“We are the party of wealth creation,” declared Sir Keir Starmer, as he launched Labour’s manifesto last Thursday.
‘You’re speaking our language!’ cheered Britain’s bankers and bosses, who like to style themselves as ‘wealth creators’.
No doubt they got the message: that the Labour Party under Starmer is now a safe pair of hands for British capitalism.
Tory-lite
After 14 years of crisis and decline, the Tories have never been more hated.
But despite naming his manifesto ‘Change’, Starmer’s programme in fact offers a continuity of the broken status quo; more of the same austerity, inequality, and war that Sunak and his predecessors have presided over for the last decade-or-more.
Starmer makes lots of noise about “Conservative chaos”, the collapse of the NHS, and the cost-of-living crisis. But instead of taking aim at the source of these ills – the dead-end of capitalism – he simply blames the Tories, for putting their “own interests” above those of “the nation”.
After all of Starmers’ huffing and puffing about ‘serving the interests of working people’, therefore, we’re simply offered a Tory manifesto in Labour colours.
The Labour leader has promised “a return to the foundations of good government: national security, secure borders, and economic stability”.
This will involve no less than increasing ‘defence’ spending to 2.5 percent of GDP, cracking down on migrants, strengthening the police, and taking “hard choices” with the economy.
With this, Starmer is singing straight from the Tories’ hymn sheet. This is no accident.
The aim of Labour’s manifesto isn’t to connect with the burning desire of workers and young people to transform society. Its real target is the big-business bosses, the bankers, and the billionaires.
With this manifesto – and his entire conduct over years – Starmer is effectively saying to the establishment: “Forget these Tory clowns in government, you can rely on us to do your dirty work.”
Big business in the saddle
Indeed, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently told a meeting of City bankers that when they read the manifesto, they’ll see their “fingerprints all over it”.
Reeves reassured these fat-cats and parasites that the ideas in Labour’s programme “are based on so many of the conversations I’ve had with businesses and investors over the last three years”.
Much is made in the manifesto of striking “an enduring partnership with business to deliver the economic growth we need”, for example. And the party leadership have repeatedly asserted that Labour is now “pro-business and pro-worker”.
But as any faithful servant knows, it’s impossible to obey and please two masters. The interests of the capitalists are in direct conflict with those of workers.
It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce who Labour will in fact serve, given that the bosses’ grubby hands are all over their programme!
As a sop to workers, the manifesto promises to introduce a swathe of new workers’ rights, such as “banning exploitative zero-hours contracts”. But before we get too excited, big business take note:
“We will consult fully with businesses, workers, and civil society on how to put our plans into practice before legislation is passed.”
In other words, bosses shouldn’t worry – they’ll have their chance to water-down anything that threatens their profits.
Prepare for struggle
Overall, the manifesto promises very little in the way of change.
Even patching up ‘broken Britain’ after decades of capitalist decay and crisis would involve spending vast sums of money. But the government’s cupboard is bare. The Treasury is sitting on a mountain of debt. And further savage cuts are baked into the Budget.
As good responsible statesmen, Starmer and Reeves have committed Labour to adhering to the Tories’ ‘fiscal rules’ to reduce the public debt.
So despite Labour promising “no return to austerity”, all the evidence suggests otherwise. Indeed, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) – a right-wing think-tank – said the following about the party’s plans:
“The public service spending increases promised in the ‘costings’ table are tiny, going on trivial. The tax rises, beyond the inevitable reduced tax avoidance, even more trivial.”
“On current forecasts, and especially with an extra £17.5 billion borrowing over five years to fund the green prosperity plan, this leaves literally no room – within the fiscal rule that Labour has signed up to – for any more spending than planned by the current government. And those plans do involve cuts both to investment spending and to spending on unprotected public services.
“Yet Sir Keir Starmer effectively ruled out such cuts. How they will square the circle in government we do not know.” (Our emphasis.)
Unlike the IFS, we can predict very well how Labour will ‘square this circle’.
Rather than seize the idle fortunes of the super-rich, which could easily be used to solve society’s problems, it is clear that Starmer and his cronies will unleash a new onslaught of austerity and attacks upon workers, the poor, and the vulnerable.
In trying to manage capitalism – a system in terminal crisis – they will be forced to do what every other capitalist government worldwide has done for the past decade and more: make the working class pay.
So whilst we’ll be delighted to see the back of the Tories after 4 July, as revolutionary communists we say: prepare for struggle!
A manifesto for Murdoch, not for Merseyside
The Labour manifesto has 34 pictures of Keir Starmer. Presumably they need to fill the space where workers would expect to find policies to fix the crises in the NHS, education, and more.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I picked up the eight-page paper provided by the Labour candidate for Liverpool Wavertree and couldn’t find one picture of the dear leader.
I can only assume that local Labour campaign managers think that Starmer is a vote loser in Liverpool. And for good reason: we know him best for breaking his pledge not to speak to The Sun (or ‘The Scum’, as we call it).
For the survivors of the Hillsborough disaster, and for the whole of Liverpool, this is offensive. It shows that Starmer and co. put their relationship with the Murdoch press above that with the working class.
Murdoch, like the rest of the capitalists, wants a government that will put the bosses before the workers. No doubt he will be happy with Starmer.
Mike Hogan, Liverpool
