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Britain’s political scandals have acquired a peculiar quality. They don’t feel like ruptures in an otherwise healthy system, but small windows thrown open onto the machinery itself. A loan here, a consultancy there, a weekend on an oligarch’s yacht, a minister leaving office on Friday and returning on Monday as a lobbyist for the firms he once regulated. Nothing necessarily illegal. Yet each episode leaves the same impression: that the real life of the British state is conducted elsewhere, beyond the theatre of parliament, in private rooms where wealth and power recognise one another without introduction.
The Epstein-Mandelson affair belongs to this category. It’s shocking because it’s so familiar.
In Peter Mandelson – minister, fixer, envoy, consultant, intermediary between cabinet and capital – one sees the career of Britain’s governing caste in miniature. A stratum that long ago stopped representing the public and instead made politics a form of brokerage: arranging introductions, smoothing obstacles, managing the flows of other people’s money. Mandelson isn’t a deviation from the system. He is its most perfect expression.
As business secretary under Gordon Brown, Mandelson appears to have passed Jeffrey Epstein advance notice of market-moving events: details of a €500bn eurozone rescue deal hours before it became public; a confidential paper outlining £20bn of potential asset sales; and suggestions that Epstein coordinate with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to pressure the government over taxes on bankers’ bonuses. They were the sort of signals on which currencies swing and fortunes are made.
Mandelson’s actions are best understood as the logical expression of what he’s long represented. His most famous line – that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – is often remembered as a quip. In fact it was a doctrine. The role of government was no longer to discipline capital or direct investment toward national development. It was to reassure the wealthy that they would grow ever richer, and to manage the political consequences below.
The phrase is sometimes compared to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “let some people get rich first”. But Deng’s tolerance of inequality was tethered to a project of national development, productive capacity, and strategic state power. Wealth was a means to secure sovereignty. In Britain, enrichment became the end in itself. Industry hollowed out. Finance swelled. The state stopped building and started selling. Where Deng used markets to strengthen the nation, Britain used the nation to service markets.
This settlement required political engineers. Mandelson was chief among them. He worked to modernise Labour’s language and rewire its loyalties – to make the party safe for boardrooms, pliable to lobbyists, and hostile to any revival of its older commitments to trade unions or public ownership. When Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership threatened that order, Mandelson boasted that he worked “every single day” to remove him. The candour was striking. It revealed what had long been true: that the party’s most senior figures felt more answerable to capital than to organised labour.
After office came monetisation. Through lobbying firm Global Counsel, Mandelson sold what really matters in modern Britain – access. Global Counsel’s client list reads like a directory of corporate power: JP Morgan, Accenture, Palantir, Shell, Nestlé, Anglo American. The firm hired him because he knew the wiring of the British state – which minister to call, which rule to soften, which door would open quietly after hours.
In other words: how to translate public authority into private advantage.
Nor was Epstein incidental to this story. At the founding of Global Counsel, the financier reportedly provided introductions and business advice, connecting Mandelson to the wealthy networks the firm would later serve. A man who would later be exposed as a child sex offender and human trafficker moved easily in these circles. This isn’t a quirk of British politics. It reflects an oligarchic logic perfected elsewhere.
In the US, wealth and office interpenetrate and elite interests reliably shape policy while public demands rarely do – as two political scientists showed more than a decade ago. Billions flood elections each cycle. Lawmakers trade shares in the very sectors they regulate. Congressional portfolios routinely beat the market. US Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s disclosed investments, for instance, have produced roughly an 838% cumulative return over the past decade – the sort of outperformance less suggestive of genius than of proximity to power. Britain has adopted the same habits with less spectacle and smaller cheques.
Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.
The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.
While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.
Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital.
So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.
A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.
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US justice department accused of cover-up after lawmakers view unredacted Epstein files
(www.irishtimes.com)
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Water companies preying on benefits through the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) deductions regime are compounding poverty amongst their most vulnerable customers.
Amid soaring bills, rampant pollution, and rank profiteering, privatised water firms are getting away with this at welfare claimants’ expense.
And notably, it’s all within the context of layers of DWP-facilitated debt deductions that are leaving claimants unable to afford the bare necessities.
DWP and water companies entrenching destitution
The DWP enables private companies to chase people who owe them money via the welfare system. In August 2025 for instance, the department facilitated £24m in ‘third party’ deductions. These so-called third parties include landlords, energy companies, and local authorities (for council tax).
Water and sewerage companies can also do this. When an individual is in arrears to their water supplier, the company can apply to the DWP to deduct directly from their welfare payments. And as it stands, despite their appalling performance and rampant pollution, there are no restrictions on this.
Research has shown that the majority of Universal Credit claimants experiencing debt are in arrears with multiple parties. Notably, a report the previous Conservative government suppressed revealed in 2024 that nine in ten claimants with debt have more than one source of it. On average, they have four sources of debt. As many as half owe money to five or more different sources.
This is significant — because water bills are low on the pecking order for deductions. Notably, the DWP operates third party deductions on a priority list. It’s based on what the department determines poses a greater risk to claimants when they’re unable to pay. It puts water bills sixth, behind payments like rent arrears and gas and electricity bills.
Compounding layers of debt
As the Canary previously revealed, across an 18-month period, water companies have preyed on £32.4m in claimants’ Universal Credit. For the most recent twelve months (between September 2024 to August 2025), they’d nabbed £21.7m.
In that same 12-month period, the DWP and government were also making deductions to around three-quarters of households with third party deductions.
DWP data doesn’t provide an indication of how many households have multiple third party deductions. However, it’s safe to say that water company deductions would rarely come in isolation.
In other words, water firms are stripping vital social security from people who are likely among those with multiple oppressive debts.
Pilfering profits from the welfare system
The same suppressed DWP report also identified that more than two-thirds of Universal Credit claimants with debt had gone without food and essential items. Some claimants felt “so helpless” that they had considered suicide.
And water poverty statistics from Citizens Advice in September 2025 chimed with this. It found that companies had forced 42% of households to forego groceries and reduce their energy usage within the last year. Skyrocketing water costs caused more than a third to ration water during this time.
Of course, water firms continuing to ratchet up customer bills is driving all this. The report identified that more than a fifth got into debt with their supplier. Obviously, for welfare claimants, this is when the DWP’s relentless debt chasing mechanism can kick into gear.
So in applying Universal Credit deductions, water companies will only be making all this worse. However, it’s a cycle greedy utility firms are only too happy to maintain. Because at the end of the day, pilfering profits out of a public good is the privatised water industry in a nutshell.
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E-bike crashes account for almost 1 in 5 serious injuries to cyclists in London
(www.standard.co.uk)
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