'Labour', lobbying and the de-corporatization of society

The ‘Labour’ party are a bunch of corporate lobbyists with a political party attached. And that includes its white knight, Andy Burnham.

Just before Labour won the 2024 election, Rachel Reeves reassured an invited audience of leading corporate representatives that “your fingerprints are all over every one of our national missions”.

She wasn’t exaggerating.

One of those fingerprints belongs to the “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson, now charged with “misconduct in public office” stemming from his best buddy relationship with sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. In 2010 he co-founded the now defunct lobbying firm Global Counsel. The aim was to exploit his seminal place in the modern Labour party and help corporations “see opportunities in politics, regulation and public policy”.

A Freedom of Information request from journalist Solomon Hughes reveals that Global Counsel was still hosting soirees and breakfasts for its business clients and representatives of the UK government less than a year ago.

Attendees on the lookout for “opportunities” included financial services behemoth JP Morgan and drugs giant GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline). Among the subjects discussed was NHS drug pricing.

Curiously, a few months later – in December 2025 – the government announced a deal with the US over how much the NHS pays for pharmaceuticals (bought mainly, though not exclusively, from American corporations). The agreement – intended to avert the axe of Donald Trump’s sanctions – saw the NHS committed to paying 25% more for new medicines and to increase what it shells out for existing drugs.

Under its terms, the NHS is also compelled to double its spending on new medicines from 0.3% to 0.6% of GDP by 2035.

It is estimated the cost will come to £64 billion.

Inevitably, given the government’s “iron-clad” commitment to fiscal rules, the money will be diverted from patient care. According to one health economist – Karl Claxton who led a research term at York University to model potential outcomes – by 2033 excess deaths as a result of the deal will be greater than in the first two years of Covid.

“The government faced a clear choice,” Claxton said, “either back the NHS and adult social care and stand up to these pressures, or don’t. And it decided not to.”

In another strange coincidence, in November 2025, JP Morgan announced plans to build a skyscraper new HQ in Canary Wharf. The decision owed a lot to the deal, negotiated by the Treasury and Tower Hamlets council, to provide the bank (which is clearly short of cash) with a 100% discount on business rates.

Also oiling the wheels was Rachel Reeves’s commitment not to increase taxes on banks in her autumn budget (just on everyone else) following a meeting in Number 11 with Goldman Sachs.

It wasn’t thought necessary to call in a police forensic team to sweep the room for fingerprints.

The lobbying impulse is so deeply ingrained in the ‘Labour’ party that glaring conflicts of interest pass without a second look. Mandelson was UK Ambassador to the US during the NHS drug pricing negotiations. All through this time, he remained president of Global Counsel which represented GSK and JP Morgan. His firm actually undertook research for the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry “making the case for many of the changes ultimately secured in the deal”.

According to a whistleblower, Mandelson vetted Labour candidates for the 2024 General Election. Just to make doubly sure no unsavoury characters slipped through the net.

Doubtless the memory of Jeremy Corbyn gave him the jitters but he needn’t have been so careful. Research before the election was called revealed that 10% of confirmed Labour candidates were employed as corporate lobbyists and communication advisors. And according to an article in The Times, a third of actually elected Labour MPs have a background in lobbying. “It was”, said the author, “the most common past job for an MP – far outstripping trade unions, teachers or doctors”.

And if they manage to climb a few rungs up the greasy pole, they are sure to run into former colleagues. Secondees from lobbying firms work with senior Labour ministers such as Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds. Mandelson’s Global Counsel spent £36,000 paying for a staff member to work with former Treasury minister Tulip Siddiq for a year.

When the former Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, (the electoral mastermind oversaw Labour haemorrhaging 40 seats in Scotland in the 2015 GE), predicted that Starmer’s government would be “the first private sector government in Labour history”, he was, if you’ll excuse the pun, right on the money.

Of course, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham wants to return to Parliament, oust Sir Kier, and “change” Labour (a word you may have heard somewhere before).

The fact that the lying/snooping Labour Together faction that put Starmer in power in the first place are the very people that are beating out the path for Burnham to return to Parliament should invoke a healthy degree of scepticism.

Burnham has already rowed back on his lament that Britain is “in hock to the bond markets”, promising to stick to Reeves’s fiscal rules and replacing rhetoric about renationalising utilities with merely instituting ‘stronger public control’.

But even if Burnham was sincere in wanting to send the lobbyists scuttling away from the husk that remains of the ‘Labour’ party, it would take a lot more than the good vibes he is promising to do it – for Labour not to roll over but, in the words of Karl Claxton, “stand up to these pressures”.

The huge increase in the amount to be paid by the NHS for branded drugs agreed to by Labour was not merely the fruit-bearing result of a concerted campaign by bands of lobbyists. It was also preceded by real-world threats to withdraw investment by pharma companies (interestingly, that weren’t all American and thus backed by Trump). What, in old-fashioned language, used to be called a ‘capital strike’. In the words of a Bureau of Investigative Journalism report:

Then, over the course of a single week in September, the dominoes began to fall. One company after another threatened to pull major UK projects: MSD scrapped a £1bn London research centre; AstraZeneca paused a £200m project in Cambridge; Eli Lilly parked a planned London lab. In response to concerns that the pharma giants had colluded in a bid to bump up drug prices, the Competition and Markets Authority said it had decided not to investigate.

A fortnight later, AstraZeneca threatened to quit the London Stock Exchange and move to the US.

In a similar vein, JP Morgan – in spite of the 100% business rates relief sweetener and the promise of no new taxes on banks – has threatened to back track on the building of its new HQ if Sir Kier is replaced by someone “hostile to banks”.

Even if the government were full of – to use Tony Blair’s phrase from 1997 – “whiter than white” individuals with impeccably sturdy backbones, they would, in all certainty, cave in to these demands, followed by an immediate impulse to reach for the shelf containing ready-made excuses about economic growth and saving jobs.

Unless they had an alternative economic strategy to hand.

The only way not to give in to this blackmail is to follow the logic (if not necessarily the publicly announced policies) of Corbynism. To set up a publicly owned drug research and production enterprise to sell at cost to the NHS, thus saving billions for patient care.

More broadly, the entire NHS needs to be renationalised and freed from incremental privatisation.

But it doesn’t end there. Profit maximising banks who, despite the events of 2008, push for renewed deregulation and new ways to be subsidised by the public need to feel the stiff breeze of competition from a publicly-owned investment and retail bank.

And the only real answer to tax havens – likened by the writer Thomas Frank to an “unseen planet” pulling politics and economics inexorably rightwards – is the withdrawal of limited liability which is granted by the state. Without the state, whom corporations incessantly lobby, they are nothing. It is their hidden Achilles’ heel.

The only way to make such a threat credible is to create publicly owned, cooperatively-run companies that can compete with shareholder-driven corporate leviathans and take their place should the latter’s legal ‘person-hood’ be rescinded. Such companies will openly and willingly pay their taxes and won’t try to financially exploit the local or central state or hollow it out through privatisation.

The fork in the road we are now facing is between shades of corporate fascism, based on deportation of immigrants, the crushing of dissent, endless deregulation, and minimal taxes for the super-rich, and something else. That something else is socialism, which will eventually dawn on people who would never think of themselves as socialists.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

I haven’t posted much about Brexit on this blog. Partly this is because other people are more than happy to do so I’d just be repeating what someone else has said. But it’s also because I’m convinced that in future years, in the aftermath of a future economic crash, the level of attention devoted to something that really doesn’t change the economic fundamentals much will seem bizarre.

However, I think the leaked US-UK free trade negotiations are very interesting and do merit comment because they indicate that the form of Brexit matters. Johnson’s regulatory disalignment with the EU and liberalisation-based free trade agreements represents a definite fork in the road compared with continue customs unions membership and single market alignment (the Labour party plan) or remaining.

To recap, the leaked documents reveal that US negotiators are pushing for “total market access” to be “the baseline assumption” of the talks. This primarily means services because services are the dominant part of the British economy. And this definition includes the NHS because the NHS is considered a service.

British officials have promised to “fly the good for flag for services liberalisation”. The NHS could only be excluded if, as is the custom with trade negotiations, it is specifically exempted. And the British side has declined to exempt the NHS, just as David Cameron refused to do in the doomed TTIP negotiations between the European Union and the US a few years ago. That is extremely revealing.

Other elements of the nascent US-UK negotiations include introducing lower food standards (chlorine-washed chickens), banning any mention of climate change and establishing the right of corporations to sue the British government, without any right of appeal, for practices they regard as unfair.

The EU and total market access

But before we rush to put our bodies on the line for the status quo, it’s necessary to recall what is already happening in the absence of a newly-minted trade agreement with the USA. Because it’s eerily similar. The afore-mentioned TTIP free trade agreement (FTA) between the EU and the US was considered to pose “real and serious risks to the NHS”. There were genuine worries it could also have undermined food safety, bank regulations and environmental standards. It was negotiated in secret (you had to go into a secure reading room to examine it) and it would have established exactly the same ‘corporate court’ system as the US-UK negotiations. In fact, as a result of EU FTAs with many different countries, and also within the EU, so-called investor-state dispute tribunals are extremely common. 

In Britain, the NHS is already being privatised with mental health services on the frontline. Moreover, under EU laws on fair competition, companies such as Richard Branson’s Virgin are able to sue the NHS on the grounds of putatively poorly-run tendering processes.

However, I think there is a difference between EU free trade and a future in the US orbit. That relates to public opinion. The TTIP, which was negotiated between 2013 and 2016, is dead in the water – in April 2019, the European Commission declared that TTIP was “obsolete and no longer relevant”. Partly that outcome is a result of mushrooming governmental and public opposition to TTIP provisions as they were gradually exposed. Doubtless the European Commission would have liked to proceed, without opposition and scrutiny. But it couldn’t. The same European public opinion will influence what a future Labour government can and cannot do and what is politically possible.

The same could theoretically be said of the British government. But if Johnson wins a majority on December 12 he will take that as permission to blithely ignore public opinion for five years, by which time a US-UK FTA could be negotiated and sealed.

Not all people’s votes are the same

There is also a question here about how Brexit is negotiated which has been overlooked. The leaked negotiations revealed that a no deal Brexit (still on the cards if the UK doesn’t reach an agreement on future trade arrangements with the EU by December next year) is the US’s preferred option. Conversely if the UK is still in the Customs Union and aligned to the single market – which is Labour party policy – a US-UK FTA is seen as a “non-starter”.

So if Labour wins the election and negotiates a deal in which Customs Union membership is maintained and organises a referendum with that deal going up against Remain – as is its stated policy – that will specifically rule out any future US-UK trade negotiations which lead to the privatisation of parts of the NHS or dilution of food standards. Regardless of which side wins, it won’t happen.

However, if there is a 2^nd referendum between Johnson’s deal and Remain, a future US free trade agreement – with all that that entails – is eminently conceivable. Indeed, such a scenario – propping up a minority Conservative government to allow a ‘people’s vote’ – was put forward by Lib Dem deputy leader, Ed Davey, now that Lib Dem ‘Plan A’ – revoking Article 50 – has been conceded to be pie in the sky.

Ironically, a putatively principled opposition to Brexit could result in the worst kind of Brexit happening.