The Gist: UK Labour's FG mastermind

After two Gists in quick succession on the abuse factory that is X dot com, I thought I'd leave that subject, to return to it when a number of the various investigations, assertions and ineffections have reached some sort of conclusion.

Instead, it occurred to me that it has been quite a while since we took a stroll around our neighbour to the East, Great Britain. Specifically, let's check in on how the Labour party there has been using its commanding Parliamentary majority to ensure a transformed nation begins to recover from the prolonged period of clownish Tory misrule.

Ah. Sorry to report, it appears the Labour party leadership has spent its time in office repeatedly stabbing itself in the eye with a fork while the same clownish Tory misrulers join the Reform party who are currently threatening to return them to office.

At the heart of this arc of failure is Kier Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. He designed Labour's technocratic electoral campaign which centred around bloodless plans and targets, rather than anything that might spark emotion or empathy. He has also responded to the opposition's rightward lurch by chasing them to the right as well, even having Starmer adopt far-right language in his public comment, including a direct paraphrase of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. Where Powell complained that a Britain open to immigration would result in white people who "found themselves made strangers in their own country", Starmer bleated that immigration would result in an "island of strangers".

While the UK commentariat have wrestled to explain the failure of the Starmer political project, and its almost uncanny ability to repulse its own voters while attracting none of those it was chasing, those of us on this side of the water will have been experiencing a stirring of recognition.

Morgan McSweeney has been running the UK Labour party on the Fine Gael electoral model.

The Parties of the Hole

Fine Gael, as we have seen in election after election for decades, becomes less popular the more the public is exposed to it. It attributes electoral failures to its leaders, who are therefore under constant threat of replacement. With little job security, those leaders become defensive, frequently blocking opportunities for potential successors to gain meaningful experience. In the same vein, just this week, the Labour leadership blocked the popular mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, from returning to Parliament.

The McSweeney family's Fine Gael background is well known. The Journal reported on them after the election: "His aunt Evelyn McSweeney also spoke to the Opinion Line with PJ Coogan and noted that Morgan comes from a Fine Gael family and that his father is very involved in canvassing for the party.

“His grandfather canvassed with (Cork North West TD) Michael Creed’s grandfather out on the bike, so that’s how far back we started getting involved in politics,” said Evelyn.

She also noted that her daughter, Clare Mungovan, is an advisor to Taoiseach Simon Harris, while Evelyn herself was a councillor for 20 years in Macroom."

And certainly we have seen that, since he became Fine Gael leader, Harris has made many of the same mistakes that Starmer made. They both ran an almost content-free election campaign, where soundbite was put ahead of ideas. What plans they did put forward offered an almost identical set of priorities, even down to demanding a "firmer migration and criminal justice system". And Harris, like Starmer, has also responded to far-right noise (and it has been largely noise, with negligible electoral success) by accepting some of its premises rather than reject is as the bad-faith racism it is.

The unasked question in all of this is why the UK Labour Party, gifted with a landslide majority, would adopt the political techniques of one of Europe's most enduring electoral failure-addicted parties. The answer, as far as it can be determined from the outside, is a shared belief that the voting public need to be tricked into voting for them, rather than levelled with.

What unites both parties ruling cadre is the belief that beliefs, always presented as a contrast to 'common sense', are per-se inherently suspicious. This of course is exactly what you would term a political belief, but it is one which denies itself as such. Its proponents hold that their political beliefs are 'centrist', making any ones you might hold extreme and radical by definition.

Now, the problem here is that we are, in actual fact, facing an attack on standard human-rights respecting norms from radical right wing propaganda. But both parties' reflexes are to see all external alternatives to their positions as threats to the status quo they claim to represent.

This leaves them in the absurd position of having to argue that attempts to bring in improvements to society are an equal threat to the polity as attempts to destroy it. In the UK, this has seen the proscribing of Palestine Action as a 'terrorist organisation' and the consequential arrest of approximately 2,700 people for supporting them. It has also seen the arrest and conviction of individuals for engaging in protests against climate change.

The UK Labour Party is, meanwhile, plummeting in the polls against a Reform Party collecting up exactly the same Tory ministers the electorate rejected last time, while its left wing gets up and decamps to a newly vocal UK Green party in the face of their previous home's unvarnished hostility to them.

At the last poll, both UK Labour and Fine Gael were on 18% support. It appears that Morgan McSweeney's political project has reached its successful conclusion. UK Labour are now as popular with their electorate as Fine Gael are with theirs.

The problem with treating politics as a doughnut, where the centre is consistantly defined as the hole where policy doesn't belong is that it means you can never move the country's discussion to anywhere it needs to go. It leaves the parties of the Hole to just react to wherever the dough is.

His Lord and master

Speaking of dough, the other great influence on Morgan McSweeney's career was Peter Mandelson, who previously had to resign as the Ambassador to the US when he appeared in an earlier release of Epstein files. This week he had to resign from the Labour Party, to 'spare it embarrassment' while he, OJ Simpson-like, promised to investigate himself after it was reported that he and his husband had both been receiving payments from Epstein in the tens of thousands, and that he had also leaked a memo on government tax plans to him.

Mandelson remains a peer of the House of Lords and a member of the Privvy Council, so I suppose we can look forward to potentially further resignations in the future once his self-investigating has been completed.

Britain is a rich country which has been captured by a small number of it's richest individuals over a number of decades. Its media hunts in packs, creating salience from irrelevancies, generating fears in the population unrelated to their actual problems in life and promoting the scapegoating of minorities while conducting little to no structural assessments of the real problems that the political and social worlds have inherited and intensified.

It is surely of no little significance that it turns out that this model of public capture of political discourse for private gain is one which is revealed by these Epstein documents to have had been a global formula.