PRIME minister Keir Starmer appeared before the House of Commons on Monday to try to placate Labour MPs and the public over the crisis engulfing him over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the USA.
Expressing moral indignation and outrage that no one had bothered to tell him that Mandelson had failed a positive security vetting before being appointed, Starmer proceeded to blame everyone else for this ‘unforgivable’ lapse.
Starmer had already thrown the top civil servant, Sir Ollie Robbins, under the bus by immediately sacking him after the Guardian paper broke the news last Thursday.
Labour whips even handed out printed lists of ‘friendly’ questions for Labour MPs to ask as they waited to enter the chamber in a desperate attempt to present a united front to protect Starmer.
In the event, most of these were torn up by increasingly demoralised Labour members who saw that all Starmer’s evasions and twisting of the truth were finally coming home to roost.
Starmer is incapable of wriggling out of liability over the appointment of a man who had twice been dismissed from previous Labour cabinets and whose close relationship with convicted sex offender and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was common knowledge.
Yesterday morning, Robbins got his chance to speak out when he appeared before the MPs on the Foreign Affairs select committee.
Robbins told the committee that Starmer’s office at No 10 had put the Foreign Office under ‘constant pressure’ to clear Mandelson’s appointment and that there had been an ‘atmosphere of constant chasing’ for his vetting clearance.
The pressure clearly came from the fact that Starmer had announced Mandelson’s appointment before the final vetting that he failed.
Dame Emily Thornberry, Labour MP and chair of the committee, told the hearing that Morgan McSweeney – close ally of Mandelson and former chief of staff to Starmer – reportedly ordered the Foreign Office to ‘just f…ing approve’ the appointment.
Mandelson, along with former Labour PM Tony Blair, was central to the tight body of unofficial ‘advisors’ that Starmer surrounded himself with to help push the Labour government further to the right.
The man behind the entire ‘New Labour’ drive by Blair to break Labour completely from the trade unions and working class was seen by Starmer as the ideal person to suck up to US president Donald Trump.
Starmer’s embrace of Mandelson is a symptom of the Labour right-wing attempt to go much further than Blair’s ‘New Labour’ of the 1990s as the Labour government faces the demands of a bankrupt British capitalist system, diving headlong into a recession, accelerated by the imperialist war against Iran, for a class war to impose this crisis on the working class.
Starmer’s Labour government is tasked with the job of forcing the working class and youth into accepting mass unemployment and poverty to keep British capitalism staggering on.
The historic economic crisis finds its direct reflection in the political crisis engulfing Starmer’s government.
He is clinging on by his fingernails, with confident predictions that if this latest scandal doesn’t force him out then the predicted massacre of Labour candidates in next month’s local elections will finish the job, as the working class turn their backs on a Labour government that acts only in the interests of the bosses and bankers.
The burning issue is not just to dump Starmer but for the working class to act against the moves towards some form of right-wing national government as it becomes apparent that Labour on its own is too weak to carry out the class war to the finish that the bosses and bankers are demanding.
Workers must demand that the TUC take action by calling a Special Congress to mobilise the full strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Labour government and bring in a Workers Government that will nationalise the banks and major industries and base itself on the establishment of Councils of Action to run the country.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists today to build up the leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
