Organise to end Labour austerity
Editorial of the Socialist, England and Wales edition, issue 1324
When chancellor Rachel Reeves steps up to the despatch box in parliament on 11 June to present her summer spending review, it will contain details of brutal austerity measures – huge cuts to day-to-day spending on services.
During less than a year in office, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has exposed itself as being, like the Tory government before it, determined to make the working class pay in service of the capitalist bosses’ profits.
Maintaining the cruel two-child benefit cap, the pensioners’ winter fuel payment cut, cuts to NHS England, attacks on disabled peoples’ benefits… On top of the already crumbling state of public services ruined by over a decade of Tory austerity, and the long, painful, relentless driving down of workers’ living standards.
Meanwhile, Britain’s super-rich have continued to amass vast wealth at our expense. The recently published Sunday Times Rich List details how Britain’s richest 350 individuals and families have a combined wealth of £772.8 billion. Since 2008, the rich list wealth has increased at a rate four times that of median UK household wealth.
Some Labour ministers have raised extremely modest tax proposals, not yet taken up by Reeves, to bring in up to £4 billion a year. Unite the Union points out that a 1% tax on assets of the richest 1% in society could raise £25 billion.
Reeves’s refusal, so far, to raise taxes on wealth is a sign of this Labour government’s subservience to the capitalist investors. Her motivation to stick to her ‘fiscal rules’ comes from complete subservience to the capitalist markets. Investors internationally hold Britain’s economy in low esteem, which could provoke another Liz Truss-style crisis, rapidly driving up government borrowing costs and risking triggering major financial crises.
Under pressure, a tweak to the fiscal rules or modest tax rises is likely, but will not be on the scale necessary to fundamentally change the course that is already set towards ongoing brutal austerity. And that is without further economic shocks that Britain is especially vulnerable to in an increasingly volatile world.
Any measures to take wealth and power out of the hands of the super-rich capitalist class should be supported. But Starmer’s government has made it absolutely clear that it is the bosses’ interests that it is there to serve. So there has to be a fight.
Strikes
The Birmingham bin workers’ battle is an example of a fight already under way. Workers face an £8,000 a year pay cut from a Labour council, and a strikebreaking operation assisted by the courts, the police, neighbouring councils – all backed up by Starmer’s government.
Within weeks of entering government, ministers were crowing about having ended national strikes in the public sector. In admission of the fact that striking works, Reeves described how the pay deals as being calibrated to a level which they judged would be enough to end strikes. The junior doctors’ determination to fight was the reason their pay was higher than across other sections of the public sector.
Now, the next pay offers from the government have been announced, short of what would be needed to address over a decade of shrinking pay in real terms, and unfunded.
Socialist Party members are fighting in the trade unions for strike ballots to be organised, for a decent pay rise, linked to the demand of full funding.
It is not an accident that, despite Labour’s promise to the unions that it would be abolished, the Tories’ anti-strike 50% turnout threshold remains.
During the 2022-23 strike wave, there were several days where strikes of different sections of workers were coordinated to take place on the same day. In 2011, in response to the Tory government austerity onslaught on public sector pensions, two million workers took strike action together in a public sector general strike.
Socialist Party members will be marching on the People’s Assembly demonstration on 7 June, but the fight against Labour austerity must be led by the unions themselves. A weekend demonstration, organised by the trade union movement in its own name, could be a step towards future coordinated strike action too.
A new party
If the 1 May local elections showed one thing above all else, it is that the Tories and Labour are extremely unpopular, unprecedentedly so. In those elections, a section of working-class people picked up the opportunity to vote for right-populist Reform UK to demonstrate their anger.
Now is the time for the trade unions to give a lead by taking steps towards developing their own political voice. Trade union support for a Labour government carrying out brutal austerity only serves to undermine the authority of our movement.
The petition launched by trade union activists ‘Time for trade unions to take the lead in forming a new working-class party’, signed initially by 25 current and former trade union executive members, should be welcomed. It can play an important role bringing together activists in the unions battling for a new party.
Labour signalling future U-turns on pensioners’ winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap is an indication that pressure can be applied. Fighting for and winning more can give confidence to working-class people to refuse to accept further austerity in all its forms.
Socialist change
The profit-driven capitalist system is crisis-ridden to its core, the world is increasingly volatile and unstable, and Britain is especially economically vulnerable. Unwilling to stand up to the super-rich bosses and unable to imagine the possibility of an alternative, Starmer and Reeves will continue to try to make the working class pay.
The alternative is for the working class to take wealth and power out of the hands of the capitalist class. By nationalising big business and the banks under democratic working-class control and management, the vast wealth and resources in society could be put to planned use to meet the needs of all and the environment.
Driven by competing profit interests and capitalist nation states, capitalism means war and conflict. A government of the working class in Britain would be able to act in solidarity with the working class internationally, laying the basis for socialist change and an end to war and oppression worldwide.
Stop the cuts
- Reinstate pensioners’ universal winter fuel payments
- No disability benefits cuts, scrap the two-child benefit cap. For real living benefits for all who need them
- No NHS cuts – fully fund services. Kick out the profit vultures. Make all health and social care public, under democratic control of workers, service users and communities
- Increase school funding per pupil to meet needs. No school closures, reduce class sizes. End academisation, bring schools under local democratic control
- No uni tuition fees rises, no course closures, no job losses. For free, fully funded education with living maintenance grants. Write off student debt
- Fully fund council services. Councils should set needs-based budgets, demanding funding from central government
Trade union action
- Fight for fully funded pay deals which begin to restore pay lost through Tory austerity – £15-an-hour minimum
- No public sector job losses
- Trade unions prepare to ballot now for national strike action
- Ditch the undemocratic 50% strike ballot turnout threshold. Scrap all Tory anti-union laws now
- For a Saturday national trade union-led demo against Labour austerity, as a step towards future coordinated action
A political alternative
- For working-class unity against the bosses’ division – no to discrimination and oppression
- For a new mass workers’ party – trade unions must act to build their own political voice, independent of Labour
- Renationalise energy, water, steel, rail, telecoms and mail, with compensation only on the basis of proven need, nothing for the capitalist bosses
- Take the wealth off the super-rich. Bring the big businesses and banks which dominate the economy into democratic public ownership, under workers’ control and management, to develop a plan of production to meet the needs of all and the environment
