Tories Out – Build the socialist alternative

Editorial of the Jan/Feb issue of the Socialist – the paper of the Socialist Party Scotland

The opening shots of a lengthy general election campaign have been fired by the main capitalist parties in Scotland and Britain. 

The Tories are in crisis and heading for a huge election defeat. Unity has shattered as multiple factions emerge in a desperate bid to hold onto seats. Splits and divisions are growing over a range of issues – although Tory MPs are all in agreement that the working class should pay the price of the deepening capitalist crisis. 

Plummeting opinion poll ratings for prime minister Sunak mean it is odds-on that a Starmer-led Labour government will come to power this year. 

But Starmer has made clear that from day one a government he leads will act at the behest of the capitalist class, not the working class. 

Gaza

Just look at his backing for the Israeli government’s war on Gaza and particularly the priorities of US imperialism. Starmer’s actions are a carbon copy of Tony Blair’s slavish support for the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001.

Corbyn’s manifesto pledges of public ownership of mail, energy, and telecoms have all been ditched by Starmer. The overwhelming majority of anti-union legislation will remain on the books under a Labour government. ‘Fiscal responsibility’ – i.e. cuts – are the watchwords of a Labour leadership committed to capitalism. 

Starmer talks about an end to “politics fuelled by division”, to “moderate your political wishes” and to follow a “politics that aspires to national unity”. After a year in which workers have had to struggle together against the cost-of- living crisis while those at the top have continued to make massive profits, this amounts to putting aside our interests to keep the capitalist show on the road. 

Because despite what Keir Starmer says, working-class people do have a “common enemy” – the bosses that make massive profits out of us working for them each day. 

Socialist Party Scotland is fighting for workers’ action in the workplaces and trade unions to fight for the kind of collective action needed to get the pay rises we deserve. 

We are organising with others the steps necessary for a mass party that represents our class interests. And all of this comes back to the need to change society, for workers ourselves to run so- ciety on a democratic socialist basis.

This capitalist system is rotten to the core and we desperately need an alternative. So while millions will welcome the end of 13 years of Tory rule, the need to build a political force to represent the working-class majority is more urgent and acute than ever. 

trade unions 

The trade unions, with more than six million members across Britain, have been at the forefront of the working-class fight back over the cost of living crisis. And it is precisely the trade unions – or a number of key unions – that can resolve the complete lack of political representation by acting to build a new workers’ party. Socialist Party Scotland has championed such a demand for years and we will continue to do so in the run-up to the general election. 

One thing that will not change in 2024 is the unending squeeze on living standards faced by workers. Official inflation has fallen from its previous high point but prices are still rising way beyond the current levels of wages and benefits. The wave of strikes that we saw from the summer of 2022 on will therefore continue this year as trade unionists are forced to take action in pursuit of pay rises that at least match rising costs. 

With energy bills rising again in January 2024, the demands for the nationalisation of energy companies under working class control and management are as vital as ever. 

And the new Tory anti-union laws – the minimum service legislation – can also provoke action by the unions if it is used to try and prevent workers tak- ing action in the run-up to an election. 

The special congress of the TUC in December 2023 included developing “practical solidarity plans for unions actively engaged in strategies of non- compliance”, supporting “any worker subject to a work notice, including with support from across the trade union movement, if their employer disciplines them in any way”, and ensuring “that where any affiliate is facing significant risk of sanctions because of this legislation, we convene an emergency meeting of the Executive Committee to consider options for providing practical, industrial, financial and/or political backing to that union”. 

Workers’ action against the MSL can render it utterly ineffective, not least because the Tories are weak, divided and staggering towards election defeat. 

Starmer’s Labour and the neo-Blairites are clear that the working class will have to pay the price of the economic crisis. In this they are as one with the leadership of the SNP and their partners in crime, the Scottish Greens. 

The Scottish budget currently going through Holyrood is a finished recipe for the decimation of public services. The Scottish finance secretary, Shona Robison, has been explicit that: “We must reduce the size of the public sector”. And the scale of the cuts raining down on councils, the NHS and public services will do just that. Elected politicians must refuse to make cuts and set budgets to deliver for the needs of workers and communities. 

While the nationalists, with some justification, blame Tory spending cuts – in reality its their own refusal to stand up to Tory austerity, set no cuts budgets and build a mass movement for full funding for services that is also a major contributory factor in the crisis. 

Yet even under the SNP’s plans for independence it’s clear that cuts would continue. SNP first minister Humza Yousaf said recently: “I’m not selling independence as being an overnight change, that somehow the day after we become independent there will be rivers of milk and honey and the manna will fall from the sky. There will be challenges, of course, there will be difficulties.” 

And the reason for this is the SNP leadership are committed to the continuation of capitalism in an independent Scotland. While Yousaf is correct to say that in the UK “living standards are also abnormally low”, why would capitalist independence offer a route to increased living standards if wealth and economic power was left in the hands of the bosses? 

public ownership 

What would certainly offer a way forward to ending low pay, poverty and inequality would be bringing the major sectors of the economy into public ownership under workers’ control and management.

The immediate introduction of a £15 an hour minimum wage without age exemptions.

A massive programme of investment into housing, hospitals and public services to reverse decades of underfunding.

In other words socialist policies to transfer back to the working class the enormous wealth and resources stolen from them and then squandered by the capitalist elite. 

It is vital that policies like these and others are available at this year’s general election. Even if no new workers’ party is launched this year, Socialist Party Scotland will put forward candidates as part of the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition to offer that alternative. 

The building of a socialist alternative to the parties of capitalism is essential. The ongoing slaughter in Gaza and the denial of a genuine independent Palestinian state shows how the struggle for basic democratic rights are linked to the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. 

While making the case for the trade unions to launch a new workers’ party, Socialist Party Scotland is also appealing to young people and workers to join with us.

Help us build the fightback against capitalism and for a socialist future to end war, economic and environmental destruction.