Nigel Smith
On the 12th October it will be 100 days since the current Labour government came to power with a huge parliamentary majority but a paper-thin popular mandate. It benefitted from a collapse in support for the Conservative Party, with their worst election showing for 200 years and some success for the right-wing Reform Party with 5 MPs, which suckered the most reactionary Tories into supporting it. There was also increased support for the Greens (four MPs) and Left independents (four MPs).
Τicking time-bomb
Since being elected there has been a brief honeymoon period, where the unions, especially those who give funds to the Labour Party, are waiting to see if Labour will deliver on its meagre election promises. UNISON (public service union) has been quick to recommend acceptance of the pay deal offered by the government’s pay review body. The promise made by Labour to honour the recommendations of the eight government Pay Review Bodies was used as an incentive to support Labour by trade union leaders, as the Conservative government had refused to honour the recommendations of these bodies. The agreement to honour the findings of these bodies was in fact giving crumbs to the workers who had fought for months for improved pay and had taken widespread and sustained strike action. Most groups of workers had settled for the, below inflation pay deals except rail workers and junior doctors. The junior doctors continued militancy saw them extract a 22% pay deal from the incoming Labour government. This has in-turn resulted in the nurses rejecting the new Pay Review Body settlement by a two thirds majority, seeing their earlier readiness to settle last year as a strategic mistake. They do not blame the junior doctors for continuing their action but resent the fact that their previous reasonableness was seen as weakness and exploited by the government. If the nurses now decide to re-commence strike action and win an improved settlement it will surely inspire other health and public sector workers to do the same in the next round of wage negotiations which are not too far away. The teachers’ and civil service unions are already in the process of consulting their memberships.
This is a ticking time-bomb for Labour. There is already dissatisfaction with Labours performance and broken promises since being elected. Their promise to reform employment law, looks to be watered down almost daily. Already the pledge to get rid of zero hours contracts and fire and re-hire has been diluted. The new phraseology being used now by Labour is: “banning exploitative zero-hours contracts” and banning fire-and rehire except in “very limited circumstances”. As Sharron Graham (General Secretary of the UNITE union) puts it, Labour’s employment plans have “more holes in them than Swiss cheese”. This is simply the start of the roll back on promises to workers which are being made to keep big business happy rather than meet the needs of workers.
Gifts and hypocrisy
There has also been the first resignation from the Parliamentary Labour Party by Rosie Duffy, the Canterbury MP, who accused the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, of hypocrisy for receiving personal gifts from big businesses whilst imposing austerity. Starmer has made it clear that austerity is set to continue and councils all over the country are set to impose reduced budgets with little if any new money coming from government. Starmer has been forced to declare significant gifts of boxes for football matches and concerts as well as gifts from other “friends”, amounting (according to The Guardian) to over £100,000 in the last five years. It is particularly sickening to discover the extent of favours given to Starmer when one recalls, as opposition leader the way he attacked Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for similar behaviour. When Starmer goes to support his beloved Arsenal, he is not mixing with the ordinary fans, although the price of tickets excludes any but the better-off, he is mixing with the other beneficiaries of such gifts who represent the elite and big business. They are the people he identifies with.
Austerity
Two measures that the government was prepared to announce prior to the budget which is due on 30th October were to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners and continue with the two- child benefit cap. Both of these measures show the way that Labour views the poor and aged. Children living in poverty (there are four million such children in the UK) will remain in poverty and the winter fuel allowance could, according to Labours’ own figures, result in 4,000 additional deaths for the elderly. The child-benefit cap is seen as unaffordable, when in fact it’s a tiny amount when set against the government’s overall budget. Anyway, the winter fuel allowance will only be paid to the very poorest of pensioners. Cutting the winter fuel allowance shows a crude failure to understand the benefits of universalism. The Labour government is prepared to take £300 a year from the rich by removing this benefit but will not confront them fundamentally by increasing general taxation of the better off. In Scotland the SNP is prepared to allocate more resources to alleviating poverty. More than half a million children could be lifted out of poverty if the Westminster Labour government matched the Scottish child payment of £26.70 per week but the October budget is unlikely to enact this humanitarian measure, preferring to allow tax-breaks for the rich and powerful. Recently, Starmer also announced new measures to tackle benefit fraud, rather than emphasising the tremendous amounts spirited away by tax evasion and loopholes.
Labour has also abandoned a commitment to freeze tuition fees with it looking almost certain that they will increase at least in line with inflation. This might be good news for the universities but will discourage even greater numbers of working-class students from opting for university, making them even more elitist. It further reinforces the business model being applied to universities as well as the NHS with huge sums of money being spent on advertising and media, as universities compete for students, rather than spending the money on teaching and learning.
Gaza
Labour’s position on the situation in Gaza has also not changed and those in the Labour Party who are trying to stand by the Palestinians are being ignored. Labours’ racist immigration policy that panders to the rhetoric of the right, emboldens racists and increases racial tension by describing the migrant situation as a crisis and planning to deal with it in authoritarian and bureaucratic ways rather than following the more humane approach suggested by the PCS (civil servants union). The PCS along with the charity Care for Calaise, recommends processing refugee and asylum applications on the continent as happens already with applications from Syria, Hong Kong and Ukraine. Applicants from these groups are not forced to use gang masters and consequently drown crossing the English Channel.
When the far-right took to the streets in August, it was ordinary British people who stood up to them and forced them off the streets without the support of Starmer’s government or initially the police. However, it was Starmer who tried to take the credit. It is worth noting that further anti-terror legislation is being sought and the attack on free speech was fully realised at the Labour Party Congress last month when a heckler was throttled and thrown to the ground for shouting “We are still selling arms to Israel, I thought we were voting for change”. In response to another heckler, Starmer highlighted the fundamental shift to the right in the Labour Party by cynically remarking, “His pass must be from the 2019 conference”.
New budget
When one looks at the Labour Parties’ manifesto it begins with two big ideas. The first is an emphasis on serving the nation and the second on hard work. It uses the national flag and celebrates loyalty to it and the institutions of state, including the Royal Family. An emphasis on patriotism and nationalism is worrying because the Labour Party was a party that, in words at least, championed the poor and minorities as well as, to a limited extent, welcoming migrants. Harking towards nationalism serves to further embolden the forces of reaction.
When it comes to the economy, Labour has vague ideas about increasing investment in building new houses, building the Green Economy and increasing industrial output. There are few concrete ideas about where the finance for increased expenditure on the economy might come from. In the area of housing for example where Labour has pledged to build 1.5 million homes, Peter Foster from the Financial times highlighted the realities facing the new government which “despite issuing strong rhetoric made no new announcements or strategies to address many of the key delivery issues from construction skills shortages to the ability of local authorities to take on greater planning workloads”.
Rachel Reeves (chancellor) at the Labour Party Congress, apparently contradicting Starmer, said there would be no return to austerity. However, she suggested that the Treasury becomes more flexible in its interpretation of what constitutes debt, in order to allow greater spending. It remains to be seen whether the Treasury can be convinced but looking to private finance again raises the horrors of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and the terrible cost that they brought to the UK economy. PFIs put finance in charge with interest rates that were exorbitant and crippling for the institution persuaded to agree to these deals.
Once the budget is announced it will be easier to assess the economic direction Labour will take. From much of what was detailed above it seems unlikely that working-class people will benefit much from any of their proposals. The NHS will remain under-funded and infiltrated more and more by private companies; the Green New deal will face under-investment as well. Labour’s new state-owned energy company GB Energy looks like a drop in the North Sea, in terms of significance and promises of state control of rail transport have yet to be realised. Most of what Labour introduces will be to serve profit and they could hardly do a worse job than the previous Conservative administration. The energy companies are being allowed to increase charges by 10% at a time when energy bills amount to a significant percentage of inflation. We should not see the few “progressive” ideas as persuasive. They are tinkering around the edges of capitalism from what is now a fully realised capitalist party. In any event, as has been proved repeatedly across Europe and the rest of the world, the only option for capitalism is to crush the organised working class, to secure profit through the exploitation of labour.
A new party?
There remains discussion on the Left in the UK as to whether one should remain in Labour and fight or try to work outside Labour and build a new party or opposition. The independent MPs in Parliament are working together and others on the Left try to find a way towards a new worker’s party. A new organisation, Collective, met on September 15th to discuss the possibility of a new party with: Jermey Corbyn, Len McCluskey the former Unite General Secretary, film director Ken Loach, the former mayor of North of Tyne Combined Authority, Jamie Driscoll, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman and other prominent Left figures present. The discussion was at this stage tentative with opinions divided on the timings for and the structure of such a party.
The budget on October 30thmay give a green light to some of the unions and certainly many ordinary working people and Labour Party members, to abandon the Labour project and begin a new one. The discussion in last month’s Socialism Today on whether the Labour Party can be reclaimed as a progressive party by the Left, between Clive Heemskerk and Chris Robinson was of interest. I think Heemskerk is correct to write, “Blair’s transmutation of Labour was not just a quantitative ‘swing from left to right’ but a qualitative change in its character into a capitalist party”. The failed Corbyn experiment has if anything made the Labour Party even more determined and ruthless in its defence of capitalism and the existing establishment.
