WeeklyWorker

08.01.2026
Under capitalism a large majority is partially dependent on the family as an economic institution. ‘Neoliberalism’ and ‘austerity’ both increase that dependence

Old corruption revived

The latest right-populist smear tag is the ‘stakeholder state’, writes Mike Macnair. Fronted by Paul Ovenden, the Murdoch press rails against the bloated state apparatus and turns what is a half-truth into a big lie

T he Times on January 2 introduced us to a new far-right smear tag for liberals, to add to or replace ‘Remoaners’, ‘the Blob’, and ‘elites’ that somehow do not include the ultra-rich and their representatives. The new one is the “stakeholder state”.1

The project of The Times in promoting this idea as a smear-tag is multi-faceted. It is firstly to promote the press barons’ own monopoly of political voice and the rights of commercial lobbyists, as opposed to others. Secondly and ideologically, it is to promote shareholder/creditor sovereignty in corporations, as opposed to the conception that a broader group of ‘stakeholders’ has legitimate interests to be considered in decision-making. More conjuncturally, for The Times to big up this proposal from Paul Ovenden is to offer assistance to the political rehabilitation of Ovenden after he lost his job as an adviser to Keir Starmer in September 2025, when his 2017 rugby-song-style2 ‘jokes’ about Diane Abbott became the object of press attention.3

This last is the least important aspect of the story, but still worth mentioning. Ovenden was as a student (History and English, Southampton), a sports journo, and in 2014-17 worked as a press officer for the Labour Party. In this capacity he was a party to chats on Labour’s messaging system that displayed the worst features of student-political culture and - the Diane Abbott ‘jokes’ - gross sexism.4

In 2017-20 he moved into the private lobbying industry, working at least in 2019-20 at InHouse Communications, which lobbied/provided PR services for a range of clients, including various booze firms, Barclays and Lloyds Bank, the ‘Love to Rent’ rental agency and the Independent Schools Council.5 He was rehired by Labour as director of communications in June 2020, becoming a spad for Starmer as prime minister in July 2024, and quietly promoted to ‘director of strategy’ in January 2025.6

Sexism remains a theme in Ovenden’s Times piece on the ‘stakeholder state’, where he complains that the state “has got bigger and bigger, while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself” (emphasis added). Why should state ineffectiveness be linked to lack of masculinity?

Routine sexism in the transmission culture between student sports, journos and lobby hacks would, of course, be a reason for the Murdoch press to seek to rehabilitate Ovenden. Routine workplace-culture sexism has, after all, been one of Rupert Murdoch’s populist selling points ever since he told the new editor of his recently acquired Sun newspaper in 1969 that “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it”.7 Rehabilitating Ovenden is, then, not about forgiveness for youthful indiscretions,8 but about presently promoting male-supremacist workplace and political culture.

The plausibility of this rehabilitation is part of the general political project of right-populism: to bring lower and middle class support in behind big capital on the basis of common values of nation, tradition and patriarchy - expressed at every level from grand-scale promotion of traditional religion, through witch-hunting trans people, down to the lowest grade of promoting what, in the case of the police, gets called ‘canteen culture’.

I have argued before, but it is still worth repeating, that under capitalism a large majority is partially dependent on the family as an economic institution; and ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘austerity’ both increase this dependence, as well as on religious charities (not only in the form of poverty relief, but also religious schools). The result is inevitably mass attachment to the family. Hence leftwing purity-politics no-platforming people who hold illusions in familial politics simply fails to achieve its objective, and in fact strengthens the patriarchalist-conservative right.9 It is the left’s ‘people’s frontist’ alliance with ‘democratic capital’ in the form of the human resources departments, and so on, which have given mass appeal to the actual political promotion of male-supremacist politics as a form of right-populism by the Murdoch press along with the Trumpites (among others).

Shareholders

The question posed by the substance of Ovenden’s argument, and The Times’s decision to promote it, is what on earth is meant by “the stakeholder state”? Ovenden’s account is deeply imprecise and unclear about why the word ‘stakeholder’ should be used at all:

The Stakeholder State [original capitals] is not one single phenomenon. It is the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore. In this state, the government rows with muffled oars to appease a coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and organisations. It isn’t a grand conspiracy. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger, while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere: in the democratic powers handed to arms-length bodies or the many small government departments too powerless or captured to resist lobbying. The Stakeholder State ferments between the NGO and the campaign group, the celebrity letter-writing campaign and the activist lawyer. It is given voice by political podcasts, where everyone agrees, and canonised via a corrupted honours system.

If it were not for the use of the word “stakeholder”, and the spin expressed by “morbid symptom” and “emasculating”, this would just be a description of normal bourgeois politics of the sort one can find in ‘Politics 101’ textbooks. In this respect it would be a half-truth (a point to which we will return).

“Stakeholder” is also spin, but of an indirect character. Where it comes from is developments in academic views on the law relating to the duties of directors of corporations (in English law companies). Traditional law took it that the directors owe ‘fiduciary duties’ to the “stockholders” (in English law the shareholders): that is, to place the shareholders’ interests first.10 The ‘stakeholder’ idea was that the directors should take account of the interests of ‘stakeholders’ - “those groups who have a stake in the actions of the corporation” - or, in an older, but narrower version from 1963, “those groups without whose support the organisation would cease to exist”.11

In the 1970s-80s the theory of duties to a broader conception of “stakeholders”, including creditors, employees and so on, became quite fashionable;12 to the point that in the UK a pretence of duties towards employees was introduced by the Companies Act 1980, section 46, and included in the Companies Act 1985, section 309. It was extended to other ‘stakeholders’ in the Companies Act 2006, section 172, calling on directors to consider:

(a) the likely consequences of any decision in the long term;

(b) the interests of the company’s employees;

(c) the need to foster the company's business relationships with suppliers, customers and others;

(d) the impact of the company's operations on the community and the environment;

(e) the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct; and

(f) the need to act fairly as between members of the company.

The effect of this extension is dilution. But the duty to employees was always a pretence, because it was owed to the company (which is controlled by the directors and shareholders) and the section 172 duty lists the stakeholders below the primary duty to “promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members [shareholders] as a whole”.13

The alternative to ‘stakeholder’ theory in corporate/company law is ‘shareholder primacy’: that is, that directors/management decisions should be exclusively focused on profits for the benefit of the shareholders.14 This is the actual underlying idea of UK company law.

When, therefore, Ovenden and The Times talk negatively of the “stakeholder state”, what they impliedly counterpose to it is the shareholder primacy state. It is not totally unreasonable to say that company directors should put profits first and not have regard to the interests of workers, creditors and so on. After all, the point of most companies is to make a profit; and if their decisions with a view to profit create ‘negative externalities’ (bad results for other people or the public generally), the law and the state should be able to set limits on companies’ conduct.

I italicise ‘should’ here because, in reality, the routine sale and denial of justice through the ‘free market in legal services’, together with commercial lobbying for deregulation, and so on … But to argue for a ‘shareholder primacy state’ (against a ‘stakeholder state’) is to argue for closing off all the avenues for anything other than corporate/commercial interests to be considered in politics; that is, to make the state completely and not merely predominantly corrupt.

What Ovenden counts as ‘stakeholders’ should in principle include commercial lobbyists, and the legal representatives of business. In which case, of course, he should include himself as a former lobbyist (and quite likely a lobbyist again, after his ejection from government last September). But his list - “campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and organisations” pointedly does not include commercial lobbyists - or the advertising-funded press.

Monopoly

The Times editorial too is not directed against commercial lobbyists, legal representations on behalf of business or the advertising-funded press (itself). Rather, the problem is claimed to be “an administrative class that stretches from deep within Whitehall into various charities and pressure groups … going against the will of the country” and “a backroom bureaucracy using its power to nudge ministers and hapless civil servants towards whatever outcome seems to suit the zeitgeist”.

The example we are given by Ovenden is the case of Alaa abd el-Fattah, who is currently the object of a Tory press and Zionist campaign for the revocation of his citizenship. (He was accepted to be a British citizen, on the basis of his mother’s British birth, while in arbitrary detention in Egypt.)

What is missing is that the campaign around el-Fattah was a matter of British diplomatic policy on ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. It is, of course, true that there was always a contradiction between this policy and US and British support for the regime of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Egypt. There is also a contradiction between US and British support for the state of Israel, which has been waging aggressive war since the beginning of settlement activity in the occupied territories, has engaged in assassination, collective punishment and so on, and British and US commitments to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal after World War II, to article 2 of the UN Charter, and to the International Declaration of Human Rights and European Convention of Human Rights. This contradiction is now being resolved in favour of US repudiation of the post-1945 global settlement, and a return to open colonialism, gunboat diplomacy and ‘might is right’. Before 2025 the contradiction was held.

What Ovenden and The Times are seeking is that that UK should join the Trump administration in openly repudiating the post-war settlement. The “stakeholders” or “backroom bureaucracy” are being blamed for failing to accept Trumpism quickly enough.

In making this demand, The Times - using Ovenden as a convenient instrument - is seeking a monopoly of political speech for the advertising-funded media, commercial and US or undisclosed-funded lobbyists and think tanks (like ‘Policy Exchange’).15 It is only those outside this charmed circle whose interventions are to be taken as illegitimate.

In this, The Times pursues the same policy that the Murdoch press has pursued in its decades-long campaign against the BBC and against public-service broadcasting more generally.16 It is not that the BBC is actually biased to the left: it is merely not sufficiently biased to conservatism. The object is, again, to secure a monopoly for commercial control of political speech; as I put it above, to make the state completely and not merely predominantly corrupt.

Fraud

Back in 2010, commenting on the then general election campaign, I made the point that

All capitalist elections have to be largely governed by fraud: who would vote for the Bankers Atlanticist New Labour Party, Bankers Atlanticist Conservative Party or Bankers Atlanticist Liberal Democratic Party, if given their right names? Even before universal suffrage, who would have voted for the Landlords and Bankers Imperialist Whig (Liberal) Party or the Landlords and Bankers Imperialist Tory (Conservative) Party? The capitalist class is a small minority in society, and it can only rule in elections by winning support from the lower orders for parties which it controls through machineries of corruption.

A large part of the con man’s trick is to reduce the information available to the mark. The primary fraudulent misrepresentations are expected to crowd out other information, less attractively presented, which might conflict with them; but also pressure is put on to ‘close the deal’ before the mark has had an opportunity to rethink.

Electoral fraud works in the same way. The primary fraudulent misrepresentations are broadcast by paid advertising and the state and advertising-funded media, crowding out other messages (indeed, the phenomena of junk mail, billboard advertising and flyposting for clubs and gigs themselves work to drown out all forms of political communication not backed by advertising agencies or the mass media). The role of the advertising-funded mass media is, in fact, central to corruption and sleaze, because the only way (within the rules of the game) that politicians can hope to counter the biases of the mass media and behind them the advertisers, is to buy commercial advertising, which demands donations from the rich, which in turn demands the policy pay-off to the donors.

Meanwhile, elections happen once every five years, and the campaign is short. The message from both the media and the main parties is that the job of elections is to choose a government. So don’t waste your vote - or your thinking time - on fringe parties. Close the deal! Political action in local government elections and the internal life of parties, which can provide some degree of political life outside the ‘government election season’, is as far as possible closed down: by FPTP, which results in big-party control of councils and ‘rotten boroughs’; by the enormous expansion of judicial review (why fight for council policies, when the lawyers will tell you what to do anyhow?); and, in the Labour Party, by bureaucratic intervention from the central apparatus, backed up if necessary by the trade union bureaucracy. Only in general elections are the voters to be allowed to make ‘real choices’. Close the deal! Close the deal now!17

It is in this context that there is a half-truth in Ovenden’s argument. This half-truth is that it is a reality that there has been a “gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore”. What is false and misleading is the absence in Ovenden’s narrative of a series of institutional steps taken to reduce the power of voters for the benefit of business corporations and the wealthy.

The existence of ‘stakeholderism’ reflects the fact that by expanding judicial review of local government, by anti-union legislation, by media and legal interventions in the Labour Party and so on, the capitalist class, its political representatives both in the Tory and Lib Dem parties and within Labour (like Ovenden) and through the media and the judiciary, have closed off the avenues that used to exist for voter influence - leaving behind only the possibilities of “campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and organisations” that Ovenden deplores.

To overcome this problem what is needed is an independent workers’ political voice, capable of combatting the long-running, persistent campaigns of the Murdoch, Harmsworth, etc, press. The left today is failing even to try to do this job, because it is dominated by people who imagine that sufficiently clever ‘media management’ - or the atomised interventions of individuals on ‘social media’, blogs and so on - can do it.

The Times’s Ovenden story is yet another sign that it is essential to begin to overcome this problem.

  1. P Ovenden ‘Fattah has shone a light on the supremacy of the stakeholder state’ (Leader ‘Stakeholder state’, p23).↩︎

  2. For rugby songs style see rugby-songs.co.uk/rugbysonglyrics.↩︎

  3. ‘Senior Starmer adviser quits over offensive Diane Abbott messages’ The Guardian September 15 2025; see also x.com/ShehabKhan/status/1967590269446193396/photo/1.↩︎

  4. Student sports journo: Wessex Scene March 24 2008. Press officer and chats: P Holden The fraud London 2025, pp222-27 has more of the context than the x posting.↩︎

  5. Public Affairs Board Register for December 1 2019 to February 28 2020: www.prca.global/system/files/paragraphs/cw_file/2025-05/PAB-Register-1-December-2019-28-February20201-1-1.pdf.↩︎

  6. “Quietly” because googling the appointment only produces material produced at the time of his resignation.↩︎

  7. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch.↩︎

  8. See, for example, S Tsantsekidou ‘In defence of Paul Ovenden’: unherd.com/newsroom/in-defence-of-paul-ovenden (September 17 2025).↩︎

  9. ‘Communism and trans liberation’ Weekly Worker November 17 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1561/communism-and-trans-liberation.↩︎

  10. The technical position in English law is that the directors’ fiduciary duties were owed to the company itself, not the shareholders, with the shareholders having merely the right to appoint and dismiss the directors. The effect is practically the same.↩︎

  11. RE Freeman and DL Reed, ‘Stockholders and stakeholders: a new perspective on corporate governance’ California Management Review Vol 25 pp88-106 (1983).↩︎

  12. The development down to that date was discussed by Freeman and Reed (see note 11).↩︎

  13. For a recent discussion, see C Villiers, ‘Bridging the gap between labour law and company law: Wedderburn’s legacy: an appreciation’ Industrial Law Journal Vol 54 (2025), pp278-323.↩︎

  14. A convenient short discussion is on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy; this, however, understates the relative weight of shareholder primacy arguments in law. See, for example, RJ Rhee Minnesota Law Review Vol 102 (2018), pp1951-2017 for US law; D Collison et al, Shareholder primacy in UK corporate law: strathprints.strath.ac.uk/32336/1/Shareholder_Primacy_in_UK_Corporate_Law.doc.↩︎

  15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Exchange.↩︎

  16. Googling “Murdoch press campaigns against BBC” produces 388,000 hits …↩︎

  17. ‘From an instrument of deception’ Weekly Worker April 28 2010: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/815/from-an-instrument-of-deception; there is further argument in ‘Sleaze is back’, July 20 2006: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/634/sleaze-is-back.↩︎