From the welfare state to the workfare-warfare state

Starmer’s decisive shift rightwards has blown another gaping hole in Labour Party left’s pretentions to offer a socialist alternative within the party. Individually left parliamentarians express their outrage at cuts in fuel winter allowance and the prospect of a proposed £6 billion cuts to benefits to finance defence spending. Collectively, their silence is deafening. The myth of Labour’s big tent politics lies in ruins, as Starmer and his parliamentary fellows-in-arms shift policy decisively to the right.

Starmer’s clear lack of character and charisma make it appear he is a plaything of the right, a hapless patsy for the not-so-hidden Blairite agenda to expunge left politics from the Party and advance the interests of Capital. While not totally without substance, the reality is that Starmer assumed control of Labour in April 2020 by wheeling and dealing between Corbynites and Blairites to build a platform to pursue a clear right-wing mandate to become the party of Capital, distance the Labour Party from the anaemic socialism of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, and crush the left as a leading collective force in the party.

The virulent and ruthless manner of party purges on trumped up charges of antisemitism and the systematic expulsions of a host of left-wing groups working within Labour – including the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Labour Left Alliance, Labour Against the Witch-hunt, Socialist Appeal and Resist – are testament to this mandate. As is Starmer’s vociferous support for Israel in the teeth of the genocide propagated in Gaza (no doubt bolstered by Pro-Israel Lobbyist donations to thirteen of Labour’s 25 cabinet members since they were first elected to parliament). ^I

Starmer now heads a party that openly celebrates its position as a willing stooge of Capital, on a mission to capture the new centre ground in the great moving right show engulfing Europe, the US and the UK. His trajectory is marked by many key reference points, three of which are, capital first, the rightward shift and militarisation. Taken together they represent an attempt to project a modicum of coherence around a workfare/warfare state. They can be summarised as follows.

The Starmer regime’s overt commitment to Capital.

This is perhaps most transparent in maintaining strict self-imposed fiscal rules designed to balance budgets and pay down debt over the five-year government cycle. Fiscal rules are social constructions of the state transformed into the language of iron laws through which it attempts to manage class struggle and Capital-labour relations on terms favourable to the capitalist class it represents.

In this respect, Labour’s iron law of fiscal austerity is its way of bailing out Capital at the expense of the working class. Re-balancing budgets and paying down a mounting debt caused by Capital through, among other mechanisms, quantitative easing – the technical term for the state creating millions of bonds from thin air and the Bank of England doing likewise by printing money, which it then distributes to the wider banking and financial institutions which  transfer the money into parasitic assets and hiked-up stocks and shares.  At the behest of the previous Tory governments, the Bank of England incurred a net loss of £126 billion, which has been added to government debt. When the dust settled, it is the working class which is left to pay a bill of £150 billion ^II, currently being processed by Labour in the form of fiscal austerity, axing jobs, and forcing workers off benefits (about which more below).

Moreover, ‘40% of the impact of quantitative easing on asset prices accrued to … the top 10% of people’. A case of ‘they take the profits; we’re saddled with the debt’. Indeed, the monetary bonanza for Capital from quantitative easing, unleashed by the 2008 crisis, forms part of the debt that the Starmer regime is now forcing the working class to pay for through the afore-mentioned series of cuts in benefits and cuts in public sector employment, all in the headwind of a looming economic contraction that will shed jobs.

Indeed, the unspoken mantra when advancing the interests of the capitalist class would appear to be a nasty revamp of the Blairite approach to crime: ‘tough on labour and tough on the causes of labour’. Hence, Starmer and his cronies can proudly announce the myth (which will please its capitalist buddies no end) that there is no alternative to their necessary (from their point of view) fiscal policies, i.e., no tax the rich (perish the very thought!), or increase in spending to redress years of austerity manifest in pay freezes and benefit caps.

The rightward shift

A second reference point is the eagerness to lurch to the right, as a) a feature of the very nature of the Starmer regime’s centre-right aspirations and b) in the pragmatic response to the threat posed by the Reform Party to Labour’s future electoral ambitions. Farage’s party now has a three-point lead (27 per cent) over Labour (24 per cent), with the Tories at 21 per cent, according to latest surveys.

Like Farage, Starmer, too, is itching to take an axe to public sector bureaucracy, shrink the ‘dependency culture’ and prioritise British jobs for British workers. Starmer’s distinctive stance is to become more reactionary than Farage to prevent any haemorrhaging of the Labour voting base to Reform: enter the bonfire of job cuts in NHS England and across the civil service (music to the ears of your everyday Reform voter ^III).

Even the supposed redress of the exploitative zero-hour employment contracts takes a bow to the rightward drift as it became a tame, weak-kneed arrangement embedded in the broader ‘right to work’ programme (read get off benefits!), with more holes than Swiss cheese for Capital to easily manipulate (basically a spurious shift from zero- to minimal-hours).  Not an outright ban but a choice – because ‘some workers on zero hours contracts benefit from and enjoy the flexibility they offer every bit as much as the employer does’ (indeed!).

Meanwhile, Labour’s increased National Insurance on employers will manifest as a cut in employment and a tax on future jobs, while intensifying the use of existing labour, at the entrails of the labour market (where ‘modern’ spiv industry Capital derives most demand for labour power these days). Moreover, cynics would be right to link the latter within Labour’s over-arching reactionary perspective informing ‘the right to work’ (to tackle that culture of ‘labour market inactivity’)

Disdain added to cynicism equals grand malice aforethought when we consider a) that the economy is currently contracting and with it employment prospects; and b) that the millions of so-called ‘inactive’ will move to the pool of 1.6 million ‘active’ unemployed (reserve army) to compete for 860,000 job vacancies across the UK, currently listed. To add insult Labour is effectively forcing people to compete in a race to the bottom of a working environment in which ‘15.7 per cent of employee jobs in the UK (4.5 million jobs) were paid below the real Living Wage in April 2024 – an increase from 13 per cent (3.7 million jobs) in April 2023’ ^IV.

Militarisation

The third reference point is the Starmer regime’s commitment to the military-industrial complex. Starmer’s regime has consistently sucked up the NATO narrative of arms escalation and its contrivance of military expansion and state of permanent war-readiness as a means of ‘peace and security’. By amplifying threats posed by Russia and China, using increasingly outlandish rhetoric, Starmer has become NATO’s unofficial ambassador in the UK and Europe for military expansionism.

Starmer markets the narrative of militarisation in terms of it dovetailing into a core part of Labour’s broader economic agenda to reverse decades of failing productivity and boosts economic growth. Yet, as we know, state military spending circulates existing capital in a tax loop to the military industrial sector to furnish the defence industry. It helps subsidise their profits from non-military production (private airlines, etc), but most of this circulated capital adds to public debt, which is then utilised as a political weapon to impose welfare cuts when needs arise. To maintain credibility with Capital for ‘balancing the books’, Starmer’s regime is eager to transfer savings made from slashing jobs and benefits payments to the NATO war machine, revealing once more the class character of Labour and, so, the deep disdain this ‘party of labour’ has for the working class.

Vacuum on the left

The vacuum on the left of Labour is palpable, caught in the Westminster web of left-speak, and limited to abstract leftist tropes about ‘resolving greed and social inequality and creating a fairer society’. I dare say we would all agree, but this political tripe is not going to transform the left or lead anywhere near socialism’ ^V. Nor is the equally politically banal sentiment we often read in labour left groups, epitomised by this from Momentum,

‘While the new leadership of the Labour Party may not represent our values like the old, with its links to the labour movement and with its rich history of socialist struggle, a transformed and democratised Labour Party is our best chance of delivering meaningful change in government’ ^VI.

One reason the Labour left was vanquished and dispatched with such ease by the Labour Party establishment was because it has consistently failed (by design or default ) to accept the historic role of the Labour Party as an organisation dedicated to sustaining capitalism through ultimately reversible reforms, and acting as a brake on and, indeed, a road block toward the development of the working class as a collective force in society and the development of a collective class consciousness, as necessary prerequisites towards ending capitalism and  building socialism.

Starmer’s dramatic Reformation of Labour does not alter the fundamental problem of an economy that is not growing, at a time when public services are failing’ ^VII. Starmer will fail to arrest a stagnant malfunctioning capitalism, as will his quest to install the economy of a workfare/warfare footing eventually fail. It is debatable that the parliamentary left can offer any collective kickback to this descent into a workfare/warfare politics. When the Starmer project fails the left cannot afford to repeat its many failed attempts to fill the vacuum to sustain the myth of Labour as a workers’ party? The left must vacate Labour and sink this myth once and for all, and join the struggle for socialism in a party dedicated to this end.

1. De-Classified UK (2024) ‘Israel lobby funded half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet’, https://www.declassifieduk.org/israel-lobby-funded-half-of-keir-starmers-cabinet/[↩]
2. City AM (2023) ‘Taxpayer to hand over £150bn to Bank of England to cover QE losses’, https://www.cityam.com/taxpayer-to-hand-over-150bn-to-bank-of-england-to-cover-qe-losses/, July 25^th[↩]
3. The Guardian (2025) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/13/wes-streetings-high-stakes-abolition-of-nhs-england-will-cut-10000-jobs, March 13^th.[↩]
4. Living Wage Foundation (2024) https://www.livingwage.org.uk/employee-jobs-paid-below-real-living-wage-2024[↩]
5. Socialist Worker (2024) ‘What next? Here’s what Corbyn thinks’  https://socialistworker.co.uk/general-election-2024/what-next-heres-what-corbyn-thinks/ , July.[↩]
6. Momentum (2025) ‘where we stand on the Labour Party’, https://peoplesmomentum.com/about [↩]
7. Marr, A. 2025, Labour’s Reformation: Under threat from the populist right, Keir Starmer is forging a hard new politics, New Statesman Ltd, London.[↩]