Karl Marx once compared capitalism to an insatiable vampire, gorging itself by sucking the life out of the working class.
As a trusted servant of British capitalism, it seems that โSirโ Keir Starmer has also developed a taste for blood.
By chopping billions from welfare to fund billions for warfare, the Prime Minister has proven his readiness to feed imperialist carnage abroad by sacrificing the vulnerable back home.
Even infamous slasher villains from Hollywood horror-flicks would be impressed by the comfort with which the Labour leaders wield the knife.
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With their latest cuts to disability benefits, Starmerโs government has already gone further than even George โScissorhandsโ Osborne โ the former Tory chancellor โ was willing to go.
In todayโs blood-curdling House of Commons announcement, Labourโs Rachel Reeves outlined the Treasuryโs Spring Statement.
On top of ยฃ4.8 billion hacked away from the welfare bill, the โIron Chancellorโ is set to slash spending on the civil service by 15 percent.
Meanwhile, despite the governmentโs empty promises to โget Britain growingโ, the 2025 economic growth forecast was halved from 2 percent to 1 percent.
With the British economy faltering, Starmer and his ministers are feeding workers and the poor into the meat-grinder โ cooking up a platter of austerity to ensure that Britainโs ravenous creditors get their pound of flesh.
While the bosses and bankers feast themselves, the working class will be forced to survive on a Dickensian diet of thin gruel.
This is the bleak future ahead of us under capitalism. Rather than appealing for crumbs, with calls to โtax the richโ, the leaders of the labour movement must mobilise workers and youth to demand the whole bakery.
We say: make the billionaires pay for this crisis!
Pressures mount

Starmer and Reeves entered Downing Street promising nothing. Within weeks, however, even these low expectations were being further shrunk, with hand-wringing talk about โtough decisionsโ needed to fill a ยฃ22 billion โblack holeโ in the governmentโs finances left behind by the Tories.
Since then, the situation has only deteriorated.
The Chancellorโs Autumn Budget provoked a backlash from investors and speculators. Promises of โturbocharged growthโ have fallen flat, with official figures from January showing a contraction of the UK economy by 0.1 percent. And shockwaves from across the Atlantic, including the threat of tariffs and an escalating global trade war, have only added to the instability and uncertainty.
Add to this the rush for rearmament across Europe โ in the wake of Trumpโs effective abandonment of NATO, the western imperialist military alliance โ and it is clear that the pressures are mounting on all sides for British capitalism and its representatives.
Bitter medicine
This is the dire backdrop to Reevesโ latest economic announcement; a statement that, in the words of the Financial Times, is โwritten in red inkโ.
The Chancellor is delivering an entire pharmacyโs worth of bitter medicine: a halving of UK growth forecasts for this year; stagnant productivity and stubborn inflation; and ยฃ5bn of extra cuts to public spending, on top of the same amount already axed from the welfare budget.

All of this, meanwhile, is merely the appetiser for the main dish of brutal austerity that Starmerโs government is expected to serve up in the autumn; โa holding operation โ a patching-up of the public finances โ ahead of more radical surgery later this year,โ according to the FT.
And that is before the worldwide crisis of capitalism really begins to bite, including the fallout from protectionist measures and any number of other potential hazards โ economically, diplomatically, and politically.
Broken Britain
Even Tory shadow ministers have labelled Labourโs economic programme as โausterity, just with a different name, a different faceโ โ a bizarrely brazen admission of the draconian nature of the Conservativeโs own policies whilst in power.

There is a hatred of all the traditional parties; a resentment towards all those establishment politicians who are seen to be upholding a rotten system.
This explains the rising support for Farageโs Reform, which according to some surveys now tops the polls, on the basis of its demagogic pledges to fix โbroken Britainโ.
The more astute strategists of capital are aware of this fact. Underpinning the phenomenon of right-wing populism, states leading Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley, โis the feeling that politics no longer works for ordinary people โ that it is elitist, unresponsive to and dismissive of their concerns.โ
โAs long as the mainstream parties can be painted as defenders of the status quo,โ he continues, โmavericks will retain an appeal.โ
The problem for capitalist establishment, the FT journalist remarks elsewhere, can be put quite simply: โyou cannot do any form of liberal [i.e. bourgeois] democracy on economic stagnation.โ
This is the cold reality facing the ruling class, which is increasingly losing control of the situation in all countries. Their system has hit a dead-end. For humanity to move forward, capitalism and its custodians must be overthrown.
Splits and struggle
The perspective ahead is one of intensified crisis at all levels, and with this a sharpening of the class struggle.
Starmerโs militarism and austerity is preparing the way for an almighty social explosion.
Labourโs โguns before butterโ approach is deeply unpopular. According to one recent poll, a plurality of UK voters want the government to prioritise the needs of those unable to work over the needs of British imperialism.
Feeling this pressure from below, splits are already beginning to emerge inside the Labour Party. Backbench MPs, and even cabinet ministers, are openly voicing their concerns about the scale of the painful cuts that the government is proposing.

When it comes to voting these measures through, Starmer can expect to face an embarrassing and damaging mutiny from those behind him.
Unfortunately, so far, the response from the so-called โleftโ has been timid, to say the least.
The widespread demand for โwelfare, not warfareโ is correct. But from the mouths of the trade union leaders and social reformers, such words ring hollow.
The role of communists is to fill this slogan with revolutionary content: to show the connection between the warmongering of โourโ imperialist ruling class, and their attacks on the working class in Britain; and to link all of this destruction and misery back to its underlying cause โ the crisis-ridden capitalist system.
โTo be radical,โ Marx stated, โis to grasp the root of the matter.โ Today, this means identifying the source of our problems โ capitalism โ and organising to sweep away this decrepit system through socialist revolution.
Join us โ the revolutionary communists of the RCP โ in this task.
Labourโs war on the poor โ For welfare, not warfare!
The Communist
With their fresh round of savage cuts, Labour has thrown down the gauntlet and declared war on the poor.
Tens of thousands of those unable to work are estimated to lose around two-thirds of their income as a result of Labourโs onslaught on Britainโs welfare safety-net.
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According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation think-tank, meanwhile, as many as 1.2 million people currently claiming personal independence payments could be worse off by around ยฃ4,300 a year, due to draconian changes to eligibility criteria.
Many who require assistance with washing or going to the toilet will now have a vital lifeline snatched away from them, adding to the daily indignity and misery that capitalism imposes upon the most vulnerable in society.
This naked cruelty is only the tip of the iceberg. Not only the poor and disabled, but the entire working class is set to be battered by the deepening crisis of British capitalism.
Only months ago, โSirโ Keir Starmer was pledging to โput more money in the pockets of ยญworking peopleโ. Now, however, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicts that living standards for the majority of UK households will fall by the end of the decade.
The charityโs researchers suggest that the average family will be ยฃ1,400 worse off by 2030, representing a 3 percent decline in disposable incomes โ on top of the hit that ordinary people have taken over the last 15 years or more.
Workers and youth must mobilise against Labourโs austerity agenda, and reject Starmerโs militarism mania. While the ruling class demands โguns before butterโ, our slogan must be for โwelfare, not warfareโ.
Instead of enriching the bankers and fuelling the imperialistsโ war machine, we must seize their fortunes and overthrow their system.
We need a revolution against the billionaire class and its craven representatives, to put an end to the barbarism of capitalism once and for all.
Communist gets a good response at disability cuts protest
Saoirse Currell, Manchester
Starmerโs cuts on disability benefits have triggered protests across the entire country: I attended the one in Manchester.
All of the speeches expressed a deep anger against Starmerโs attacks on the poor. Amongst the demands to โtax the richโ, there were some in the crowd who did not believe that this demand was going far enough.
I went to the platform and gave a speech, beginning with how these cuts will affect my family.
Afterwards I explained that whilst Starmer is launching attacks against the poor and disabled, the banks and billionaires are hoarding more and more. The enemy is not just Starmer, but the entire system and its lust for profit.
None of the parties that defend capitalism can offer anything else, be they Tories, Greens, Labour, or the Tories.
Furthermore, whilst they carry out cuts, they continue to send billions to aid Israelโs genocide. The struggle against imperialism is therefore the same as that against Starmerโs austerity back home.
I ended by stressing that the only solution is not to tax the rich but to overthrow their whole system through revolution.
This militancy received large support from the crowd, and connected with those who are drawing more revolutionary conclusions.