With near-zero growth in the British economy, pressure from the financial markets, and commitments to increase military spending, Starmer’s government is forging ahead with plans to further slash public services and welfare.
Last October, Labour announced intentions to restrict access to sickness benefits. When asked if this would mean cuts, Work and Pensions minister Alison McGovern euphemistically stated: “We will bring forward our own reforms.”
Such was the sound of the starting gun for Starmer’s new ‘war on welfare’, under the banner of ‘Get Britain Working’.
Fast forward five months, and the Labour frontbench have just announced billions in cuts to the benefits bill in the upcoming Spring Budget.
There is no doubt that the government’s plans were accelerated by Starmer’s recent pledge to drive up military spending by an extra £13.4 billion.
Some capitalist commentators have put things even more plainly. FT columnist Janan Ganesh, for example, has unashamedly declared that “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”. An honest enemy is better than a lying friend, as they say.
The Liberals say warfare not welfare, we say welfare not warfare. pic.twitter.com/DC78b0ivMM
— Jorge Martin ☭ (@marxistJorge) March 5, 2025
Pointing to Britain’s low employment rate and high level of illness, the government is pushing to get more people off benefits and into work.
Cynically, ministers are trying to paint this severe austerity measure as a benevolent gesture towards the unemployed.
“We’ve seen a huge rise in that welfare budget,” justice secretary Shabana Mahmood said yesterday. “We know that there are millions of people who are out of work in our country who want to be in work.”
Similarly, employment minister Alison McGovern complained that the current benefits system leaves people “on the scrapheap” and “forces people to say how sick they are”. She added that the country “can’t afford the waste of people’s time and talent that represents”.
But rather than providing dignified work for the unemployed, or measures to improve workers’ health, the intensifying crisis of British capitalism means that Labour will be implementing even deeper cuts to an already-hobbling welfare state.
We say: No more austerity and attacks! For healthcare, not warfare!
Sick man of Europe
The UK is the only major economy where the employment rate has fallen over the past five years. Nearly a quarter of working-age people in Britain (11 million) are out of work, with only around 13 percent of those actively looking for employment.
What concerns the government most is not so much those who are aging out of the workforce, in education, or otherwise unavailable to work. Instead, the Labour leaders’ focus has been on the sharp rise in the number of people (2.8 million) who are off work due to long-term sickness – a figure that has increased significantly since the pandemic.
Analysis shows that each year, around 300,000 people aged 16–64 leave the workforce due to a work-limiting health condition, amounting to 900,000 since the start of 2020.
The rate of work-limiting conditions has grown fastest among younger workers, doubling in just the past decade. As a result, a 16-34 year-old employed in 2023 is now as likely to report a work-limiting condition as someone aged 45-54 a decade ago.
A record 35 percent of 18-24 year-olds were classed as economically ‘inactive’ this year, up from 28 percent in 2022 – the largest increase in the developed world. Meanwhile, Universal Credit claimants aged 16-24 rose by 24 percent in 2023-24, mostly citing health reasons.
Declining mental health is a part of the picture, but it isn’t the sole factor. Official surveys show that only one-in-five 16-24 year-olds not in education, employment, or training last year had a mental health condition. 11 percent reported learning difficulties or autism. Among this group, only 20 percent held basic qualifications like GCSEs and A-Levels.
A lack of skills and a tight job market are also major hurdles for young people. Job openings for school leavers fell by 39 percent over the year to September, compared to a 27 percent drop across all entry-level roles.
The surge in long-term sickness has significantly increased the welfare bill. The annual cost of incapacity and disability benefits is projected to rise from its current £64.7 billion to £100.7 billion by 2029-30. Since 2020, an additional 1.2 million working-age people have started receiving health-related benefits, bringing the total to 3.7 million.
This trend has also led to a significant slice of lost tax revenue for the Treasury. And it is exacerbating workforce shortages for the bosses, creating yet more supply-side problems and bottlenecks for the British economy.
By ‘getting Britain working’, therefore, the Labour government hopes to address two challenges simultaneously: curbing welfare spending and boosting economic growth.
Divisive distraction
Labour is proposing a broad range of legislation to tackle these issues. For example, the Employment Rights Bill aims to reform statutory sick pay, providing phased returns to work for those with long-term illnesses.
The government is also calling on employers to take occupational health more seriously, with £125 million allocated to fund specific health interventions, including the creation of additional NHS appointments.
Another key proposal is £55 million to establish a National Jobs and Careers Service. Additionally, a ‘Youth Guarantee’ will offer training, apprenticeships, or job assistance – but with sanctions for those who refuse to participate. Essentially, young people will be required to take up a low-paid apprenticeship or face penalties: all stick, no carrot.
Given the Labour leaders’ commitment to making ‘tough decisions’ and ‘balancing the books’, however, it is questionable whether Starmer’s crisis-ridden government will deliver on any of these promises.
In reality, Starmer’s campaign is less about getting people into work, and more about manufacturing another divisive distraction to divert attention from the real problems in society.
Britain does have a dwindling workforce. But this is the result of the bosses eroding workers’ health and conditions over an extended period, instead of investing in technology and productivity-improvements. The result is a widespread ‘burnout’ culture across the UK economy.
Demonising the poor
Rather than pointing the finger at the capitalists and their dog-eat-dog system, Starmer and co. have been more than happy to scapegoat so-called benefits scroungers who ‘game the system’.
Taking to the pages of right-wing rag the Mail on Sunday, for example, the Prime Minister promised “no more business as usual”.
“Make no mistake,” the ‘Labour’ leader assured the tabloid’s rabid readers, “we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society.”
Such rhetoric is grist to the mill for the Tories and employers, who are also eager to play the blame game, in order to deflect from their own economic mismanagement and welfare counter-reforms.
Instead of acknowledging the rise in ill health, for example, Tory journalists pin worklessness on supposedly “entitled” and “lazy” British workers – and even on TikTok!
In an interview with The Telegraph, meanwhile, one care home boss – Geoff Butler – complained that British workers are unreliable and whiney: failing to turn up for interviews, or quitting within the first two-to-three weeks.
“They [native workers] come in and they just don’t like it,” Butler states, lacking any critical self-reflection on the conditions inside his chain of care homes. “A lot of it is because they find it very, very hard physically and emotionally. People find doing a 12-hour shift really tough. And it is tough.”
Such claims are utter nonsense. A recent study by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) found that one-in-two workers puts in two extra unpaid hours every week. Half of workers go to work while feeling ill. And one-in-four regularly exceeds the legal maximum of 48 hours per week.
According to analysis by the TUC, meanwhile, UK bosses squeezed £26bn-worth of labour out of their workers through unpaid overtime last year.
Such demonisation of the poor and vulnerable is nothing new. Accusations of ‘feckless’ workers being responsible for their own poverty are as old as capitalism itself. As Karl Marx satirically noted in Capital:
“In times long gone by there were two sorts of people: one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living…! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.”
The reality is that work under capitalism doesn’t even pay the bills. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 20 percent of workers live in poverty. For many, wages no longer guarantee even basic subsistence – housing, clothing, food, and raising a family.
Add to this the drudgery of repetitive, mind-numbing, back-breaking work on outdated equipment, often doing the job of multiple people, and is it any wonder that there isn’t a rush for jobs that offer nothing but poverty in a pay packet?
Bosses’ demands
Starmer’s Labour is trying to portray their plans for welfare ‘reform’ as a case of ‘common sense’: improving the health of the British economy by cutting public spending, restoring dynamism, and encouraging greater private investment
With overtures to the bosses about ‘turbocharging’ growth, slashing ‘red-tape’, and creating hubs for international capital, it is clear that Labour intends on being a government of big business.
But this will clash with any attempts to get employers to improve working conditions and boost sick pay.
Indeed, the capitalists are already raising a hue and cry about the government’s Employee Rights Bill – Labour’s ‘New Deal for Working People – as it works its way through Parliament.
According to the CBI, the bosses’ union, hiring intentions are at their lowest level since the pandemic, with many firms planning hiring freezes and wage cuts.
A London Chamber of Commerce survey of over 200 business leaders, meanwhile, found that nearly half expect to reduce job openings and pay, in response to concerns about increased taxes and regulations on employers.
Rather than improving working conditions or strengthening health and safety protections, therefore, it is far more likely that we will see deeper austerity, with further attacks on welfare and labour rights.
According to the latest reports, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is eyeing up between £5-10 billion in benefit cuts, in order to ensure that Britain’s creditors get their pound of flesh, and to free up money for increased ‘defence’ spending.
The message from Starmer and co. is clear: the money will always be found to pay the bankers and defend the interests of British imperialism, but never to pay for healthcare and decent jobs.
‘Get Britain Working’, yes – but only in the capitalists’ interests.
No trust in Starmer’s Labour
There is strong demand from workers for greater workplace protections. One recent TUC poll found three-quarters of workers support key measures in the Employment Rights Bill, particularly those tackling precarity.
Expecting employers to willingly improve wages and conditions in an economy built on exploitation is like asking a tiger to go vegetarian, however.
For decades, the capitalists have prioritised cheap labour and quick profits over long-term investment in skills and technology. And they have no intention of changing the habit of a lifetime, and going against their own interests.
At the end of the day, Starmer is taking his marching orders from the capitalist class – from those demanding attacks on workers’ living standards, for the sake of bigger profits, not from those concerned about the health of the working class.
The leaders of the labour movement must therefore be under no illusions that Labour will deliver any genuine reforms. Workers must trust only in themselves when it comes to winning better pay and conditions, not in Starmer and his big business government.
Squeezed for profit
Labour can talk all they like about long-term solutions to return the British economy to growth. But the capitalists have spent the last forty years looking for shortcuts.
The poor health of the British workforce – and the resultant rise in the benefits bill – stems from this fact.
Long-term underinvestment by the capitalists makes work in Britain some of the hardest and least productive of any developed economy. Output per hour worked is 40 percent below that in the USA, and 20 percent below France and Germany.
To compensate for this, and boost profitability, British bosses force their workers to work harder and longer, leading to burnout, stress, and physical degradation.
For decades, workers have reported a consistent increase in the intensity of labour. 55 percent of workers feel that work is getting more intense and demanding. And 61 percent say that they feel exhausted at the end of most working days.
Starmer’s Labour has clearly cast its lot with the flailing fortunes of British capitalism. On this basis, pie-in-the-sky promises about solving worklessness, increasing productivity, and securing economic growth are pure fantasy.
The communists do not fight for work for its own sake. We fight for work that provides decent pay and conditions; for work that offers dignity; and ultimately, for workers to secure their means of existence by controlling and planning the means of production.
Only in this way can we drastically reduce the quantity and burden of work, use the latest technology and technique to eliminate menial labour and increase leisure time, and guarantee a fruitful life for all.
