It feels like we’re all enraged by the impunity of the powerful. This is one of those rare issues which unites people across the political spectrum. We fundamentally do not like it when powerful people do bad things and get away with it.
But it is bad for them as well. It may feel in the short term like impunity is working out great for you but most of the time, for most people, it is not working out for you at all but actually undermining you. Accountability isn’t just for the greater good – it is your friend, if you want to exercise power wisely.
This was what dominated my schadenfreude over Keir Starmer’s increasingly tenuous grip on power this week. I see him drowning and most certainly not waving and I think to myself ‘well this is what happens when you break the rules again and again and get away with it’. The loss of Mandelson and the head of strategy can be traced straight back to the liberal establishment amnesty that was issued as soon as Starmer took power.
There is nothing complicated about this. The liberal establishment in Britain hated Corbyn so much they were incredibly quick to justify any actions no matter how unconstitutional, immoral or incompetent, as long as it was for the ‘greater good’ of destroying socialism.
Usually in politics when you tell lies as utterly whopping as Keir Starmer did to win the leadership election (that he was going to maintain Corbyn’s policy agenda but implement it in a more orderly manner), the fact of your lie is mentioned. There is not a grain of truth in what Starmer said, and yet there was next to no accountability for it.
In fact I’ve read more than one Guardian article which actively excuses the lies as ‘unfortunate but necessary’. Why necessary? Because overthrowing party democracy to prevent anyone from the left of the political spectrum having any power at all ever was seen as a necessity, a foregone conclusion.
From there the free passes just kept coming. Commentators who were absolutely outraged at sitting Labour MPs being challenged from the left started quietly cheering when the right started to challenge sitting left-leaning politicians.
Lots of people were forced out through a range of dirty tactics, many of which breached the rules of the party. A very few honest commentators raised the alarm (Michael Crick, no leftie, leading among them – warning that purging the left would come back to haunt Labour). Most said nothing at all.
You got the impression that Starmer could be caught trafficking children for uranium mines and the British establishment would have looked the other way
The Starmer machine (which seems mainly to be a vehicle for resurrecting the political careers of failed Blairites) was intensely relaxed at bringing in figures many had assumed had had their day, given the poor legacy they left behind (and the fact that no-one wanted to mention their name for years). Again, the establishment basically cheered.
They rigged the party democracy to make a challenge from outside the party’s establishment impossible. Reporting of the current deputy leadership campaign takes this at face value, a problematic reality that is just ‘democracy’. Except it isn’t. This is a very recent construct designed for purely anti-democratic reason.
On and on and on this went. So desperate to get rid of Corbyn and then so desperate to get rid of the Tories, you got the impression that Starmer could be caught trafficking children for uranium mines and the British establishment would have looked the other way.
Of course, he won, and won everything in every possible way. The party is his, the parliament is his – corruption worked. Right up until it didn’t.
Across the Guardian in the last week there has been sanctimonious article after sanctimonious article asking why on earth Mandelson was appointed. At the time of his appointments there were loads of articles which were 90 per cent hagiographies to what a great move it was and what a star performer Mandelson was. Get your story straight guys.
The rest of us were basically waiting for what would bring him down. He’s a fundamentally corrupt sort of chap and his downfall always comes. I wasn’t sure what it would be because the liberal media already knew about his links with Epstein and had given him a free pass.
The same is true in spades with Paul Ovenden, the Corbyn-hating head of strategy at Downing Street. He was the guy who was spewing noxious views on Dianne Abbot which in any other circumstance the Guardian would describe as racist and misogynistic but for some reason has instead settled on ‘lewd‘.
They weren’t lewd, they were unprofessional and disgusting – and everyone knew about them five years ago. They were a finding in the Forde Report, the assessment of antisemitism and racism in Labour. It found that there was an antisemitism problem (though it was all Israel stuff and I wonder if they’d all stand by the accusations now…) that was at least being addressed (if inadequately).
The factional racism? The report made clear that that came well down the ‘hierarchy of racism’ and was clearly tolerated in Labour. An uproar it the media? Starmer’s racism crisis? Nope. No-one said a thing and are now acting vaguely surprised that the newly weakened Starmer outfit can’t shrug this kind of stuff off.
The taking of gifts, the knuckle-dragging attacks on disabled people, the poor and Gaza demonstrators, the language they use on immigration – they believed they could do absolutely anything because the right wing media would hammer them irrespective and the liberal media would whitewash it.
Moral hazard is morally hazardous for a reason
And look how that’s working out. Look at Sturgeon. There is a woman who operated with almost complete impunity, and she simply came to believe her own hype and failed dreadfully as a result. Look at Scotland’s public institutions. Again and again they get caught in scandal. Again and again the get away with it.
But they don’t get away with it, they do lasting, fundamental damage to those institutions. Trust is impossible where there is impunity.
Trump gets away with everything, yet his impunity is actually bringing a century of global dominance by the US to an end. At the moment it is not clear to me that the USA will survive as a single entity. That isn’t victory.
Look at Netanyahu – done the worse things a human can do and been protected at every turn. Yes, the Palestinians are the ones paying the immediate price, but for a new generation of people, Israels unique status as untouchable is over. Netanyahu is actively preparing Israel for economic and diplomatic isolation. Is that success?
Wealthy white men have been getting away with it without comeback for centuries. I don’t want to pretend that everyone gets the karma they deserve for their actions. But I refute the idea that any of them truly get away with it. One way or the other, they pay a price, in posterity if not in life.
I write about accountability a lot in terms of the wider public good, but that isn’t the whole story. Accountability has a very particular benefit for those being held accountable. It trains you to be better, to do better. Too much impunity is like too much chocolate – it may feel nice but it makes you fat and complacent, ill suited to lead or govern.
Moral hazard is morally hazardous for a reason. It damages us even as we damage everything else. Starmer is rubbish and no amount of accountability would have made him a good leader. But some honest scrutiny might just have put him on his toes enough that this national embarrassment of a government might have been somewhat less bad than it is.
So if you ever rise to the heights of power, that is the first advice I can give you. Find people who will tell you your wrong. And listen when you are held accountable. It is telling you something you need to hear.