Four and a half million children, 31% of all kids, are suffering in poverty in Britain today. That is the highest total since records began.
Yet Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ Labour government is sticking to the benefits cap and two-child limit for tax credits that the Tories imposed on the poorest families.
Though it receives little attention, 1.6 million people in the UK are unemployed, 4.5% of all workers, while job vacancies are rarities. For under-25 year olds, the jobless rate is three times higher.
Yet Labour has frozen Universal Credit and told young people to stop ‘taking the Mickey’ and accept any job, no matter how bad the pay and conditions.
Wages are stagnant while inflation has climbed back up to 3.5%, with much higher increases in energy bills (6.4%), rents (7.4%) and water charges (26%).
Yet Labour expects NHS staff, teachers and council workers to accept cost of living pay ‘rises’ that barely keep pace with prices. In reality, the cost of living crisis is far from over.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Britain’s top 100 bosses received an average 11% pay rise to £6.5 million a year. The UK economy is the sixth largest in the world, worth £2.5 trillion every year. So why are we being put on rations, while the rich have money to burn?
Every worker, every trade union branch, every housing estate must get out on the streets on 7 June and demand from Labour: tax the rich to raise benefits and wages, and to rebuild public services.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is feeling the heat to turn pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance back on and the two-child cap off. Rachel Reeves is under pressure to bend or break her fiscal rules. Both might make tweaks to Labour’s plans in the Spending Review on 11 June.
Good. Millions of parents and pensioners would breathe a sigh of relief.
But the problem is, all this pressure is coming from the right. From Nigel Farage, who is opportunistically taking up the benefits cause and from the IMF and The Economist, who fear both a recession and a Reform-led government, which could ‘do a Liz Truss’.
We need to make Labour’s front bench feel our anger, the anger of the organised labour movement, pressure from the millions of trade union members. This can begin on 7 June with a massive, raucous and militant turnout on the People’s Assembly demo. But we need to go much further.
A united front
We need a real united front of mass forces to compel Labour to make a real U-turn, not a just tweak here or there.
Public sector workers should form anti-cuts committees in every workplace, cutting across union divisions, to agitate for strikes and occupations against every cut and closure. We must force the union leaders to speak out, to take their foot off the brakes and allow, no, encourage their members to take strike action over wages, benefits, pensions and demand ‘what it takes’ to rescue collapsing services.
Unionised workers should link up with community campaigns, Palestine solidarity organisations and anti-racist groups to form local action committees. These can amplify every struggle and unite to call ‘days of rage’ and direct action, as well as strikes.
And finally we need more rank and file organisation in every union, so we can pile the pressure on the union leaders to fight against Labour’s cuts—or take action independently if they refuse to.
There should be no holding back to defend an anti-worker Labour government. Better to put it into crisis than to betray millions of workers on the receiving end of their cuts.
