front group for Quadrature Capital (an investment fund with ample fossil fuel investments, which donated £4 million to Labour). It was, let us say, unfortunate that this should have turned up at exactly the moment that the government decided it would be investing a huge amount of money in ‘carbon capture’ technology - that classic bit of diversionary vapourware which substitutes for serious action to reduce fossil fuel dependence.
A third strand of the lobbying picture is the blurring of the line between factional organisations and think tanks, on the one hand, and fundraising apparatuses, on the other. Geoghegan cites Labour Together, the counter-Corbynite headquarters founded by the likes of Luke Akehust nine years ago. In 2017, the group was taken over by a certain Morgan McSweeney. McSweeney used Labour Together to put together Starmer’s campaign for the leadership in 2019, and then jumped ship to work for him. At the same time, he obfuscated their finances:
At the outset, Labour Together was financed by anti-Corbyn Labour donors like the hedge fund manager, Martin Taylor, and the venture capitalist, Trevor Chinn, and donations were published on the Electoral Commission website. Then, on McSweeney’s watch, it stopped declaring them … The electoral authorities repeatedly advised McSweeney that, as a members’ association, Labour Together had to declare donations. But between December 2017 and late 2020 McSweeney registered just a single gift, of £12,500 from Chinn, and failed to report donations worth a total of £730,000. The electoral commission found in 2021 that he had breached election law, and Labour Together was fined £14,250 (the maximum fine the commission can levy is a paltry £20,000 per offence). The organisation dismissed it as an “administrative oversight”.
Since then, the group has become an important nexus between the Labour leadership and the donor class. It runs fringe events at Labour conferences with corporate ‘partners’. Much the same might have been said, in the Blair years, of David Sainsbury’s Progress outfit. None of this stuff is terribly new.
Purpose
For this, and other reasons, the tendency for people to view this as a matter of personal greed - or, at best, naivety about the ‘optics’ of too-cosy relations with the corporate lobby - is misleading. We are talking, instead, about the systematic suborning of political life by big capital. The system includes both the professionalisation of politics (the existence of intermediary organisations like lobbying firms and business-friendly ginger groups like Labour Together) and the woefully and laughably inadequate institutions that are supposed to prevent unseemly behaviour of this sort. Since the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments do not actually prevent what, in a just society, would amount to criminal bribery, they play another role: of punishing a few extra-bad apples and giving the veneer of respectability to the overall picture.
That may seem unfair to people who are, no doubt, consciously committed to the goal of keeping politics clean. Intentions can be finessed, however. The cybernetics pioneer, Stafford Beer, used to say that “the purpose of a system is what it does”. He was onto something: the intentions of individual actors are less illuminating than the overall behaviour of the whole structure.
State and capital
We Marxists are accustomed to using phrases like ‘bourgeois politics’ and ‘bourgeois politicians’, and perhaps we sometimes do so too crudely - as though being ‘bourgeois’ in this sense was merely a moral failing. In reality, bourgeois politics simply must, merely as a product of its role, be bribed. The details vary, but there simply must be ways for money to gain its required outcomes.
Capital requires a state to settle disputes between different capitals, to pursue the interests of national capital against other national capitals, and to manage class conflict, among other things. Capitalists, however, are divided, and so some means is required to subordinate different sections to each other. Even ignoring the existence of other classes in society then, there is a tendency for political contestation to map onto the pecking order in the wider economy - political forces emerge around divergences of interest, and the biggest wallet tends to win. The ideal form of capitalist politics actually exists - it is called the shareholder’s meeting. One share, one vote.
Once we introduce class struggle into the picture, however, things get more complicated. The popular masses demand a say in the running of things, but they have little or no cash to throw at the problem. The emergence of strictly working class politics poses a special problem, since workers’ interests are directly opposed to capitalist interests. As well as politically cohering capital, bourgeois politics must neutralise working class politics, and one means of doing so is incorporating workers’ parties into the wider backscratching network. It is hard to think of a more morbid case of this than Labour.
Therein lies the fatal flaw of left Labourism. Because it does not question the constitutional regime, it cannot in the end succeed in replacing the power of money with working class power. Even spectacular breakthroughs, like Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, leave the left hostage to the right, so long as they do not recognise the danger (which the Corbynites certainly did not). The history of the socialist movement has various mechanisms for counteracting the universal tendency towards corruption - subordination of elected representatives to party structures, imposition of a ‘maximum wage’, and means of recall.
There is no silver bullet, but we must fight the monster with what weapons we have.