Time to put New Labour on Trial
Truth and Reconciliation is Needed
Now that Peter Mandelson’s crimes have become undeniable the British right-wing press (with the noble and notable exception of Guido Fawkes) are kicking into their ‘Operation London Bridge’ Jimmy Savile revelations mode. We will be told by hundreds of hacks that they ‘always knew’ about Mandelson (why didn’t you write about him, then?) Fiat 500 rent-a-grinch women will watch spooky true crime docs about Mandelson and pretend they never liked him when, in fact, they didn’t know who he was. Mandelson will have his royal palace taken away like Prince Andrew and then get pardoned by an ‘impressive’ judge who will never be named or criticised in any of the papers.
The reality is, everyone over the mental age of 12 knew, the moment it was confirmed Mandelson retained contact with Epstein in 2011, that he was a culprit. It is not the job of Prime Ministers, intelligence agencies and journalists to let judges do their thinking for them, it is their job to exercise something called ‘discretion’ or ‘Intelligence’ where you reason likely conclusions from available evidence. One use of ‘intelligence’ would be to deduce appointing a man with an existing misconduct record, who is now known to be friends with a foreign spy to a sensitive diplomatic role is a bad idea. Barely a single Westminster journalist even thought it merited comment. That would make one a “crank.” Let’s talk about headphones on the tube.
Of course, many of you will be genuinely angry about Mandelson’s crimes. But you know, deep down, you have no way of avenging yourself upon him. Last year, many people were talking about a grooming gang inquiry. It did not take a tripos mind to see the problem. The issue of the grooming gangs inculpated so many people, and required scrutinising so many different aspects of law, that to really stage an ‘inquiry’ it would mean putting the entire British government on trial. And to do that, you need a new government first. Not just a new name you put a tick next to at the election. New judges. New civil servants. New police inspectors. Similarly, with Mandelson, you think about the issue for more than five minutes and it becomes apparent multiple layers of the state must’ve consciously abetted his behaviour. Gordon Brown could have known Mandelson knew Epstein in 2008 and he would’ve certainly known about his past record of sleaze.
SIS would’ve almost certainly been informed by foreign intelligence services about Mandelson’s behaviour in 2024 at the absolute latest when he was vetted for the diplomatic role. Indeed, one of the most disappointing things about the media coverage thusfar is how nobody is holding SIS responsible. Preventing an easily compromised individual with a track record of corruption from getting access to official documents and selling them to a foreign intelligence agent is minimal baseline competence for a public intelligence organisation. That SIS were not monitoring Mandelson in 2006 is a failure, that they didn’t prevent his appointment as ambassador in 2025 is a disgrace. I seriously hope the occasional fawning over this obsolete body, which routinely attempts to meddle in democratic politics, from the Right will be tested by this scandal.
What makes the mainstream reaction so enraging, to those of you who think, is that they describe Mandelson as a lone individual who did something wrong. Treating Mandelson’s corruption as the actions of one man, rather than the logical consequence of the New Labour machine, is like if the South African press pretended Wouter Basson was just ‘a bad scientist’ who happened to be working on chemical weapons, ignoring that he was only able to do this because of laws and cultural norms inherent in the society in which he lived. This required people to come to see this period not as a natural extension of this society’s history but as a ‘regime’, distinct and illegitimate from its predecessors and the new order. Every real moment of lasting political change relies upon these events, in which it is clearly and loudly declared by the voice of progressive society that the old ways are unacceptable and a line is drawn under the past. The officials responsible for the Marian persecutions were punished in their turn. After the Glorious Revolution, the Jacobites were outlawed. There is never going to be any permanent victory for ‘the Right’ and Basically Fine future unless this happens in Britain. We must draw a line under the whole New Labour period and I shall explain how this is reasonably achievable in a court of law.
The crimes of Mandelson, the perjury of Parliament which led to Iraq, the grooming gang scandal and systematic harassment of civil society are not isolated crimes perpetrated by individuals but the actions of a regime deriving from collective conspiracy. Some individuals might not have benefited, or participated, in the crimes of others but the testimony of Nuremberg shows this is no defence. They deliberately created a culture in which these crimes, against both humanity and the state, were covered up and opposition to them silenced.
It is a matter of public record that the self-proclaimed architects of New Labour desired to permanently capture the British state and make opposition politics ‘impossible’, for the reactionary end of prolonging the postwar consensus past its sell-by date. The actions of the Labour government in power faithfully reflect this intent. Files held by the intelligence services, detailing the past political lives of key figures, were illegally destroyed. The police, the border force and the armed forces were brought under politicised management. The most restrictive laws on freedom of speech, personal privacy and the right to protest in the Western world were passed by Parliament without the slightest scrutiny from the new courts. The judicial system was completely, openly, rebuilt from the ground up including the creation of courts representing a body of law which had no falsifiable intellectual basis in anything but the ideology of the ruling party.
It is a well-accredited Westminster trope among perfectly centre-ground pundits, mainstream politicians and respected left-wing journalists that New Labour built an incredibly corrupt communications machine which severely compromised the independence of virtually all the press by a commercially incestuous relationship: culminating, although delayed by one year after they were out of power, in the Leveson Inquiry which introduced a form of official censorship. It is somewhat more contested but still arguable that, in this time, the state broadcaster acted as an effective mouthpiece of the government and did not sufficiently respect the neutrality stipulated within its charter.
