18.09.2025

Endless embarrassments

Angela Rayner, Peter Mandelson and Boris Johnson are not isolated cases. We live under a regime of institutional corruption. Mike Macnair looks for the roots of successive scandals

In the last fortnight, Sir Keir Starmer has had the misfortune to lose both his deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, and the British ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, to scandals. The scandals are very different. Rayner mistakenly believed that a tax dodge to avoid stamp duty land tax would work, when it did not. The context of a politician who has trumpeted her working class background and promoting class interests buying a second home in Hove, while resident in a grace-and-favour apartment in London, was what made this story her political death. It relates to the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal;¹ and The Times for September 16 has taken the Rayner story as the starting point to revive this, digging up a number of Labour ministers who have claimed as expenses the additional council tax on second homes.²

Mandelson turned out to have carried on (warmly) corresponding with and backing Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. It used to be said that the Tories suffered from sex scandals and Labour from money scandals, but in recent years both have had both, and Mandelson’s fall due to links to Epstein is, in effect, an indirect sex scandal. Another is the resignation of Starmer’s ‘director of strategy’, Paul Ovenden, over schoolboy-ish abusive sex jokes about Diane Abbott, while working as a Labour press officer in 2017.³

It is a fair guess - no more - that what lies immediately behind these stories is that someone in the ‘Blairite’ faction of the Labour Party briefed sections of the Tory press about Rayner’s second-home purchase in order to discredit her; and that someone in the party outside the ‘Blairites’ took revenge by pointing the Tory press at Mandelson’s continued friendship with Epstein after 2008 and at Ovenden’s 2017 messages (part of a stash leaked five years ago).

Dominic O’Connell in The Times’s business pages for September 13 took the occasion of Mandelson’s fall to quote an October 2010 email from Mandelson to Jes Staley - at the time head of JP Morgan’s investment banking division - which Staley forwarded to Epstein and which was later disclosed in litigation about Epstein’s operations between the British Virgin Islands government, JP Morgan and Staley.⁴ It is worth quoting again here: “In Congo-Brazzaville last week, I talked at length with president Sassou-Nguesso, including about the [Zanaga iron] mine. The government is reaching a final decision on whether to issue a full mining licence … no obligation, but if there is someone in JP Morgan who might want to talk to me privately about this, please shout …”⁵

The Mandelson-Staley emails forwarded to Epstein illustrate a shadowy world of ‘fixers’ operating through friendship networks in the borderlands of business (especially the financial sector) and government.⁶ This is closer to the core of the problem.

Scandals arising out of this sort of stuff have been repeated. The Gordon Brown government had to suspend several ex-ministers from the Parliamentary Labour Party for lobbying activities.⁷ The Con-Dem coalition of 2010-15 was slightly less affected.⁸ But the Johnson administration (2019-22) was full of them. Rishi Sunak’s government was affected too.⁹

Part of the problem is that no British government can actually ‘deliver’. The underlying reality is that the UK as a ‘firm’ in the world market has been losing money since the Thatcher years. In part, the scale of losses in the productive economy is covered by the scale of exports of financial and managerial services; but there is still a deficit, which is covered by selling assets to foreign (mainly US) capital, and by borrowing, on the basis that the UK is a low-regulation and low-tax regime, and the home of the ‘London laundromat’ for dirty money. Large parts of the productive economy depend on subsidies from the financial sector.¹⁰ Meanwhile, the young commonly do not vote due to cynicism about politics; the elderly do vote, and subsidies to home-owners through non-revaluation for council tax, to pensioners, and so on, are politically untouchable. The result is that political parties constantly make promises they cannot deliver.

Institutional

More generally, however, we live under a regime of institutional corruption. It is the continuity of the ‘old corruption’ targeted by the radicals of the late 18th and early 19th century, and of the ‘moneyed interest’, which concerned both the Tories and “country Whigs” on the right and ‘Old Cause’ Commonwealthmen or republicans on the left, in the early 18th century.

The scandals do not result from the moral failings of individual politicians: they are an institutional feature of the British constitution, created by the revolution of 1688 and what followed. When we look beyond Britain’s borders, we can see that political issues about corruption and sleaze of this type are common to capitalist governments everywhere.

I emphasise of this type because the feudal middle ages had its own forms of scandalous political corruption, but these were about permanent patron-client chains (‘bastard feudalism’ and ‘nepotism’), not the scandals about alleged corrupt bargains, which we find in capitalist politics. The bureaucratic so-called socialist regimes were medieval in this respect.

Why do they do it? This inevitably has two sides. There have to be people who are willing to pay big money for disproportionate influence over politicians’ decisions. And there have to be politicians who are willing to accept big money, even though they know that this will involve giving ‘favourable treatment’ to the donors.

Businesses and rich individuals pay for political favours. They do not necessarily expect an immediate pay-off - if they did, the payment would be corrupt within the existing law. But they do expect favourable consideration, when issues come up in the future which will affect them.

Why they do it is, in fact, obvious. The idea that a corporation has no conscience is an old one, dating back to lord chancellor Sir Thomas Egerton and chief justice Sir Edward Coke in the early 17th century. The directors are expected, and required by law, to subordinate other moral considerations to maximising the company’s profits. If they can reasonably expect that making payments to politicians will lead to benefits, they will make those payments.

Market politics

Rich individuals expect to be able to pay for benefits for themselves. That is the point of getting rich. They also tend to think that their wealth reflects their superior ability and moral strength rather than (as is usually the case) luck. A consequence is that from their point of view they should get more consideration from government than the undeserving poor: after all, they pay more taxes, and their superior abilities mean that they should run the country. Bribing politicians is from this point of view merely ‘correcting’ the ‘unfortunate mistake’ of universal suffrage.

If you believe in the free market, why not have a free market in political and state services? Then we could all pay for what we can afford: a driver could slip a tenner to a policeman to avoid prosecution for speeding; a local drug-dealer could pay off a chief superintendent to keep his business under the radar; businesses and developers could pay off local councillors for help with planning matters; and the big donors to Labour and the Tories could openly pay for whatever it is they pay for.

Britain functioned to a considerable extent in this way in the 18th century, as did the US well into this century, and some ‘third world’ countries do so to this day. In essence, a free-marketeer might say: ‘What we have done with anti-corruption legislation from the 19th century on is to distort the market by imposing entry barriers’, so that only big corporations and the very rich can pay, and only senior politicians (through their control of ‘their’ parties) can be paid.

Capitalism as such is not a zero-sum game. In boom periods it is a positive-sum game: total social wealth increases, and enough of it ‘trickles down’ to sufficient members of the lower orders that there is mass political consent to capitalism. This is the basis of free-market ideology in both its systematic and its common-sense forms. In slump periods capitalism is a negative-sum game: total social wealth decreases, and with it political consent to capitalism. But, as long as people keep clinging to boom-period politics (Labourites, etc) or look to nostalgia politics as an alternative (political Islamists, Christian revivalists, nationalists, Reform UK, etc), capitalism can hang on until the next boom.

Paying for favours from the state, however, is a zero-sum game and everyone understands that it is. The driver who this week pays off a copper to avoid prosecution for speeding next week runs down a child on a zebra crossing. The drug dealer who pays off the cops is matched by his competitors, who suffer either prosecution or personal violence to drive them out of the business. If councillors are ‘influenced’ to compulsory-purchase land for the benefit of developers, the right of property itself is undermined (many US commentators argue that the 2005 US Supreme Court decision in Kelo v New London does just this). How can anyone be sure the local councillors, or in extreme cases the judges, will stay paid? For every individual firm which gets a contract through ‘favourable consideration’ after party donations, there is another firm which did not get the contract.

Corruption and sleaze is therefore both necessarily endemic in the capitalist political order and necessarily politically illegitimate. It is endemic because it grows out of capitalism itself. It is illegitimate because, if it becomes perfectly generalised, each property owner will no longer be able to rely on the state to protect their property. They will have to employ their own goons and develop their own permanent patronage networks - a return to feudalism.

Payees

In the imperialist countries, the role of small-scale corruption has been much reduced since the 19th century. The key to this reduction has been the proletarianisation of state officials. They are paid a living wage (in the case of senior officials a very generous salary) and are expected to be content with it, and not to seek to elevate themselves into the ranks of the capitalists by bribe-taking. The state is distanced from business - imperfectly - by rules like those controlling movement to and fro between business and the civil service (it is striking that both Tony Blair and David Cameron weakened these rules). Any future reduction of corruption will necessarily involve the same method: to extend the proletariat - those who live on a wage - at the expense of private business and ‘contracting out’.

The politicians who take party donations from business and the rich present a somewhat different problem. This is because they are not, or only to a limited extent, in it for personal gain.

In order to understand this we need to abstract from the mechanisms of capitalist control of politics those which do not work through the electoral system - the judicial power, the monarchy’s relationship to the police and armed forces, and the ultimate veto power of the USA - in order to focus on those that do: the cost of election campaigns, capitalist control of media outlets, and the patronage powers of central executive government. In this framework it will be possible to see how Labour politicians have come to think that relationships to business and the rich are essential to winning office and thereby achieving even slight advantages for their constituents.

Labour is a good example, because the Tories and Liberals both have back in their early history explicit opposition to corruption. Moreover, nobody ever stands for election on the platform that politicians ought to be bought, or that their own party is the party of City yuppies and fat-cat company directors: there are no votes in it. Capitalist parties - ie, ones dominated by capitalist funding - always start as something else: big business has little interest in funding marginal parties, except for temporary tactical advantage (as in the case of the Social Democratic Party of the 1980s).

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that in order to reduce corruption, legislation made major cuts in the parties’ national spending on election campaigns. Labour politicians in the early 2000s resisted such proposals. Why? The whole debate was conducted on the assumption that spending money on advertising - giving visibility and coverage - can make a difference to election campaigns. This is not entirely clear where the difference in spending is marginal - say, between Labour and Tories - but it is pretty clearly true where the differences are on a large scale. The Social Democratic Party of the 1980s, the Lib Dems in 2010, and Ukip, the Brexit party and Reform UK more recently, showed that lots of media exposure can produce dramatic results in election performance.

Now suppose the national advertising spending of both parties was dramatically curtailed. The national media exposure of the two parties would then depend wholly on the extent to which the media was willing to give them exposure. And here there is a dramatic difference. Murdoch controls the Times and Sun. The Telegraph is a traditionally Tory paper, as are the Mail and Express, and most of the locals. The Mirror has traditionally been Labour, but that was at least partly an artefact of Robert Maxwell’s relationship with the party and cannot now be taken for granted. Both the Independent and the Guardian are by instinct Liberal Democrat papers, though they will, in the absence of the Lib Dems breaking through to be the main alternative to the Tories, support a sufficiently rightwing Labour leadership.

It used to be claimed that this difference reflected the ‘natural Tory majority’: ie, that the Tory press predominated because of popular demand. Since the later 1980s this has been plainly untrue. The Tory press predominates because of advertising revenue and subsidies to papers by their owners from other, more profitable businesses: and because owners prefer their papers to be Tory (or, now, Reform) or at least not to be clearly committed to Labour. The Tories (and now Reform) thus get large amounts of free advertising from their press.

In this situation it is entirely understandable that the Labour leadership wanted to be free to raise and spend very large sums on advertising. But these very large sums inevitably have to come from rich individuals and from corporations. Even if the unions were prepared to cough up on a much larger scale than they have recently, their resources are relatively weaker than they were before Thatcherism: union membership is down, especially in the better-paid sectors in private industry; conversely, the Thatcher governments’ tax and regulatory ‘reforms’ and the effects of financial globalisation have shifted much more liquid wealth, available for spending on donations, into the hands of corporations and wealthy individuals.

Again, there is nothing inherently new about this. Before universal suffrage and before the anti-corruption reforms of the mid-19th century, it was necessary when standing for election to offer direct bribes, ‘entertainments’, etc to the electors. The result was that the parliament was very roughly a ‘shareholders’ meeting’, with the very rich directly present in the House of Lords, and others represented in the Commons in proportion to their wealth - reflected in their ability to bribe electors. What has changed is the concentration of capital and the mediation of the process through the advertising industry and capitalist-owned mass media.

Before the flood

Labour has been a pro-capitalist party - by way of its loyalty to the British constitution and the national interest - since it was founded. But its full embrace of business and the rich as funders, and therefore cronyism stories and those like the Mandelson case, was new under Blair. Yet the capitalist domination of the press is a long-standing feature of British politics, and Labour nonetheless managed to win elections. How?

The answer is that the Labour Party had - and to a very limited extent still has - means of communicating with the broad mass of the working class which are not dependent on the capitalist-dominated media.

The first of these means is the trade unions. As I say, they have been massively weakened since 1979, and a significant part of this is things that they did to themselves, or rather that the Labour and union leaderships did to them, under the 1974-79 Labour government. The acceptance of the regime of industrial tribunals weakened the immediate link between union membership, shop stewards and employer disciplinary action, and thereby weakened the stewards’ - and hence the unions’ - ability to deliver immediate resistance to speed-up, unsafe working, etc. The systems of deduction of union dues from wages or payment by bank standing order similarly weakened the relation between the local organisations and their members; they also rendered the unions effectively incapable of maintaining illegal action. Thatcherism and financial globalisation merely accelerated the processes by reducing the workforce employed in the traditional industrial and geographical bastions of the trade union movement.

But before the changes of 1974‑79, the base of trade unions was not their legality, but the immediate relationships between member, shop steward and branch, branch and region, and so on. These relations were a means by which the case for voting Labour could be passed on in spite of The Sun and all the rest.

The second means is the Labour presence in local government and - going along with it - the ward organisations of the party, the loosely associated trades and Labour clubs, and their connection, through the general committees, with the local trade union movement. In the high period of the growth of the party, Labour inherited the proud civic traditions of the old Liberals. The councillors could deliver real improvements to their constituents within the framework of capitalist legality. All this has changed as a result of a combination of actions by the state and the party leadership: the public spending controls of the 1970s; increasingly aggressive judicial review from the same period, reviving a tradition the Poplar councillors had faced in the 1920s; imposing central, legally regulated duties on local government, giving central government control of an increasing share of local government budgets; and, finally, the assaults of the Tories in the 1980s.

These changes have driven local authorities towards distance from their constituents and towards corrupt relations with property developers (etc), reducing the councillors’ ability to speak to the masses. But they also made it increasingly difficult for local authorities to do anything at all without central government support; and the Thatcher and Major administrations dishonestly manipulated the system of central financial support to tighten the squeeze. By the early 1990s, the Labour councillors and local party branches behind them were utterly desperate for a friendly government, and willing to give up anything to get it. In 1997 they got a ‘friendly’ government - but Blairism turned out to be a continuation of Thatcher’s squeeze on local government, merely redirecting a bit of the financial support towards Labour councils.

Meanwhile, the Labour leadership has increasingly sought to impose its will on the local organisations and deprive them of the voice they had - even if it was only a voice - in the national conference. And it has materially weakened them by moving to a national membership system and payment of dues by standing order. With each step it has weakened the ability of the Labour Party to address workers outside of and against the capitalist-dominated media.

Of course, the Tories also had their local councillors, their constituency associations and their network of clubs, etc. But they were willing to sacrifice all this under Thatcher in the hope of getting rid of the Labour Party or at least bringing it fully under corrupt central control. The sacrifice was real: Thatcher’s local government reforms and the accompanying offensive of the barristers had the effect of breaking the mechanisms which drew new activists at the base into Tory politics, and the Tory councillors’ links with their constituent voters, so that the defeat in 1997 left the party immensely weakened (today the threat of Reform UK reflects the same process). But the Tories calculated it was worth it: after all, they owned the press. By 1994 it was clear that this could not save them from defeat in the next election, and the media swung behind Blair to secure Thatcher’s legacy.

Unintended

No-one set out to create an endless succession of corruption and cronyism scandals. What they set out to create is “improved British competitiveness”: to give more power back to management, and to redistribute wealth, so as to make the rich work harder by paying them more and make the poor work harder by paying them less. This required a struggle against political democracy, in which the partial democracy of the Tory Party was sacrificed to the need to destroy the partial democracy of the Labour Party and the trade unions. It is the consequence of this struggle that we now have more obvious corruption and cronyism, and a cynical electorate decreasingly willing to vote.

At the centre of the problem of corruption in countries with universal suffrage is capitalist control of the major means of political communication - the mass media. This control is opposed to political democracy. It would be obvious if what was going on was paying the House speaker for the right to speak (or to be the first or last person called in debate) in the Commons, that this was anti-democratic. It would be equally obvious if at a union conference the employers set up a rival public-address system to drown out the speakers. Capitalist control of the media has the same effect on a larger scale. The significance of scandals is that they bring this fact sharply to the surface.

It may be said that this is not new. It formed part of the argument of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders in 1918-20 for the suppression of the capitalist, Menshevik, etc press and the nationalisation of the presses, etc, placing the means of political communication in the hand of the state. For example, the Thesis and report on bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat for the First Congress of the Comintern (1919), which stated:

8. ‘Freedom of the press’ is another of the principal slogans of ‘pure democracy’. And here, too, the workers know - and socialists everywhere have explained millions of times - that this freedom is a deception, because the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and, while capitalist rule over the press remains - a rule that is manifested throughout the whole world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically - the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America, for example …

Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing presses and public stocks of paper.¹¹

What is wrong with this policy should be apparent from what followed. Without freedom of information and communication, the state created by the working class frees itself from the working class and becomes, first, the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship, and in the end a capitalist political regime (Putin’s Russia, etc).

What to do?

Our Draft programme contains no proposals on the problem, though it is one which was discussed widely in the Labour Party in the 1970s and 80s. These Labour left discussions generally pointed towards the sort of nationalist regulatory regimes of control of media ownership found in some continental countries. It should be clear enough that this leads only to a form of censorship and does not affect the underlying capitalist control of the press.

The democratic-republican solution to the problem of capitalist ownership is not media nationalisation. It is to eliminate capitalist subsidies to news media, both directly and in the form of commercial advertising. If the media was forced to rely on sales and subscriptions for the whole of its income, it might well be the case that there was still a mass market for the Tory media even after the working class had taken power in the form of a democratic republic and the accompanying destruction of the deeper structures of the capitalists’ political power. There would certainly be a niche market for it. But this would not in itself be a form of capitalist political power, since it would not be power created by the ownership of the means of production.

There is, of course, no immediate practical chance of obtaining legislation against cross-subsidy and advertising in news media. But what certainly is possible, because it has been done before, is for the workers’ movement to break the capitalist monopoly of the means of information. To do so does not mean in the first place setting up a competing commercial national daily run by the Labour or trade union bureaucracy or their nominees: this has been tried before and the result is utterly boring. The core of the answer is to revive democratic face-to-face and door-to-door politics at the base: the original basis of the workers’ movement and a practice still successfully exploited by the Lib Dems and the Greens.

But to do this requires breaking with the control of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in local party politics and in the unions themselves. And it requires abandoning the illusion that it is possible to get a democratic and pro-worker government through playing the game dictated by the capitalist-controlled media. More than anything else, it requires the struggle for a workers’ party which is able to openly identify the capitalist character of the media and the extent to which this corrupts political life in general.

That in turn implies, in present conditions, a party which is willing to be anti-constitutional and to stand openly for the working class to take political power. In other words, a Communist Party.

1. See, for example, J Turley ‘Scams, yoghurts and loopholes’ Weekly Worker May 13 2009 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/769/scams-yoghurts-and-loopholes); M Macnair ‘Against rightist populism’ June 3 2009 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/772/against-rightist-populism); E Ford ‘Crocodile tears over salary recommendation’ July 18 2013 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/971/crocodile-tears-over-salary-recommendation); P Demarty ‘Rightwing press rocks the boat’ April 10 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1005/rightwing-press-rocks-the-boat).↩︎

2. ‘Ministers claim back double council tax’.↩︎

3. ‘Senior Starmer aide quits over lurid Diane Abbott comments’ The Times September 16.↩︎

4. On the Staley-Epstein relationship see www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/26/high-flyer-to-pariah-saga-jeffrey-epstein-banker-jes-staley.↩︎

5. ‘Mandelson’s downfall highlights a troubling trend among the elite’.↩︎

6. Wikipedia’s article on Mandelson has more in this vein: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mandelson.↩︎

7. J Moody ‘Whoring for business’ Weekly Worker March 25 2010 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/810/whoring-for-business).↩︎

8. Eg, E Ford ‘Establishment hypocrisy and Miss Whiplash’ Weekly Worker August 6 2015 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1070/establishment-hypocrisy-and-miss-whiplash).↩︎

9. Eg, E Ford ‘Deserting the ship’ Weekly Worker October 26 2023 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1464/deserting-the-ship).↩︎

10. M Macnair ‘Class composition in a snapshot’ (part 2) Weekly Worker August 28 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot). On the “London laundromat’ phrase see, for instance, www.transparency.org.uk/news/trust-issues-tackling-final-frontier-secret-property-ownership (May 2025).↩︎

11. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/comintern.htm.↩︎