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Graham Starmer

Where is the trade union opposition to Starmer?

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Starmer’s government has been riddled with crises through February. At this point, you would hope to see Britain’s trade union leaders on the offensive. Alas, blinkered by their reformist approach, their response has been very limited.

As the Epstein-Mandelson affair hammers the nails into the coffin of Keir Starmer’s government, many workers are hoping that the death knell will soon resound on his austerity cabinet.

The only thing we could wish for is that it should be us, the working class, that digs his grave – and not some careerist Labour MP, or the opportunist Reform UK.

‘Restoring democracy’

Unfortunately, however, the leadership of the trade unions has said very little at best, and very perplexing things at worst.

Up until this point, you would be hard-pressed to find any word from any of the trade union leaders denouncing Starmer over the Mandelson affair.

When the unions did finally release a statement – in a joint letter signed by the general secretaries of Unite, Unison, ASLEF, the FBU and CWU – their only demands were an appeal to the Labour leadership to “restore Labour democracy” and end “nasty factionalism”.

The central sentence in the document says that “it’s increasingly clear that a narrow, factional agenda is being imposed upon the Labour Party and that this is increasingly unpopular with the public” (our emphasis).

This is all true. Starmer is imposing a capitalist agenda – not only on the Labour Party, but on the entire working class in Britain.

The answer to this, however, is not to timidly appeal to the Labour leaders for “democracy”, but to mobilise the organised working class to boot these agents of the bosses and bankers out of Downing Street.

Starmer’s militarism

Turning specifically to Unite, things go from bad to worse.

Since the beginning of February, the union has redoubled its campaign for increased military spending.

In one post from 6 February, general secretary Sharon Graham said that: “The first priority of a government is to defend its people. That means investing in the British defence industry here at home.”

This came two days after the Prime Minister’s infamous question time in Parliament, when he was grilled over the Mandelson affair.

Unite is specifically demanding “a change in the fiscal rules to allow the government to borrow to invest”. An official statement from the union, meanwhile, lays blame on the Treasury for having dug their heels in against Starmer’s militarism, due to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ ever-so-tight fiscal rules!

Furthermore, on 16 February, Graham announced that “Keir Starmer’s words need to be put into action, beginning with the much-delayed Defence Investment Plan”.

In other words, precisely at the moment when millions of people are looking away from Labour for a radical alternative, Graham is calling for greater public spending on bombs and bloodshed.

Unite’s leadership claims this plan will protect the 70,000-or-so defence workers organised by the union. In reality, this means cuts to welfare to pay for warfare, inflation eating into wages, and a strengthened imperialist state.

Class struggle

All of this exposes the blinkered outlook and class collaboration approach of the trade union leadership: their reliance on appeals to the bosses and their political representatives – rather than on class struggle and socialist solutions – to tackle the problems facing workers.

The unions should be taking advantage of the weakness of Starmer’s hated, crisis-ridden government to deliver a knockout blow.

This means organising and mobilising workers to overthrow an establishment that protects predators; to demand an end to austerity; and to fight for the expropriation of the billionaires, so that their immense profits can be used for society’s needs.

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