George Monbiot on Blair, Starmer and the capture of democracy
This is from the excellent Democracy for Sale, which I recommend as one of the fastest-growing monitors of corruption in politics. Follow them here.
In this episode, Peter Geoghegan speaks to George Monbiot about how the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has been transformed since Oracle founder Larry Ellison began bankrolling it to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds.
Good points and information, but could be a bit clearer that there is no coherent ‘pro-business’ stance a government can take. Businesses and businesspeople have necessarily conflicting interests. The large, profitable businesses tend towards protecting their market dominance or monopolies, their government contracts, and so forth, which they pursue by lobbying. Small to medium enterprises have quite different interests as a rule. Exporters differ from importers. Local from transnational. Creatives from the AI corporates hoovering up their content. Free traders from protectionist interests. British politics have been partisan around these divisions for centuries (the Corn Laws were just one example). Many businesses thrive in highly-regulated (stable) jurisdictions, as during South Korea’s boom. Even under corrupt conditions, businesses have unavoidable competitions (for unshareable resources, for example, or opposed goals or methods).
So when a government favours one business segment, it is at the expense of the majority of other businesses. The striking aspect here, of course, is that successive UK governments (even the Scottish government) have favoured foreign businesses to an extraordinary extent, and particularly ones that do harm. I guess if they did good, they wouldn’t need lobbyists. You cannot have a ‘pro-business’ policy platform, that’s bullshit. There is always favouritism.
Very illuminating, this is such crucially important stuff. All power to the elbow of investigative journalists.
This is a tremendously interesting, informative and relevant video, that discusses how right-wing thing-tanks and lobbyists, secretly funded by billionaire capitalists, are able to shape the political agenda. Most of this is happening in London – Geoghegan and Monbiot do not directly refer to the Scottish political context at all. This made me wonder about the extent to which similar processes, that undermine democracy and the interests of ordinary citizens, are occurring in Scotland.
Is there any evidence on, for example, how think tanks have influenced the Scottish Government around issues such as use of the priorities of the fossil fuel industry, or land ownership? To what extent, and in what ways, were these forces instrumental in undermining the SNP-Green coalition? A couple of years ago, an analysis of Nicole Sturgeon’s office diaries (when she was First Minister) indicated that she held frequent meetings with representatives of big business (Graham, H. 2023. Diary of an SNP First Minister: A Chronopolitics of Proximity and Priorities. The Political Quarterly, 94(4), 547-555 open access article). However, what Geoghegan and Monbiot emphasise is that the power of right wing think tanks is not only exerted through access to Ministers, but through the willingness of the print and TV media to legitimate and run with their ideas.
In the run-up to the 2026 Hollywood election, it would be good to see a clear – and evidenced – commitment from the SNP around how it handles such influences, accompanied by an attack on the degree to which the Labour administration in London have perpetuated this aspect of UK political discourse.