Editorial
KEIR STARMER won his landslide election victory by promising change. Halfway through his first 100 days he has made it clear this change will be for the worse. ‘Frankly, things will get worse before they get better… There is a budget coming in October, and it’s going to be painful. We have no other choice’.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has already announced plans to means test pensioners receiving the winter fuel allowance, leaving millions facing a choice between heating and eating. The hated two-child benefit cap which plunges 1.6 million children into poverty, however, will stay.
Starmer and Reeves blame the Tories for the £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the government’s finances. However, Labour well knew the mess they would inherit, just as they knew who they would force to pay for it: those already suffering the most—the working class. While they have ruled out tax rises on working people, the Tories’ ‘stealth tax’, freezing tax thresholds, will remain in place.
Meanwhile it is widely reported that the rich are moving their money around to escape any increase in capital gains or inheritance taxes. Council tenants cannot move so easily. Labour’s promised home building programme will be paid for by a 10% increase in social rents over the next decade.
When it comes to the racist riots that hit Britain’s streets the weeks after the election, home secretary Yvette Cooper’s only reaction was to call for ’swift justice’ and a police ‘reckoning’ for those involved. Starmer claimed the racists knew the prisons were overcrowded and ‘gambled’ on setting hotels on fire with impunity. But the racist rabble who engaged in these rampages were acting on the years of propaganda pumped out by Tory and Labour politicians as well as the press.
These mouthpieces of the ruling class blame the lack of decent housing, jobs and services on migrants and refugees. Immigration has long been presented as the major cause of social problems, to deflect attention from the privatisation and spending cuts carried out by successive, Labour and Tory governments. Continuing this tradition, Yvette Cooper has announced a ‘summer blitz’ of immigration raids, while Reeves prepares austerity mark 2.0.
Labour in office has always been a staunch defender of Britain’s imperialist interests, as proven in Ireland, Malaysia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Starmer is proud to be called a friend of Israel even while it carries out a genocide. Labour has recently softened its pro-Israel statements, but this is no more than presentation to mollify its outraged former voters in Muslim communities, and the millions of people who have demonstrated in support of Palestine.
Starmer’s first foreign engagement as PM was to attend the Nato summit, where he assured the assembled Western powers that a change of government meant no change in policy. He urged all Nato states to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP (in the UK, £80 billion a year).
Yes, foreign secretary David Lammy restored the UK’s payments to UNRWA, but this amounts to just £21 million, half of which goes to the corrupt and hated Palestinian Authority. Lammy has promised a ‘judicial review’ on the legality of selling weapons for a genocide; meanwhile, arms exports continue as before.
At each turn Labour is constrained by its own contradictions. Unlike the Tories it has to offer some reforms to its main, though diminishing, social base in the working class. Much of this is channelled through the trade union bureaucracy and reflects the interests of this bloated caste, taking the shape of minor reforms around the edges of the anti-union laws.
However, at root Labour is an imperialist capitalist party, at home and abroad. The only social force capable of restraining them is the organised labour movement. That is why Workers Power urges all trade unionists and working class activists to demand Labour changes course, makes the bosses pay for their crisis and stops supplying Britain’s armed forces and Israel’s terror regime. We call on the TUC and all unions to fight all cuts and closures with individual and coordinated escalating strikes.
Most of all, we turn to the rank and file workers, because they are the ones who can turn the tables on Labour. Union branches, social movements like those for Gaza and against racism and, where they exist, local left wing Labour parties must come together in a mighty fist to hit back against Labour’s reactionary policies. To succeed, we need to build committees of action to link the struggles, and a new, revolutionary party to lead them to victory.
