Politics
Care workers and Indefinite Leave to Remain
Alan Manning reflects on the government’s proposal to change the rules for migrants to obtain Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) and its impact, using the example of migrants working in the care sector.
On 20 November the Home Secretary published A Fairer Pathway to Settlement, proposing changes (subject to consultation) to the rules for obtaining permanent residence, known in the UK as Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). The underlying principle claimed that settlement should be earned, a privilege not a right, and too little had been asked in the past of many migrants before granting ILR. The government ruled out taking away ILR from those already with it as promised by Reform UK.
The rules for new cohorts of migrants may, for the managed part of migration, be less dramatic than claimed by the policy’s supporters and opponents. Although the starting point for settlement is increased from the current 5 to 10 years, the proposals allow for shorter and longer periods. Most of those on the Skilled Worker and Health and Care Visas will qualify after 5 years given the recent changes to skill and salary requirements for entry, as will the partners of British citizens which is most of the Family visas. Those on the Global Talent Visa will have to wait only 3 years. There are big changes, however, for those who claim asylum, especially those who arrived in the UK without authorisation.
More controversial are the proposals to apply the new rules to migrants already in the country on a path to settlement. While not promised a path to ILR on the old terms, many migrants have come with that expectation, and it is generally a bad idea to change immigration rules mid-stream. A country that acquires a reputation for moving goalposts may find it harder to attract the migrants it wants.
The government estimates (plausibly) that under the current rules the numbers applying for ILR will almost triple current numbers to 450,000 in 2028. And that there will be costs to giving ILR to this cohort of migrants.
Singled out are the 616,000 care workers and their dependents who came in the years 2022-2024, likely the largest group affected by the proposed changes.
I have argued elsewhere the social care visa was poorly designed and had to go. Implementation was even worse – in 2024 the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration published an excoriating report on the visa, finding that “275 certificates of sponsorship being granted to a care home that did not exist, and 1,234 certificates being granted to a company that stated it had only four employees when given a licence”. Exploitation of workers is rife.
For jobs where employers’ demand for migrants comes from the fact that pay and conditions are not attractive enough to recruit and retain enough local workers – and everyone agrees this is the case in social care – a basic principle of visa design is that, though these visas alleviate short-term problems, this comes with at the cost of longer-term problems that crystallise if large numbers of care workers get ILR.
To understand why, consider how ILR changes options for those who came on a care worker visa. They are no longer tied to the employer who sponsored their visa and they are now eligible to apply for welfare benefits.
If they remain in social care their low level of earnings (50% earn less than £25k) may mean they receive sizeable welfare benefits when eligible. How much depends on whether they have a partner, how much their partner is earning (statistics suggest they are even lower-paid) and whether there are children. We don’t have great statistics on how much these migrants would be entitled to but we can use benefits calculators to give examples. A care assistant earning about £25k a year with one dependent child but no partner and rent of £1k a month could expect to get about £12k a year in welfare benefits. A care worker who looked cheap when they first arrived (though only if one did not factor in the cost of educating their children) now looks expensive. But if they had a partner who also earned £25k then they would only be entitled to about £3k a year in benefits. The welfare cost of ILR depends a lot on circumstances and we do not have information to know exactly what would happen.
The welfare bill would be lower if migrants’ earnings rise when they receive ILR. But, given low levels of pay progression, that would almost certainly mean leaving the care sector. The visa then only gave a short-term fix to the recruitment and retention problem in social care. Someone who came as a care worker for 5 years might have another 40 years doing something else.
And there is no requirement to work at all post-ILR. That might be a particular problem for the tens of thousands of migrants who came on care worker visas to find there was no work for them. In spite of government attempts, few seem to have found alterative employers.
By extending the period of settlement, the government will probably save money on the welfare bill and avoid workers quitting social care, but at the cost of changing rules mid-stream. There is an additional cost: child poverty. Children in low-earning migrant households with no recourse to public funds will be growing up in some of the poorest households in the UK.
So, the government finds itself in a very difficult position with no attractive option. The government seems aware of this when they say “we particularly welcome views on how the development of an earned settlement system should take account of children” – but is not sure how to handle this consequence of the ill-advised policy of Boris Johnson’s government in 2021 to open visas up to care workers (and some other jobs with earnings barely above the minimum wage). For jobs that are badly-paid you should have temporary visas (with no rights to bring dependents) or none at all (my preference in this case). As I have argued in my recent book, immigration policy is often hard.
By Alan Manning, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Veterans Aid (VA), the UK’s frontline charity for veterans in crisis, has become the latest charitable partner of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), the oldest regiment in the British Army.
VA has been operating since 1932 and enjoys an externally validated success rate of 90% in terms of transforming broken lives. For the next three years it will be the beneficiary of fundraising events and other support from the HAC in acknowledgement of the two organisations’ shared commitment to those who have served, and their families.
CEO of Veterans Aid Prof Hugh Milroy said, “We were delighted and honoured to have the value of our work acknowledged in this way by the HAC. VA deals with the consequences of crisis and poverty; issues that don’t sit comfortably with the public image of military heroism and glamour. In fact, we operate in the real world, practicing the real values of the military family where ‘man down’ is a call to immediate action. As an organisation that spends hardly anything on advertising or self-promotion, we are singularly mindful of how valuable support from organisations like the HAC can be in helping us reach donors and – more importantly – those who so desperately need our help.”
Marcus Simson, CE of the Honourable Artillery Company said, ‘’We are delighted to support Veterans Aid as our sponsored charity. We have a shared commitment to those who have served and value the vital and tailored services Veterans Aid provides. Many are not available elsewhere. They include mental health care, housing assistance, job training, and peer support. These programs restore dignity, stability, and purpose, helping veterans and their families thrive rather than merely survive. Too often they are the only thing that prevents tragedy. The HAC is clear that all of its support to Veterans Aid will go directly to helping those in need. For the HAC, contributing time or resources is a tangible way to express our gratitude, uphold our shared values and ensure that those who protected our freedoms are never left behind and remembered with respect – always, everywhere.’’
The two organisations also share a relationship with the church of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate whose links with both are strong. St Botolph’s is home to the HAC’s Regimental Chapel, which commemorates members of the Company who died in conflicts. It also houses the engraving of Hogarth’s Good Samaritan gifted by Veterans Aid to the church, as a symbol of its own partnership with the church.
Campaigner and singer Feargal Sharkey has, once again, dressed down the privatised water companies.
Water companies: taking the p*ss
On social media, Sharkey said:
You’ll want to be sitting down for this bit. Water companies are currently £82.7 billion in debt, have paid themselves £85 billion in dividends, leak over a trillion of litres of water per year, dump sewage for almost 4 million hours per year, have been convicted of over 1,200 criminal acts since 1989 and an average of 35% of your bill goes on nothing but paying more interest and yet more dividends. And not a single company has ever lost their operating licence.
When the water companies were privatised in 1989 under Margaret Thatcher, they were debt free. Since then, they have accumulated £82.7 billion in debt, as Sharkey notes. At the same time, they have failed to invest in infrastructure to fix our dated sewage system. Instead, they dump sewage in our rivers and the ocean for millions of hours a year. And they haven’t just creamed cash rather than investing. Water companies sold off 35 reservoirs in just five years, making £26 million from flogging what were public assets.
On top of that, as Sharkey points out, a University of Greenwich study for We Own It found a “privatisation tax” of 35% on our water bills. In other words, we’re spending over one-third more than we need to every time we turn on the taps.
Privatisation: 140 years into the past
Water was brought into public ownership in the late 1800s. Even back then, people knew it was a natural monopoly and a daily essential for all humans. Selling it off just means one then rents it at higher cost.
Thatcher’s government and then the neoliberals in Labour, Reform and the Tories maintaining privatisation of water, have brought us 140 years into the past.
Sharkey is spot on to take down the polluting profiteers.
Featured image via the Canary
The number of children who are homeless and in temporary accommodation in Scotland has passed 10,000.
The latest figures from the Scottish Government show that, in the six months to 30 September 2025, 10,480 children were in temporary accommodation.
People experiencing homelessness increasing
In total, there were 18,092 households in temporary accommodation, a 9% increase from 16,634 in 2024. This is also a new record high. Households spent an average of 237 days in temporary accommodation.
There was also a 4% increase in the total open homeless applications. The figure now stands at 33,006.
The number of people sleeping rough has also reached its highest in over a decade – at 1,083. This means that one in 10 applicants was sleeping outside.
One notably higher figure is the number of households not being offered temporary accommodation. The number has risen from 7,565 in 2024 to 10,710 in 2025. Most of these were in Glasgow (6,815 out of 10,710). The local authority also reported high numbers in Edinburgh – with 3,585 instances over the six months.
A figure that has improved is the number of breaches of the unsuitable accommodation order. This states that:
the maximum number of days that local authorities can use unsuitable accommodation for any homeless person is 7 days and has the effect of ending stays in unsuitable accommodation, such as B&Bs, apart from in emergency situations.
In the last 6 months, there were 3,635 breaches, which is a 12% improvement.
Changing characteristics
Of the homeless applicants, 16% were from households that had been granted either refugee status or leave to remain. This allows non-UK nationals to stay lawfully in the UK following an application made from within the country.
In total, 2% of all applications cited “left asylum accommodation” as the reason for them being homeless.
There was also a decrease in the number of white applicants, specifically white Scottish applicants. Conversely, there was an increase in the number of African, Caribbean, Black, Asian, and Arab applicants.
This comes as the number of refugees experiencing homelessness across the UK has more than doubled in the last two years. In total, 4,434 refugees and migrants were accommodated from 2024-25, the largest number on record. Of these, 2,008 were refugees — a 106% increase on the previous year.
In September, Màiri McAllan, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Housing, pledged funding for affordable housing, along with measures to support people in moving out of temporary housing.
Additionally, the Scottish government said it planned to invest up to £4.9bn over the next four years. This would help it achieve its target of delivering 36,000 affordable homes by 2030.
In a statement, McAllan said:
The figures do speak to the severe pressure that services are under due to the Home Office’s mismanagement of the asylum system, particularly in Glasgow.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paramilitaries are leaving custom-made ace of spades ‘death cards’ at the scene of migrant snatch operations. The ghoulish practice has imperial origins. US troops used to stuff cards into the mouths of the Vietnamese dead. The practice – consider yourself trigger warned here, please – was even filmed for use in official military propaganda.
The truth is this isn’t the first example of long-ago wars inflecting US immigration policy. America’s imperial past and present is so deeply interwoven into Trumpian policy that we don’t always see it. Yet these cards are one of several crystal-clear examples lately.
ICE leave death cards
The Intercept’s Nick Turse picked up the story on 3 February. It appears to have originally been reported on 22 January 2025 by Latino community organisation Voces Unidas. After a snatch mission in Eagle Country, Colorado, relatives searching for their kidnapped family members found the cards at the scene:
After detaining 10 Latino community members, ICE agents left ace of spades cards—widely known as the “death card”—inside the abandoned vehicles. The cards, later found by family members, clearly identify ICE’s Denver Field Office.
The US used the ace of spades design because it supposedly had particular cultural power in Vietnam.
As Turse explained:
During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with “death cards” — either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for their kills.
Adding:
A 1966 entry in the Congressional Record noted that due to supposed Vietnamese superstitions regarding the ace of spades, “the U.S. Playing Card Co. had been furnishing thousands of these cards free to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who requested them.”
After Vietnam, as Voces Unidas pointed out, the cards were adopted:
by white supremacist groups to demean people of color.
On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. ICE’s recruiting strategy is less about nods to racism and more about openly using fascist imagery, mottosm and even songs to attract recruits who align with a mission to ethnically purify the US.
Long history of racial violence
Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of Voces Unidas said:
We are disgusted by ICE’s actions in Eagle County. Leaving a racist death card behind after targeting Latino workers is deliberate intimidation rooted in a long history of racial violence.
He added:
This is an abuse of power, and it has no place in any society that claims to value human dignity.
Sanchez said family members of the disappeared had the cards in their possession. He confirmed they appeared custom-made and meant to terrify ICE’s targets:
These were not from a doctored deck of cards. These were designed with this legacy in mind. They were printed on some sort of stock paper and cut in the dimensions of a card.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security deigned to explain the cards.
The term ‘imperial boomerang’ has used liberally to describe what is happening in the US – and correctly so. Trump’s war on immigration is a cover for a war on the left and on migrant labour. He seeks to both create an enemy and eliminate rivals, not just at home but also abroad, as we’ve seen with Venezuela and Iran.
But there is more to it. Let’s not forget that a senior Border Patrol official invoked the Confederacy – the slave-owning losers of the Civil War – in a recently discovered email chain.
In truth, the whole spectacle is alive with fascist nostalgia about lost wars. It feels like fascists – many of whom are clearly now in ICE – are trying to correct various imperial and colonial emasculations through racist violence. Trump has given them the permission, the weapons and the authority to do so. At the very least, they are drawing on those vengeful energies.
From the War on Terror to the Confederate fantasy of a ‘lost cause’ and, now, Vietnam, the ghosts of America’s violent past are restless.
Featured image via Voces Unidas
Evil tech giant and NHS leech Palantir has links with wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And Labour MP Dawn Butler has rightly called for scrutiny.
Butler insisted we should “not ignore” the connection between Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Epstein, particularly because it has infiltrated our public health system:
We can not ignore the fact that Peter Thiel co-founder of Palantir is featured numerous times in the Epstein files https://t.co/QXoz6C94D1
— Dawn Butler ✊🏾💙 (@DawnButlerBrent) February 3, 2026
She had previously highlighted how the Conservatives let dodgy tech giants Palantir, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon get their grubby hands during the Covid-19 pandemic on our health data. In 2021, she expressed concern over the lack of transparency and the consequences for our data privacy.
Palantir embeds within the US, the UK, and Israel
As the Canary has reported, Palantir:
- Is staunchly pro-Israel.
- Has “deep ties to British and American security agencies”.
- Has gained lots of experience helping to smear progressives, back right-wing causes, and mistreat vulnerable people.
- Had links to the dodgy campaigning surrounding Brexit.
- Is already deep within the UK’s military and police establishment.
- Received investments from the shady multimillionaire donor behind Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
- Has just got a £240m deal to give services to the British military, as Starmer has cosied up even further to the company (with help from Epstein friend and general prince of darkness Peter Mandelson).
- Had Epstein in its corner, encouraging close friend and Israeli war criminal Ehud Barak to learn more about the company. It later ended up profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
- Is getting deeper and deeper into the US government, and is a key part of Donald Trump’s dystopian domestic terror campaign.
- Co-founder Thiel powered US vice-president JD Vance’s rise to prominence.
- CEO and co-founder Alex Karp is a vile warmonger, arrogant gaslighter, and misanthropic authoritarian. He seems to think war crimes are fine, that the West has “obvious, innate superiority”, and that violence (rather than ideas) is the path to dominance.
Neocolonialism
Palantir has latched onto the US imperial project and is now a prominent part of it. By extension, this means entering junior partners in the UK and Israel too. And apparent intelligence assets like Epstein helped to ensure companies like Palantir become part of this system of racist brutality and dominance.
Journalist Whitney Webb has written about:
The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein
And because of developments like artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, and drones, the baton has passed from people like Epstein to companies like Palantir. As Webb said in 2025:
you don’t really need Epstein in the Surveillance Era…
[Israel and others] don’t really need blackmail anymore…
Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company… that’s the new Jeffrey Epstein…
“They don’t…need blackmail anymore…Palantir…[is] the new Jeffrey Epstein…if they want to blackmail [you]…they…access…your finances, tweets you’ve liked…[&] the disturbing thing about Palantir is…it’s…about pre-crime. [They’re] pioneers of predictive policing”… pic.twitter.com/3Il0l3IhuR
— Sense Receptor (@SenseReceptor) August 1, 2025
Countries around the world have already started to realise the importance of technological independence from the US and its dystopian corporations like Palantir. And if UK politicians don’t heed calls to do the same, they need to lose their jobs.
Because for the sake of humanity and our future, we should not only “not ignore” all of this, as Dawn Butler rightly said. We also need to actively campaign to kick companies like Palantir out once and for all.
Featured image via the Canary
A pack of hounds from the Middleton fox hunt has run amok through a woodland burial site in North Yorkshire. The incident happened during the last week of January 2026.
Footage captured by national animal welfare charity the League Against Cruel Sports shows the hounds marauding through the Mowthorpe Garden of Rest within the Howardian Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The hounds ran across graves with the hunt failing to stop or divert them.
This is the same Middleton Hunt that the Canary witnessed a couple of weeks earlier. On that occasion, the hunt was behaving violently and showing no sign of laying a trail. Unless the law changes, and it may do before long, fox hunts can still ride out. But, legally, they can only ‘trail hunt’. This means following a scent trail, rather than actual foxes.
However, until the government moves decisively to ban them for good, fox hunts are continuing to cause havoc across the countryside.
The League’s chief executive Emma Slawinksi has slammed the hunt for its actions:
It beggars belief that the hunt would have laid a trail through a burial site so either the Middleton Hunt has no regard for the sanctity of this site or, as is more likely, the hounds were on the trail of a fox.
They have desecrated this burial site in a bid to carry on with a blood sport that was banned 20 years ago.
Hunts are behaving in an appalling way, intent on chasing and killing foxes and not caring about their anti-social behaviour and the impact they are having on local communities and the people who live in the countryside.
The hounds were also caught terrorising local wildlife with two deer filmed fleeing for their lives.
‘Trail hunting a smokescreen for fox hunts’
The footage of the Middleton Hunt is being released the day after Channel 4 News aired footage gathered by the League of the same hunt’s hounds chasing a fox on Christmas Eve 2025.
The League released figures ahead of Boxing Day showing an increase in the number of reports of hunts chasing foxes and wreaking havoc on rural communities.
Chief superintendent Matt Longman, the national lead on fox hunting crime, has described trail hunting as a “smokescreen for illegal fox hunting”. He also described illegal hunting as “prolific”.
The government has announced it will launch a consultation to ban trail hunting, though this has suffered delays.
Slawinksi added:
I would urge the public who are sick and tired of the behaviour of fox hunts to take part in the government’s hunting consultation.
The time for change is now. We want to see trail hunting banned, the loopholes in the law removed, the end of so-called ‘accidental’ hunting, and jail sentences introduced to act as a deterrent for those who would break new stronger fox hunting laws.
Featured image via the Canary
NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick to succeed him in the state Assembly cruised to an easy victory Tuesday night. But Diana Moreno’s win in that Queens special election is likely the last cakewalk we’ll see from a Mamdani-backed candidate in the near future.
The new mayor has endorsed Brad Lander in his quest to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for the NY-07 seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velázquez.
The pair of Democratic congressional primaries is expected to be far more competitive than Moreno’s race, raising a central question: How far can a Mamdani endorsement get you?
“We’re testing that out,” said Grace Mausser, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter, which has endorsed both Moreno and Valdez, but not Lander. “He has a lot of hard resources that come with an endorsement: his impressive volunteer and donor lists, his strong reach on social media … There’s also the soft power that we’re testing out now, right? Who is the leader of left and progressive politics in New York right now?”
Mamdani has so far been more involved in boosting Valdez than Lander.
The mayor appeared with Valdez — a Queens lawmaker, former United Auto Workers union organizer and the first elected official to stand with Mamdani in his campaign for mayor — at an event the day after she launched her bid. He also filmed a whimsical social media video set in a subway station to boost her fundraising.
Valdez is running against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president who Velázquez has endorsed as her preferred successor. Queens City Council Member Julie Won also recently entered the race in the progressive Brooklyn and Queens district.
The mayor has been largely hands-off in Lander’s campaign after endorsing the former city comptroller on the day of his launch for Congress. Lander, who cross-endorsed Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race, is running in Brooklyn and Manhattan against an incumbent with more than three times as much campaign cash on hand and the backing of Democratic House leadership, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
A political adviser to Mamdani said his team is still assessing how much to get involved in the two congressional contests and cautioned against reading anything into the fact that the mayor has been more involved in Valdez’s race so far. The adviser said the Mamdani team is waiting to make major moves in NY-10 pending the outcome of a court case that could scramble the lines of the district in such a way that Goldman may run in the neighboring 11th District instead.
Regardless, the Mamdani adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said the mayor simply lending his name to Lander and Valdez “already carries a lot of weight that these campaigns can make the most of.”
“His direct involvement is always going to be second to governing,” said the aide. “Ninety-nine percent of his energy is going to be focused on running the city.”
The politics-versus-governance balance is part of Mamdani’s clash with Velázquez, the highly respected progressive who effectively warned him in a New York Times interview to stay in his lane.
And the mayor does have a lot of work to do at the helm of the country’s largest city. June’s congressional primaries fall around the same time he and the City Council will be putting finishing touches on the city budget amid serious fiscal headwinds.
“I don’t know if that was the wisest thing for him to do because the job of being mayor is so big,” Democratic strategist Lupe Todd-Medina said, arguing Mamdani could end up in a situation where he’s not able to stump for Lander and Valdez as much as they want and need him to due to the sheer burden of governing New York City.
As June’s primaries still loom more than four months away, a Lander campaign official, granted anonymity to share sensitive considerations, said his team is also still waiting to see if a court decision could rip up the lines of NY-10.
But if the race ends up competitive, the Lander aide said his team is confident Mamdani will help fundraise and campaign for the former comptroller. The fact that Mamdani hasn’t done so yet, the aide said, is understandable since the mayor has been focused on governing in his first month in office.
The two House primaries have different dynamics but they’ll determine whether Mamdani can replicate the magic that catapulted him from relative obscurity to the nation’s second toughest job.
“He has a lot at stake by pushing in some chips on two fronts, but I think he has more at stake in the 7th District,” said Michael Lange, an analyst who specializes in progressive politics. Valdez “is a really close ally who comes from his political movement and his political home.”
The latest: Labour is preparing an archaic last-minute manuscript amendment to its own amendment to cave in to some of its MPs’ demands with regard to how much information on Mandelson should be released. It’s bedlam behind the scenes…
UK prime minister Keir Starmer is far from the only one who stuck by Peter Mandelson long after the scandal surrounding him became impossible to ignore. In the past few weeks, despite new evidence of Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein being made public, the BBC continued to offer him a platform. And still today, even as the extent of Mandelson’s alleged corruption, betrayal of trust and potentially criminal activity is made clear, it seems that the commentariat is prepared to come to his defence in sympathetic tweets, interviews and newspaper columns.
Starmer appointed Mandelson British ambassador to the US in 2024, despite knowing that the architect of New Labour had twice been forced to resign in disgrace from cabinet posts and had maintained a close association with Epstein. It took until September last year for Starmer to finally give him the boot, after emails were published showing Mandelson urging Epstein to ‘fight for early release’ from jail, following his conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
But while Starmer may have finally decided Mandelson was no longer fit for public life, the BBC took a different stance. Even after we had been treated to creepy photos of him in a bathrobe, casually chatting to his ‘best pal’ Epstein, Mandelson continued to be offered a cosy platform on the BBC. Just three weeks ago, on 11 January, he appeared on the BBC’s flagship Sunday morning politics show, where he was interviewed by presenter Laura Kuenssberg. Mandelson was given over half an hour to offer his take on the Trump administration, Greenland, Ukraine and the British government.
It was only in the final 10 minutes of the interview that Mandelson was asked about his relationship with Epstein. Even then, Kuenssberg threw him softball questions. This gave him a chance to offer a perfunctory apology to ‘the victims’, before giving his excuses. He told a credulous Kuenssberg that because he is gay, ‘he was kept separate from the sexual side of Epstein’s life’. Worse still, Mandelson – always the spin doctor – was able to present himself as a victim. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as a maelstrom of sex and scandal happened all around him.
This interview was no one-off. Just days later, Mandelson was at Broadcasting House again, this time being interviewed by Sarah Montague for Radio 4’s World at One. Once again, Mandelson got to present himself as an elder statesman turned commentator on global events, with the promise of moral rehabilitation via apologies and disclaimers. We have to ask why. Why did BBC producers and presenters think Mandelson worthy of this reprieve?
But the media’s special treatment of Mandelson does not stop at the BBC. Even now, when we know that the real scandal in the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein was not sex but money, knowledge and power, he is being fawned over by some commentators. This week, the former Conservative MP turned Times columnist, Matthew Parris, has been gushing over Mandelson, describing him as ‘a man of wisdom and judgement in all but the conduct of his personal affairs’. ‘Within his party he has been a seminal influence for good’, Parris continues, ‘on the right side of every important argument in the politics of the left’.
Labour’s one-time spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, has been defending him as ‘talented’. ‘There’s no doubt. If you push to one side the reasons for his resignations, he was an effective cabinet minister,’ says Campbell on the latest edition of his Rest is Politics podcast. Despite Mandelson being implicated in the biggest scandal to hit the British government in decades – allegedly engaged in corruption that makes ‘partygate’ seem like the tea party it really was – neither Campbell nor Parris can summon up the words to wholeheartedly condemn him.
There’s a reason for this treatment of Mandelson. His role in orchestrating New Labour’s success under Tony Blair means that, even today, he is given a free pass by establishment centrists. They either refuse to believe he has done anything terribly wrong, or think that the sleaze, alleged corruption and seeming acts of treachery were a price worth paying for getting their men into power.
The Mandelson affair raises questions not just about the prime minister’s judgement but about Britain’s entire political and media class. Far too many decades-old stalwarts of the Westminster-media pipeline are implicated in defending Mandelson long after his failings were manifest. Either they have grown so used to shouting ‘scandal’ over every cake crumb and undeclared payment, that they can no longer spot the real thing. Or they so firmly believe in the moral rightness of the centrist, technocratic political project that they see corruption as a price worth paying. In either case, it’s not just Mandelson, Starmer and the Labour government that Britain needs to be shot of, but their sympathisers and hangers-on in the media, too.
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