Some 30 years ago,British politicsbecame, by design, a black box - an arena for moneyed power brokers to wield political influence hermetically sealed off from the view of voters.

Only now, with the release of a portion of theEpstein Files, is a dim light being shone into its recesses, indicating how completely the billionaire class has captured political life inBritain.

The process began in the 1990s, when then-Prime MinisterTony Blairreinvented the once democratic socialist Labour Party as "New Labour", accepting the neoliberal presumptions of his Conservative predecessor, Margaret Thatcher.

Blair progressively ditched traditional trade union support and instead turned Labour into a managerial party for capital, promising to serve the interests of the world's largest corporations.

The figure who personified this trend was Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour. In 1998, during a trip to Silicon Valley as trade secretary to meet newly emerging tech billionaires, he famously said: "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."

He likes to point out thathe added, "as long as they pay their taxes". But Blair and Mandelson helped engineer preferential terms that ensured tech giantsbarely paidany tax in the UK - all in the interests, of course, of "attracting investment".

Neither party had any incentive to call out the growing capture and corruption of British politics by the billionaire class

The problem was not simply that New Labour's priorities came to resemble the Conservatives'.

Nor was it only that Labour's cosying up to the super-rich drove the Tories ever further rightwards in an effort to distinguish themselves, a process that ultimately led to the Conservative Party's implosion and the emergence of a new pretender to the right's throne in the form of Nigel Farage's Reform party.

No, the gravest problem was that, as New Labour and the Tories vied equally for favour with the super-rich and the media outlets they owned in the hope of being ushered into office, neither dared reverse the economic windfalls the billionaires had accrued.

Source: Global Research