Jonathan Cook

The political and media class that once venerated Peter Mandelson – and now rushes to disown him – is the same class that spent five years destroying Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, Mandelson and Corbyn served as the two axes in Labour around which different visions of Britain's future coalesced. Under Blair, Mandelson set about remaking Labour’s MPs and party bureaucracy in his own image: as a managerial party for the emerging class of tech overlords. But he failed to bring Labour’s third power centre – its members – along with him, which is why Corbyn slipped past institutional safeguards in 2015 and found himself elected as leader. By then, Labour had long been a soulless, technocratic party competing with the Conservatives to do the bidding of the wealthy – while holding out the fragile hope that, by miraculous osmosis, a little of their riches would trickle down to the rest of us. Corbyn’s political priorities were the antithesis of everything Mandelson stood for - and the opposite of what the billionaires who for decades were allowed to ransack Britain’s public services wanted. He called for rebuilding a fairer redistributive economy based on democratic socialist principles. He wanted to take back control of national utilities and expand public services. His emphasis was on building community and class solidarity – “For the many, not the few”. In 2017, Mandelson revealed that getting rid of Corbyn as Labour leader was his political mission: “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be – an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene – every day, I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his leadership.” The billionaire-owned media, of course, were only too willing to help. Corbyn was deemed too “scruffy“ to be prime minister. He was sexist. He was either not patriotic enough or a threat to national security. He was either too dim-witted to lead the country or a Russian spy. And finally, of course, he and the hundreds of thousands of new members attracted to Labour by his message of change and hope were antisemites for being critical of Israel’s permanent and illegal occupation of the Palestinians. In the shadows, contingency plans were readied in the event of a Corbyn victory. An army general told The Sunday Times that the officer class would mutiny to overthrow any Corbyn-led government. Leaked images showed soldiers in Afghanistan using his face as target practice. Behind all this lay the might of the United States – the imperial core whose politics is even more thoroughly captured by the billionaire class. In a leaked 2019 recording, US Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo warned that it was vital to stop the Labour leader from reaching power, suggesting that an organised campaign to discredit Corbyn was already underway. “It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible,” Pompeo said. “You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.” Why were the US and British establishments so determined to stop Corbyn’s advance, even if it meant openly sabotaging the UK’s democratic political process? Precisely because Corbyn was the only major British politician who had not been captured. This is an extract from my latest article Starmer is toast. But the dark forces that brought him to power are as strong as ever. Read the rest here: middleeasteye.net/opinion/st…