While attending the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, a Pacific island which is drowning because of climate change, Keir Starmer reacted to the Israeli bombing of Iran with his now stock answer - that “Israel has the right to defend itself”.
He then added in the same breath, that “Iran should not respond”. So, Iran does not have the same right as Israel has, to defend itself. That in a nutshell, illustrates the unequal, asymmetric “class” relations which British imperialism imposes - behind the USA, as always - on the world today.
Maybe the 56 countries whose leaders came to Samoa to bow to the British King are no longer colonies in the same sense as a hundred years ago, but if they are petitioning for slavery reparations today, one thing is certain: they are poor, under-developed countries, and still subject to the “master and servant” relationship of yesterday's colonialism.
Of course, rich western countries like Britain claim to operate a system of “enlightened capitalism” where all countries are regarded as equal under the sun - with of course, the notable exceptions of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea... the designated “pariah states”which remain outside the club - and by the way, not even by their own choice.
This is a form of racism. The rich imperialist European countries who divided up the world between themselves at the Berlin conference in 1884-1885 - and then redivided it by conducting two world wars, not only still dominate the world (now under the wing of the USA, of course), but dictate who wins and who loses in every single conflict which arises today. They maintain and reinforce all the old inequalities in order to keep the lion's share of the planet's wealth for themselves just as they did 140 years ago.
The tragedy of the past however, has today turned into the horrific and macabre caricature of so-called “self-defence” by the imperialist-backed Israeli state against the Palestinians of Gaza and the Lebanese population. Any sane person can see what is really happening: the super-powerful literally wiping out the powerless, in one of the worst ironies of history. The former victims of a racist holocaust, now becoming the perpetrators of a racist holocaust, with the weapons provided by the same imperialist world leaders.
This is the “big picture” which Labour's Keir Starmer, as Britain's latest prime minister, presides over. And while it has - at least for the working class - long been accepted fact that there is no real difference between Tory and Labour when it comes to the “small picture”, that is class relations on the ground here in Britain, it is also true that today's Labour is the most explicitly pro-business, right wing and unequivocally “patriotic” that has ever got into government. Starmer’s relentless campaign to “win” at all costs took place under giant Union Jacks; this was the backdrop to his party conference, when by contrast, the “unionist” Tories opted for a plain blue background with the slogan “renew and rebuiId" - and no flags in sight!
The first and the twelfth
Starmer is leading only the 12th Labour government in British political history. Since the party's launch in 1906, Labour has managed to “rule” for a total of just 33 years out of 118. As it happens, 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of its very first government.
Like Starmer’s today, Ramsay MacDonald's government which took office on 22 January 1924 had not won a majority popular vote. It was handed power by “Royal appointment” and in fact allowed to rule for just 9 months before it was kicked out. Starmer, on the other hand, can anticipate a full 5-year term, failing an extraordinary event - which given the state of the world, probably cannot be ruled out.
There are other interesting parallels with 1924, proving that there is nothing new under the sun - or rain(!) - when it comes to the turning circle of bourgeois politics; a circle which gets ever-smaller as the capitalist system degenerates further. For instance, it was a “snap” election, called on 6 December 1923, by Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin which led to Labour's unexpected, albeit brief, good fortune. In the face of world economic crisis, Baldwin had decided to impose a protectionist policy (read Brexit), ending “free trade". This split his party down the middle. The result of this election was a hung parliament: the Tories won 258 seats, Labour 191, with Asquith's Liberals scoring 158 and holding the balance of power. Since Asquith was unwilling to form a coalition - neither with Labour, nor the Tories - Baldwin, after losing a no-confidence vote on 8 January 1924, was obliged to ask a (very!) reluctant King George V to appoint Labour's MacDonald in his place.
Now jump to 2024, and Rishi Sunak’s 4 July “snap” election, a split Tory Party, the discrediting of Tory economic “expertise”, thanks to Liz Truss (mentioned ad nauseam), and, after 14 years out in the cold, Labour is back in business - and as we will see, literally so!
Winning by default
Of course Starmer credits his victory to his own root and branch “transformation of the Labour Party". Certainly, he effectively “cleansed” it of the last vestige of left-wing, “socialist” Corbynism and indeed, of Jeremy Corbyn himself. For good measure, he endowed this new-born party with one of the most right-wing manifestos in its history, in order to out-Tory the Tories and convince the capitalist class that Labour was fit to govern.
Whether all that effort was necessary is another question. After Brexit failed to bring Utopia on one island, despite Boris Johnson's 2019 promise; after the privations of the pandemic; after the collapse of the NHS; with rising poverty due to the worst cost of living crisis since the Great Depression, undoubtedly the party in government which presided over this series of near-disasters, was very likely to be thrown out.
But what says it all about the evolution of electoral consciousness (one would hope), is that there was very little conviction among voters that any of the parties standing in the 4 July election this year, would deliver the change which all of them promised.
Turnout was just 59.8%. Thanks almost entirely to the first-past-the-post voting system, Labour was able to win, despite getting just 22% of the popular vote, or 34%, if voter abstention is disregarded. The upstart Reform Party (the latest version of the UKIP/Brexit Party) of Nigel Farage, managed so effectively to split the right-wing vote, that the Tories won just 121 seats, with the lowest vote share (24%) in a general election since 1832. They lost 244 seats compared to 2019 when Johnson won his “landslide"! Farage's far-right, anti-immigration, anti-EU Reform found itself with 5 elected MPs.
Nevertheless, Starmer was credited with a “landslide victory”! Sure, Labour took 412 seats out of the Commons’ total of 650 - just 6 fewer than the 418 seats which gave Tony Blair his unprecedented, “historic” majority in 1997. But Starmer has only the skewed voting system to thank and nothing to be proud of. His re-invented party leadership secured fewer votes overall than Corbyn's did in 2017 and 2019 and, in fact, the lowest vote-share of any party, right or left, which has formed a government since WW2!
The tax taboo
Many of Labour's critics (and even its admirers) would say that the party needlessly boxed itself in by veering so far to the right, in order to make itself electable.
Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised that, once elected, just like the Tories, they would not resort to tax increases to provide funding for cash-starved public services. They would rely on “growth” of the economy, no matter how long it might take. There would be no increase in taxes on “working people” and the tax on corporations' profits would remain untouched; nothing would be done to disturb the peace of big British business.
But then the notorious £22bn black hole was discovered in public finances - apparently a big surprise, although the Institute of Fiscal Studies says the deficit was no secret, and for sure, the IFS should know, and so should Reeves... Anyway, as it points out, Labour had supported the cut in National Insurance Contributions made by Tory Chancellor Hunt in April this year, which had “cost” tax revenues almost exactly equal to the black hole...
Today Reeves claims that now the “black hole” has grown to £40bn. A transparent justification (but did she even need it?) for her to go back on her word and increase taxes. Everyone knows that the dire state of the “broken” NHS alone, requires huge financial input to get it back onto its feet. However, what Reeves has done so far, (at the time of writing, she has not yet delivered her budget) is to change the government's fiscal rules and deduct assets from the deficit column, which could give her an extra £50bn to play with, in the nick of time.
Nevertheless the mood music remains: “things can only get worse”, as Starmer warned in his conference speech this September. Austerity is due to arrive this winter. But apparently there is light at the end of the tunnel. Labour subscribes to the same cloud cuckoo land as the Tories, imagining that Brexit Britain is somehow insulated from the global economic crisis and that its policies for economic “growth” are actually going to work...
Hitting the poorest
Already Reeves and Starmer have gone so far as to make the Tories appear to stand to their political left! By abolishing the universal winter fuel allowance of £200-300 for 10 million pensioners within 100 days of taking office, many would say that they have blotted Labour's copy book with indelible blue ink.
Sunak, now “leader of the Opposition” stood up in Prime Minister's Questions, and demanded that PM Starmer produce an “impact assessment” of how many deaths might result from hypothermia, as the elderly choose between eating and heating. Previous such assessments had put the figure at just under 4,000. And this, to “save”just £1.3bn in 2024/25 and £1.5bn in following years! Hardly a drop in the £40bn blackness which Reeves is meant to plug!
A whole gamut of respectable bourgeois economists - including Martin Wolf of the Financial Times - have been offering Reeves their advice, suggesting that there was no shame in going back on her word and raising taxes, rather than making rash cuts which hardly help boost the economy and which hit the most vulnerable in society... And also concurring with the tweak she is making to fiscal rules, to give herself more “room for manoeuvre”.
Wolf's pre-budget advice was that she first of all, had to offer “hope that better times are coming”. But he also went on to outline what bad shape the British economy is in. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the “UK economic activity is 36% lower than it would be had it continued to grow in line with its 1997-2008 trend”(i.e., when Labour's Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were running the show, before the 2008 banking crash). Wolf points out that “the shortfall in the Eurozone is only 31%, despite its internal financial crisis; and in the US, the shortfall is 24%. Worse, UK GDP is well below even its already poor 2014-19 trajectory. And worst of all, the latest 10-year average of growth in potential GDP per worker is zero, the lowest in one and a half centuries, apart from the short-term impact of the end of the first world war and Spanish flu”.
So what is to be done in his view? After a complicated analysis which is incomprehensible to the rest of us, Wolf concludes that “for the more fundamental (and related) needs of long-term growth, (...) tax reform and higher taxation”are required. He also advocates “substantially higher contribution rates for pensions. If savings rates did rise, it would be much easier to fund higher domestic investment”.
So, no tax rises for working people, plus higher pension contributions? Reeves is of course going to follow (and keep following) the advice of the bourgeois economists, without doubt. And of course the working class has few illusions or expectations from her “government for the bosses”. But in the context of an unrelenting cost of living crisis, and 14.4 million living under the poverty line (1 in 5!), she and her boss Starmer know very well what the risks are if they take from the many to give to the few... With everything “broken” (Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s description of the NHS), how can workers be expected to swallow Labour's austerity or its so-called “tough choices”?
Where are our rights?
The quid pro quo for workers was meant to be the Employment Rights Act - but in fact there's hardly anything in it which is actually guaranteed. Implementation is going to depend on consultation with the bosses, who will get the final say - which doesn't stop them from crying foul, of course.
Ministers claim it closes loopholes which “unscrupulous” businesses use to exploit workers. But it conveniently leaves others wide open. So companies will still be able to “fire and rehire" if they face “immediate risk of bankruptcy”. And since their books are closed, who's to say otherwise?
Higher wages? Security at work? Only “exploitative” zero-hours contracts are to be banned - and that definition is up for grabs. The “new rights from day one”, like claims against unfair dismissal, paternity leave, or the pittance of statutory sick pay statutory (£116.75 per week), may cause Talk Radio presenters to froth at the gills, but workers know how carefully these token and minimal concessions were chosen. A “work placement” can still be ended at a moment's notice; sacking is perfectly legal during probation periods, extendable to 9 months.
As for taking bosses to Tribunals, which is supposed to be made easier - the waiting list is 2 years; and anyway, few workers ever win a case. The government has announced a plan to create a new Fair Work Agency, “bringing together existing enforcement agencies and extending their powers”, which they claim will alleviate the burden on tribunals. But so far nobody knows how.
The Business Ingratiation Summit
Three months into Starmer’s government there could have been no better illustration of the nature of his ruling outfit and the image it wants to project, than the “International Investment Summit”. held in London's Guildhall on 14 October.
It was a great success! Multiple CEO clones turned up from all around, although the only two which Starmer chose to name in his welcome speech were the giant US-based financial asset manager, BlackRock and... Amazon!
He boasted of how their promise of investment showed confidence in Britain's growth potential. But neither BlackRock nor Amazon is known for producing actual value in the real economy - certainly not directly. BlackRock is a giant stockbroker/private equity company which plays with the money (indeed, it's trillions!) of big and small capitalists. As for Amazon, while it stores and distributes goods which others make, it makes very little itself (the Kindle..?). In fact, given that most solid productive activity has long since been relegated to cheap labour providers in the Far East, Britain's economy is almost entirely propped up by the parasitic financial wheeling and dealing originating in companies and banking headquarters physically located in London's City (and Canary Wharf), even if much of their activity these days takes place “virtually”...
The minor hoo-hah-hah when Louise Haigh, the bright-red-headed Transport Secretary made the mistake of insulting one of the Summit invitees, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of the Dubai-based DP World which owns P&O Ferries, was soon put aside. Haigh quite rightly called P&O a “cowboy operator” and criticised “rogue bosses” who use fire and rehire to cut the cost of their wage bills. In 2022 P&O's CEO had fired 800 British workers by video-link, employing overseas agency workers in their place, at £1.80/hour (!) - perfectly legally, since British employment law didn't cover them (but even if it did, many such rogue practices would still be “legal")! The insulted Sultan was ready to withdraw a promised £1bn investment in the tax-free, Thames Gateway Freeport. But Reeves stepped in to explain that it was “not the view of the government” that DP World was in any way “rogue” and the Sultan's departure was averted...
In the end the government claimed it had promises for £63 billion which would create 38,000 jobs, “turbocharging (!) growth and innovation across the country”. Jonathan Reynolds , Starmer’s business secretary calls this the “stability dividend" which Britain needs. As the satirical magazine, Private Eye pointed out, last year, foreign investment (an instability dividend, they ask?!) into the British arms industry was quite a lot more, at £74bn...
Anyway, £58bn of the £63bn is to be invested in data centres and energy (£12bn is for Scottish Power's windfarms). Amazon's £8bn data centre supply chain might create 14,000 jobs, but over several years. Blackstone's £10bn AI data centre (4,000 jobs but 1,200 of them will be temporary - constructing the site) had already been promised before the growth summit, as had the £8bn promised by BP, Eni and Equinor for carbon capture - but they are actually getting a £22bn government subsidy (!) over 25 years for this apparently “uncertain” technology. So much for boosting growth of the real economy.
Not Blairism, but Thatcherism?
Telecoms billionaire, John Caudwell who made his wealth out of “Phones 4u", gave the summit a rave review on Times Radio the next day: “I've not witnessed such an environment of adventurous thinking and commitment to business since Maggie Thatcher...”, he told veteran presenter Andrew Neil, “The whole thing about the Labour Party is surprising... it's almost like I'm (sic) stayed with the Tory Party”.
Maybe there were some among Labour's backbenchers who wished Mr Caudwell would have curbed his enthusiasm and shut up. But it was just this kind of glib optimism which Starmer hoped would compensate for the dark tunnel-effect of the widely-leaked austerity budget.
Labour's Chancellor Reeves on the other hand, must have been unambiguously delighted by Caudwell's reference to Thatcher. She speaks admiringly of the so-called “Iron Lady", repeating the dubious cliche that she “smashed the glass ceiIing” for women in politics. And there has been mutual admiration: Conservative Party grandee Ken Clarke (an ex-Chancellor himself) and the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney (who voted Labour) both complimented Reeves for her “iron-clad” fiscal policy.
The loss of illusions?
The capitalist press points to Labour’s “shaky start” in government. The Economist illustrated this on its front cover with a picture of Starmer standing in water up to his knees, headed “that sinking feeing”. He has already had to pay back thousands of pounds in gifts given to him prior to the general election: apparently this year alone, Labour peer, Lord Alli, gave him £19,000 worth of “work clothes and several pairs of glasses” as well as free accommodation to allow his son to study for his GCSEs in peace, away from the family home and the hubbub of the general election!
Starmer has also had to “accept the resignation” of his controversial chief of staff, the high-flying and highly-paid civil servant Sue Gray (£170,000 pa, more than the PM himself) - although he immediately rehired her as “envoy to the regions and nations”, whatever that means.
This sacking (which is what it really was) has made way for a new advisor, Morgan McSweeney, who was impatiently waiting in the wings. He, presumably, wouldn't have allowed Starmer to accept all those gifts from rich donors...
McSweeney is Starmer’s version of Dominic Cummings, the Boris-Johnson-whisperer, architect of the Brexit campaign and Johnson's election success. McSweeney, similarly, has no particular political conviction, just an apparent “ability” to interpret polling data and calculate probabilities. It was he who, from 2017 onwards, helped build the right-leaning “Labour Together" group within the party which successfully discredited “left Labour” under Corbyn and finally used anti-Semitic slurs to get rid of anyone with “socialist” leanings. He is credited with Starmer’s election victory. But it wasn’t a victory of course. His dubious credit comes from ending the political careers and killing the reputations of the “left” - although he didn't get away with it when it came to Labour's first black woman MP, the veteran Diane Abbott, who “shall not be moved”!
John Curtice, the BBC’s favourite psephologist, summed it all up on election night: “Labour have secured their ‘landslide’ on a lower share of the vote (35% in Great Britain) than won by Tony Blair in each of his three victories, as well as the 40% won by Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, Indeed, the party's share of the vote is the lowest won by a post-war single party government. All in all this looks more like an election the Conservatives lost than one Labour won”.
The loss that Communist revolutionaries can hope for, in fact bank on, is the loss of illusions in reformism. If the 59.8% turnout, plus the election of 5 independent MPs supporting the Palestinians (including Corbyn himself) indicates lost illusions, that might be cause for optimism. Because a victory for the working class would mean turning the coming “winter of austerity” into a “Winter of Discontent Mark II", that is, a general fightback relying on feet on the ground rather than votes in a ballot box.
26 October 2024