As the US president-elect leads the way, elites elsewhere continue to prove they’ve abandoned those whom they are supposed to represent

As Keir Starmer struggles to come up with a credible explanation for having trousered over £100,000 ($128,860) worth of gifts from the unstintingly generous Lord Ali, a similar scandal has recently engulfed Australia’s Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. 

This is hardly surprising. Both leaders make much of having come from working-class backgrounds – Starmer endlessly refers to his toolmaker father, and Albanese talks about having grown up on a housing commission estate at the drop of a cloth cap. However, both prime ministers, and the parties they lead, long ago ceased to act in the interests of the UK or Australian working classes.

One clear indicator of this is that both Starmer and Albanese enthusiastically and greedily accept the largesse showered upon them by the global elites, whose interests they and their parties so ruthlessly protect.

In fairness to Albanese, it must be stated that the scale of grift that he has engaged in does not even begin to approach that of Starmer.

Nevertheless, Albanese has recently been accused of using his close friendship with now disgraced former CEO of the airline Qantas, Alan Joyce, to receive regular upgrades for him and his family over a period of decades. The sum involved amounts up to some $10,000 – small change compared to Starmer’s bundle of loot. 

Albanese also obtained a free Chairman’s Lounge membership for his young son – admittedly small beer compared to the luxury accommodation that Starmer managed to procure for his teenage son to study in.

The Albanese government has made a number of decisions favourable to Qantas –including restricting Qatar Airways’ access to the Australian market – and this has led to the criticism of Albanese’s longstanding association with Joyce.  

But Albanese’s troubles do not end there – a few weeks ago, the media revealed that he had recently purchased a $4.5 million cliff-top seaside mansion – hardly a good look when ordinary Australians are struggling to find houses to rent affordably, let alone purchase, and Albanese and his government are facing an election early next year. 

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The behaviour of Albanese and Starmer stands in strong contrast with that of former Labour leader Gordon Brown when he was UK prime minister. Brown refused to accept any gifts, and paid for all his personal expenses himself while residing in 10 Downing Street.

Brown apparently left office in debt – a fate that is unlikely to befall either Starmer or Albanese. 

One strange aspect of Starmer and Albanese’s fondness for accepting freebies is their mutual obsession with Taylor Swift – both are apparently ardent “Swifties” and free tickets to her concerts figure prominently in the lists of loot that they have both managed to commandeer recently.

That two prominent political leaders should profess adoration for such a vacuous pop star is surely an indicator of rank philistinism as well as capitulation to the vacuous and worthless popular culture that permeates the West at present.

Shameless greed, philistinism, and a strange fascination with Taylor Swift are not all that Starmer and Albanese have in common – they are also hopelessly inept politicians.

Starmer’s popularity and credibility have hit rock bottom just a few months after winning a very large parliamentary majority. Fortunately for him, he will not have to face the ire of the UK electorate for another five years.

Albanese’s first term – he was elected in 2022 – has been a disaster. His Indigenous Voice referendum suffered a crushing defeat, and his government has done nothing to alleviate the cost-of-living and housing crises that are currently impoverishing ordinary Australians. Albanese will struggle to hold on to office at next year’s election.

A few weeks ago, two former prominent Labor leaders publicly condemned Albanese’s Labor Party for having deserted the Australian working class.

In his memoir A Long March, former Labor senator and minister Kim Carr condemned the party for being “elitist and out of touch.” He asserted that the party had “deserted its blue-collar, low-income voting base” while embracing identity politics and acting in the interests of affluent inner-city elites.

Carr said Labor had become a party of “political grievance” while becoming dismissive of “those who were doing it tough.” He accused Albanese and the party leadership of political ineptitude, lacking “an active agenda and an ongoing policy formation” and “betraying the tradition of being a bold reformist party.”

Carr’s criticisms were echoed by former secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Bill Kelty, who admitted that “the left-wing of the Labor Party died a long time ago.” Kelty stated that the Albanese government was alienating working-class voters, had “failed to represent low-income workers,” and that it needed to formulate “an inspirational set of policies” if it were to avoid impending defeat at next year’s election. 

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Carr and Kelty’s critiques are undoubtedly correct – but it is unlikely that Starmer and Albanese discussed such matters recently when they met at the meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Samoa and engaged in endless photo opportunities together. 

Climate change was the main topic of discussion between the two prime ministers – “We have a leadership role on climate change,” announced Albanese after their meeting – and perhaps they found time to talk about Taylor Swift as well.

Be that as it may, unfortunately for both Starmer and Albanese, the political consequences of the “gentrification” of the Labor parties in the UK and Australia – which, in fairness to them, began long before they became party leaders – is already clear, and it does not bode well for the future.

The primary vote of both parties – now hovering around 30% – has been in freefall for some years, and in future they will find it increasingly difficult to form majority governments.

Even when in power, Labor governments will not be able to solve any of the pressing problems – both internal and external – that confront contemporary Western liberal democracies. 

That is because their inflexible commitment to global elite ideologies (including catastrophic climate change and identity politics) and the political ineptitude of their leaders make it virtually impossible for them to even begin to solve these problems. 

Political instability can, therefore, only intensify, as those groups that continue to be economically and culturally displaced by the global elites – most notably the traditional working class – continue to turn to populist parties – either of the right or left – who promise to reverse their displacement.

Nigel Farage’s Reform Party won seats at the recent UK election, and in Australia the Greens have recently adopted policies aimed at dealing with the cost-of-living and housing crises – including price controls, rent controls, the dismantling of monopolies and increased taxes on large corporations – in an attempt to reinvent themselves as a quasi-populist party. 

These developments can only exacerbate the chronic political instability that has given rise to them – because the UK and Australian Labor governments remain firmly opposed to any kind of genuine economic reform.

This is the key internal dilemma confronting liberal democracies in the West at present – and it cannot be solved by inept political leaders like Starmer and Albanese, who have been personally compromised by the global elites, whose interests they are determined to protect, no matter what the cost.

This analysis was confirmed by Donald Trump’s crushing victory in this week’s presidential election in America.

The Democratic Party, like the Labor parties in the UK and Australia, long ago ceased to represent the interests the American working class – white, black and Latino – and Trump has presided over a dramatic shift in the working-class vote from the Democrats to the populist Trumpian Republican Party.

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The American electorate firmly rejected Kamala Harris – a classic “diversity” candidate – who polled 10 million votes fewer than Joe Biden did in 2020 and, even in Democratic New York, Trump achieved swings of over 10% in some working-class electorates.

Bernie Sanders succinctly and correctly explained Harris’ defeat as follows: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”   

It is all very well for Starmer and Albanese to rail against Nigel Farage and the Greens – and for Kamala Harris to condemn Trump as a “fascist” – but it is their persistent refusal to contemplate genuine economic reform that has created the populist political backlash that Starmer, Albanese and Harris so fiercely condemn, yet utterly fail to understand.

If the Labor parties in the UK and Australia, and the Democratic Party in the US, are to act as effective stabilizing forces in the future – as they have done for the past century – they must discard the elite ideologies that they are currently wedded to and become, to use Kim Carr’s phrase, “bold reformist parties.”

And a good starting point might be for the leaders of those parties to develop some personal integrity and cease accepting lavish gifts from the global elites – because personally compromised leaders rarely, if ever, engage in bold reform. 

As the old Spanish proverb has it, “honor and money cannot live in the same purse.”