Just to be sure that nobody has high hopes that the new Labour government is going to fix anything in the broken system, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has explained that she has inherited "the worst set of circumstances since the second world war"...
The former Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt said this was "absolute nonsense", when he was interviewed straight after her by Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday. He said this was just a prelude to her justifying a tax increase down the road.
Hunt is right that it's nonsense. But he's only interested in playing this childish inter-party ping-pong game about who cuts taxes and who doesn't, as if that's even the real issue at hand!
Anyway, it goes without saying that increased taxes would, under this political system, be mandatory if a government wants to maintain (or restore in this case) public services.
But Reeves is definitely going to use her WW2 comparison as her big excuse to remain "fiscally conservative"! For that, Hunt should be praising her! Like Old Mother Hubbard, young mother Reeves is telling the working class that the cupboard is bare and not even the two-child benefit cap can be restored. Which, like many other "reforms" which Labour voters hoped for, was conspicuously absent from the list of 40 bills announced in the King's Speech. Yes, at a time when child poverty is at a record high, affecting 4.3 million - 30% of all British kids!
At last they have someone to talk to!
Unlike Rachel Reeves and her "public finances", the working class on the other hand, has really been experiencing a "worst set of circumstances". Maybe not comparable to WW2, but as UNITE union leader Sharon Graham leader said before the election, workers are really struggling; they are hurting, thanks to the rapid fall in living standards since 2008.
However, she, just like train drivers' leader Mick Whelan and Mick Lynch of the RMT, are so happy to be back in their warm seats around a government table (actually a "first" for some of them) and to be awarded the respect they think they deserve, at last, that they're telling the workers they represent that Labour has to be "given a chance"...
Speaking this Sunday at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset, this is how Sharon Graham put it: "There is no doubt that [Britain] has been given hope and the opportunity for tangible change by electing a Labour government. Unite is already seeing that in our initial discussions with key ministers".
She had prefaced this, however, with a warning to Reeves about the urgency of acting to alleviate the crisis for the working class: "Now is not the time for the government to be straitjacketed by self-made fiscal rules, leaving us entirely reliant on growth, which may not arrive in time".
Sadly for Graham and the rest of the union leadership, this is precisely the straitjacket that participating in the system places these aspiring Atlees and Churchills into... Real economic "growth", may not merely be late, but is unlikely to arrive at all. The capitalist economy is in its most rotten phase, so no boom is even possible. The best it can offer is "relative growth": less decline than before, or a recession which isn't too much worse than elsewhere!
It's the class struggle which must grow!
Union leaders speaking at Tolpuddle (and also at the Durham Miners Gala just over a week ago) all challenged the Labour government to "deliver", given its unprecedented 172 seat majority in the House of Commons.
They even threatened to fight Starmer and Co., if they don't. And pointed to the threat from Reform, reminding them that Labour got into government with a "historically low vote share" of 33.8% (add abstention and less than 1 in 5 voted Labour)!
So they gave sombre warnings that the far right might come marching in, if Labour doesn't cough up what the working class needs and what it demands... When in fact hardly any "deliveries" are on the agenda anyway!
Of course, there's the rehashed rail nationalisation (bit by bit, over 5 years - with no guarantees whatsoever for the workforce); the "New Deal for Workers" which won't even abolish zero-hours contracts (!), and which has built-in loopholes for just about everything (including fire and rehire) through which bosses can make their escape!
If there was even a scrap of sincerity in any of this offer of a deal for the working class, Coventry's Amazon warehouse workers would have their union recognition today. But instead they remain unrecognised even though 49.5% of them voted for it last week!
The union leadership - all of it - has already shown how little "oomph" it has when it comes to a fight. The last thing it will do in front of Labour is generalise a strike and go all out, which is the only way to win. So if workers want an effective fight, it will be up to them to organise it.