'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.

Zero points, shit in rivers, and weeping at Margaret's grave

I got an uncanny feeling of déjà vu when watching the recent Channel 4 drama about water company pollution, Dirty Business

A teacher, Reuben, gets an infection when surfing in sewage encrusted waters. Periodic attacks involving writhing on the floor and vomiting mean he has to give up his job. He applies for disability benefits but gets zero points because, as the assessor keeps repeating, when he is not having an attack, he functions normally (3^rd episode, 20.43).

You can see the tired resignation creep across Reuben’s face, as he realises that the fact he does have regular attacks which make him unemployable is completely irrelevant to the assessment.

This is so evocative of the hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people deemed fit for work points in the roll-out of the Work Capability Assessment under the Con-Lib Dem coalition. They got zero points too because although they couldn’t do any job that existed in the real world, by reaching above their head or into their top pocket once, they revealed that they could do an entirely abstract form of work.

At the time, there were futile calls for a real-world test to take account of what jobs actually demanded people could do repeatedly (as jobs tend to). But these were slammed down by the government in the shape of employment minister Chris Grayling who declared himself “absolutely, unreservedly and implacably” opposed to such a real-world test.

Current Labour DWP enforcer Pat McFadden doesn’t need to signal his opposition to a real-world test – it’s taken as read that it’s a total non-starter. The unbending focus now is on reducing the numbers of people qualifying for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) (which is what the teacher in Dirty Business applies for) despite the fact that 300,000 claims a year are rejected.

Labour did want to make the PIP criteria much tougher, something even Iain Duncan Smith found too much to stomach, but plans were put on hold as a result of an unexpected rebellion of backbench drones. But they will undoubtedly be repackaged as a result of the Timms Review now out for consultation.

Nothing better illustrates the duopoly afflicting the allegedly adversarial British political system than the treatment of sick and disabled people. The default consensus that they are ‘taking the mickey’ and deserve to be punished for having the temerity to have something wrong with them, which is probably half in the mind anyway.

The attitude, as John Pring shows in The Department, can be traced back to the dog days of the Thatcher administration, when health minister and “Mr Privatisation” John Moore wrote to chief secretary to the Treasury John Major, saying rising spending on sickness benefits needed to be tackled, with ‘no choice’ but to make ‘long-term savings’.

In the old system, i.e. invalidity benefit which existed before the testing regime began in the early ’90s, the ‘overriding consideration’ had been one of reasonableness, with the claimants’ ability to work measured against jobs which existed in the real world.  But that is a bygone era in British history. Hence the assessor’s monolithic insistence that when the ex-teacher in Dirty Business was not having a debilitating attack, he was perfectly able to do a job. The fact that vanishingly few employers would want to employ someone who involuntarily squirmed around on the floor every week, being sick everywhere, is not the state’s problem.

Have a nice day.

As of the beginning of this month, new claimants in the Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity Group of the Health element of Universal Credit (formerly Employment and Support Allowance) will have to survive on £50 a week, a nearly 50% cut from the £97 they previously received. This is so the ‘perverse incentive’ to apply for sickness benefit is removed. Actually, there is now a ‘perverse incentive’ to say there is nothing wrong with you even though there is, to ensure against the possibility that you will be judged unfit for work and placed in the LCRWA group.

This, in case you needed any reminder, is being carried through by a ‘Labour’ government. I remember being told in 2020 – by some young careerist working his way up the greasy pole at a meeting to choose the Labour leadership candidate which the CLP I was in would support – to “think of the most vulnerable person” I knew and then cast my vote for Sir Kier Starmer.

What he forgot to say was that if I harboured some sadistic desire to make them suffer even more, I should vote for Starmer.

As Dirty Business makes clear, there is a unity of purpose between the ‘Labour’ party and the Conservatives, which was briefly under threat in the four years before 2020 (which now resemble some strange hallucination). And the wretched consensus is not merely about how to treat the chronically ill.

As the programme recalls, David Cameron promised to tear up 3,000 pieces of needless regulation in order, he claimed, to release the growth potential of the British economy. Over a decade later, Starmer wrote to all 17 regulators in the UK telling them to relax rules for companies. This has resulted in a steep decline in enforcement actions, as they obediently scrabble to fall into line with the government’s so-called growth agenda.

And where has this deregulatory mania got us (aside from turds in rivers that is)? In the 18 years after the Financial Crisis of 2008, the economy has grown by 22% (an average rate of under 1%), while in the 18 years prior to 2008 it grew by 53% – more than twice as fast (and that record was terrible compared to the social democratic post-war years). But do carry on, won’t you.

We are in the grip of necrophile Thatcherism and it’s killing us. Some more than others, admittedly.

Red Tories Blowin in the Wind: A Chronicle of Welfare Cuts Foretold

 

Sometimes calling them Red Tories is being too kind. Labour’s £6 billion pounds’ worth of cuts to disability benefit, which threatens the “ability of low-income families to meet basic needs like food and shelter, potentially endangering lives”, is going somewhere even the Tories under Iain Duncan Smith’s regime of conscious cruelty did not tread.

The cut means that from next year new claimants in the Limited Capacity for Work-Related Activity group (LCWRA) will only get £47 a week to ‘live’ on, £50 less than they currently do. Existing claimants will have their benefit frozen at £97 a week, a real-terms cut. And if you’re under 22 you won’t be able to get anything at all.

Additionally, it will become harder to claim Personal Independence Payments. Under Kendall’s plans you have to ‘score’ more points on daily activities, such as incontinence, washing and dressing, and communicating.

For context, LCWRA is the old Support Group under pre-Universal Credit Employment & Support Allowance (ESA). These are people officially deemed to have such severe health problems there is no current prospect of them being able to work, notwithstanding Labour’s insistence that those with the harshest, ‘life-long’, conditions will be exempt.

Even Iain Duncan Smith left them alone. His attention was taken up with applying the Work Capability Assessment – introduced by Labour in 2008 – to existing ESA claimants, to turning the screw on those declared unfit for work but placed in the Work-Related Activity Group  (the equivalent of the Limited Capacity for Work group under Universal Credit), and ratcheting up sanctions on Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants (over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013).

Not that he wouldn’t have got around to it had he not abruptly resigned as Work and Pensions secretary in 2016. Although it’s illuminating to recall why he resigned from Cameron’s Cabinet. It was, he claimed, because he couldn’t stomach cuts to Personal Independence Payments*, which would have made it harder to qualify for PIP and meant some people wouldn’t have got anything at all. Last year, nearly half of all claims for PIP, around 300,000, were rejected.

The Starmer/Kendall/Reeves cuts are on top of the cuts that Duncan Smith found so intolerable he had to resign. This means that the current Labour government are significantly to the right of Iain Duncan Smith. When Rachel Reeves promised to be tougher than the Tories on benefits (not as tough as, mind, but tougher), she was telling the truth for once.

But with all due respect to the innate genius of IDS, Kier Starmer, Liz Kendall, Rachel Reeves, Therese Coffey or Yvette Cooper (that’s irony by the way), you can see what is going to happen to disability benefits simply by observing what important think tanks and corporate ‘thought leaders’ are saying.

The fact the Labour are introducing these cuts is, in a sense, irrelevant. Labour are, at present, the British government (probably for one term admittedly) and this is simply what the British government wants to do.

So let’s look at a chronicle of disability benefit cuts foretold.

In November 2014, Paul Litchfield, chief medical officer of the BT Group, published the fifth and final independent review of the Work Capability Assessment. This was, as John Pring notes in The Department, the very time that claimant deaths were reaching a peak under the first round of austerity, but Litchfield wasn’t interested in that. He recommended that the government look “as a matter of urgency” into why there had been such a substantial rise in the proportion of claimants placed in the Support group.

In a curious twist of fate, that is exactly what Starmer’s Labour government is doing.

In 2016, the neoliberal Reform think-tank proposed slashing the weekly benefit given to people in the Support Group by £58 so as to equalize it with the rate of Jobseeker’s Allowance. The thinking was that having a higher rate for sick and disabled people encouraged them “to stay on sickness benefits rather than move into work”. The chimes perfectly with Labour’s claims that the benefit system represents a “big discouragement to work”.

Reform (the think-tank not Farage’s company masquerading a political party that is currently leading in the polls) also described the benefits system as “broken” which uncannily is the exact word chosen by Sir Kier Starmer.

Interestingly, though, while Reform advocated putting the money saved from removing the additions to standard unemployment allowance into an enhanced Personal Independence Payment, Labour is cutting PIP as well. And the benefit levels for disabled people and the main body of claimants aren’t being equalised, the former is being significantly reduced.

Also in 2016, the Social Market Foundation proposed abolishing the ESA Support Group entirely.

The writer, who in 2016 analysed the output of these think-tanks, made a prophetic statement: “Policy change can often be explained by reference to changes in background ideas about the state, society and the individual, held and promoted by influential individuals, groups, political parties and … multinational companies,” she said. “It turns out that you can predict such a lot by simply watching the way the wind blows.”

Dominic Cummings, who apparently is informally advising Starmer’s government, used to refer to the educational ‘establishment’ – made up of local authorities, teaching unions and even the Department of Education – as the ‘blob’ because they were, allegedly, always thwarting his plans for schools.

In reality, the blob, consisting of “influential individuals, groups, political parties and … multinational companies” is always at work ensuring governments, as in the case of disability benefits, keep to the neoliberal script.

It is so huge it is very difficult to exist outside of it. The blob has a very keen sense of its own self-interest, and can always provide useful advice on what to say on any given subject, meaning its members don’t have to expend too much energy on thinking.

Corbyn wasn’t part of the blob and look what happened to him. But the blob has devoted acolytes at the helm of all political parties (and also in the backwaters of all political parties). Reform, the ‘party’ that is, might present itself as anti-establishment but it is right at the heart of the blob; its former leader, Richard Tice, handily on message in attacking “shirkers and skivers”.  The Greens might appear to be the one political party that is resisting the blob but should they ever hold the balance of power and enter government, I predict the blog will emerge victorious after a short scuffle.

To adapt the old anarchist canard, and song, no matter who you vote for, the blob always gets in.

* Duncan Smith was a tyrannical advocate of the notion that work is good for you, a zealotry shared with fellow blob dwellers Starmer, Reeves and Kendall. So it’s revealing that he was so opposed to cutting Personal Independence Payments. Perhaps that’s because, in recompensing people for the additional costs of disability, PIP enables people to work. But this realisation is apparently lost on the geniuses in the DWP.