When struggling football managers get a vote of confidence from their board, it often comes with an unspoken “for now.” In a similar vein, the clock for Keir Starmer is definitely ticking, despite pledges of support from politicians eager to replace him as prime minister. The bigger issue, however, is whether or not any of those likely to succeed him have the desire or ability to challenge the system that produced this crisis.
The Epstein files have provided a rare window into the parasitic world of the people who rule Britain and the United States, the two countries that in succession have dominated most of the rest of the planet for nearly two centuries. This world has been exposed as one in which money has become increasingly detached from the productive forces that give it value and a political class has emerged that is in thrall to those who control the financial system.
This is personified by a yet unscathed character in the saga, Jamie Dimon, the long-standing chief executive of JPMorgan, a bank with $4 trillion of assets under management. In 2009, Dimon telephoned Britain’s then chancellor, Alistair Darling, to threaten punitive action over plans to tax bankers’ bonuses. The Epstein files reveal that this course of action was treacherously suggested by Darling’s cabinet colleague Peter Mandelson. Despite this bullying already being on the record in Darling’s book, Back From the Brink, it does not appear to have done Dimon any harm: in the seventeen years since, he has been a regular visitor to Downing Street under successive prime ministers and only four weeks ago, jointly hosted an event at Davos with Rachel Reeves, the current chancellor.
Apart from snippets in memoirs, we do not usually get to know how we are ruled until government papers are released thirty years later and most of the protagonists have long left the stage. In this case, the problem for Starmer is that Mandelson was not only still on the stage, he had also chosen most of…
Auteur: Steve Howell
