EARLY yesterday morning, Labour’s Foreign Office released a statement that announced the sacking of Peter Mandelson as the UK ambassador to the United States over the extent of his relationship with the billionaire and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Claiming that this sacking was due to damaging ‘new’ revelations in the form of emails released in the US that ‘show that the depth and extent of Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is materially different from that known at the time of his appointment’.
What appears to have forced Starmer to sack Mandelson, was a leaked email that revealed he had advised Epstein on how he should respond when criminal charges were brought against him in 2008 for soliciting a minor.
The Foreign Office statement refers to this, saying: ‘In particular, Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged is new information.’
Mandelson went further in these emails, telling Epstein that: ‘Everything can be turned into an opportunity,’ including presumably acting as a sexual predator preying on young girls.
Mandelson added that his (Epstein’s) legal ‘troubles’ simply ‘just could not happen in Britain’!
We can only speculate as to what Mandelson was inferring in this comment but workers are well aware that the British ruling class have a long history of successfully covering up and keeping their depravity and crimes behind closed doors.
Labour leader Keir Starmer tried his best to cover for Mandelson, his close ally and valued advisor, on how best to suck up to president Trump – also up to his neck in the Epstein scandal. The day before Mandelson’s sacking, Starmer was defending his appointment, insisting in Parliament on Wednesday that he had confidence in the ambassador and that ‘full due process was followed’ during his appointment to the post.
The Labour government has refused to release any details of this ‘due process’ that gave Mandelson the all-clear to pick up another lucrative job in Washington.
On Tuesday, The Daily Telegraph revealed that Epstein ‘brokered a deal’ with Mandelson, who was then Labour’s business secretary, over the sale of a ‘UK taxpayer-owned banking business’ after he had been convicted of child sex offences.
Mandelson, along with former Labour PM Tony Blair, have been central to the tight body of unofficial ‘advisors’ that Starmer has brought in to aid the drive of the Labour government further to the right. Both Mandelson and Blair are valued as the architects of Blair’s New Labour’ regime to break Labour completely from the trade unions and working class and fully embrace the dictatorship of the bankers and corporate bosses.
Starmer is attempting to resurrect, and go much further, than Blair or Mandelson in the 1990s, under the demands of a British capitalist system diving into recession and bankruptcy, and whose only way of surviving is an all-out class war to force the working class to pay the price to keep capitalism staggering on.
This historic economic crisis finds a direct reflection in the political crisis engulfing Starmer’s government, which is splitting apart at the seams, and Starmer himself only hanging on by his fingertips.
All the corruption and depravity that in the past could be swept under the carpet has now erupted as workers see clearly a capitalist system that is collapsing into economic and political degeneration.
With the Labour government reeling in crisis, the move towards a form of national government for the salvation of capitalism is fast developing, as it becomes apparent that Labour on its own has not the strength to carry out the attacks on the welfare state and social spending that the bankers and bosses are demanding.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s offer to form a ‘united front’ with Starmer to push through austerity cuts was a clear sign that moves towards a national government are being stepped up.
The TUC conference this week ducked any call to organise action against this Labour government and its attacks on workers.
The TUC requires a new leadership NOW! This must mobilise the working class for a general strike to bring down the Starmer regime and bring in a Workers Government that will nationalise the banks and the major industries and base itself on the establishment of Councils of Action to run the country.
This is what is required. Forward to the British Socialist Revolution!
