This is an edited version of an introduction given by Will McMahon at the Talking About Socialism online meeting of September 30th 2024.
The context
Where does Britain stand as Starmer’s team takes its initial steps in Government? It continues its long decline as an imperialist power. A decline that became visible after the Second World War particularly following the humiliation of the Suez Crisis. The conclusion one section of the ruling class drew from Suez was Britain should place itself at the heart of a new imperial alliance in Europe. Latterly, another section favoured Brexit and a reversion back to being a junior partner of the United States on the global stage.
Britain, now a much less important power in comparison to when Blair took power, is struggling to maintain its position in the global order. There are now three imperialist blocks, the European Union, China and the United States, with Britain’s clinging on the coat tails of the US demonstrated by the recent deal struck with Mauritius over the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands and its subordinate role in the mass murder of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
Since the 2008 crash, there has been a huge decline in living standards. The instability produced by Brexit was overlaid by the economic crisis produced by the pandemic. The Ukraine War produced huge inflationary pressures which opened the door to gross profiteering and price gouging of energy and supermarket commodities. Rising heating costs and food prices, on top of the exponential rise in housing costs over the last 25 years, has seen a rise of a billionaire class, while the working class has become poorer. In terms of the post-war period, the working class has never had it so bad.
A default election
A country deeply divided by Brexit, battered by Covid and embittered by the last chaotic and corruption-ridden phase of Conservative rule, elected the most unpopular new Government in history in July 2024 by default. As discussed in my July post-election article, only 20% of those who could vote, voted Labour and only 8% of those who voted, voted Labour because they agreed with the policy platform. So Labour’s victory in the country was very shallow and narrow and popular support for Starmer as Prime Minister was and is almost non-existent.
Starmer knows the arithmetically large majority Labour was a result of Reform splitting the vote on the right and a broader coalition is needed to get him through the next General Election, if he gets that far. This coalition has to be centred on the capitalist class because the Labour Party’s core leadership are creatures of that class.
Capital controls
Each one of us could draw on our own example of the control that capital now exerts over the Labour Party. The most recent one that may come to mind is Rachel Kyte’s appointment as Labour’s climate envoy. Kyte is the co-chair of the climate advisory board of Quadrature Climate Foundation, a foundation linked to a hedge fund of the same name based in the Cayman Islands and which invests in fossil fuels. It has just emerged that the hedge fund gave a £4 million donation to Labour on 28 May, just before the election. One reward being the carbon capture investment recently announced at an estimated subsidy to big business of £5m a job.
At the main corporate event on the Monday of Labour’s conference (Sunday 22 – Wednesday 25 September 2024) , with tickets costing £3,000, Labour’s leader told 500 CEOs present that wealth creation is Labour’s number one mission – urging them to contact his office direct – presumably with a gift in hand – if they were struggling to get a response from Government.
We are back in Mandelson territory, of being extremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, but Labour will need more than capital’s backing to perform well at the next local elections, never mind the next General Election. So the ‘plan’, such as it is, appears to be disinter some of the key aspects of New Labour’s coalition building, albeit in a very different context.
Divide the working class
New Labour’s key strategy was to try and divide the working class. To divide the class based on migration, Starmer prioritising a visit to see Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. He mentioned the remarkable ‘progress’ made by Italy in tackling the flow of migrants by offshoring them in Albania. No doubt we can expect the re-appearance of the Ed Milliband era mugs that called for tough controls on immigration in the Labour shop. No Labour Minister can be seen at a pre-arranged television interview without the Butcher’s Apron in view.
Labour will, notionally at least, support and laud ‘hard working families’ while focusing coercive policy attention on those on low incomes not at work because of long term illness who, Starmer has made clear, will be expected to look for work.
There are already authoritarian steps in the wings. A crackdown on benefit cheats with a mulling over the possibility of giving the state the power to view the bank accounts of those on benefits. Expect a reinforced focus on policing and anti-social behaviour to manage the ever more residualised and resource-poor existing council estates as an attempt to cauterise the social distress. Direct action climate campaigners can expect to get short shrift.
Starmer will attempt to squat the centre-right of British politics through articulating an alliance of British capital, business unionism and the aspiring hard working families of the working class – the ‘dream of home ownership’ being at the centre of the political strategy. If this sounds familiar, then listen to Rachel Reeves who recently said: “To my mum, every penny mattered, and the basic test for whoever is Chancellor is to bring that attitude to our public finances.” This is an unambiguous copy of Margaret Thatcher’s messaging in the 1979 General Election campaign.
A vessel for the interest of capital
Labour came to power on a meaningless phrase of ‘change’ and promising an end to corrupt government and a few light-weight ameliorative reforms for the working class. Had Starmer been honest, the election slogan should have been ‘things can only get worse’, or, even closer ‘things are going to get pretty ugly’.
Unlike Blair, Starmer comes into government in a much worse economic situation, and is tied to bourgeois economic orthodoxy. In his conference speech, Starmer talked of a “shared struggle”, the best the speech writer could come up with in avoiding the comparison with Cameron’s post-crash “we are all in it together”. There will be £20 billion pounds worth of spending cuts year on year – come what may. The anti-working class direction of the government is clear enough.
In Oliver Eagleton’s book “The Starmer Project”, the leader is portrayed as a tone deaf technocrat with a charisma bypass and few ideas to rub together, simply a vessel for capital’s interests. There is a lot in the first three months to support this view.
His response to the racist mobilisations and attempted pogroms in the summer was to tell Labour MPs not to join the anti-racist assemblies in an endeavour to depoliticise events by describing them as street thuggery, rather than what they were, a political intervention by the far right. Starmer missed the mood completely, being outflanked to his left by the mainstream media who saw the danger of handing the initiative to the left and so welcomed protests as a show of national decency.
The recent revelation of Lord Alli as gift-provider-in-general to Starmer and Rayner – let us not forget, the son of a tool maker and a single parent – has forced aspiring lieutenants into defending the indefensible, Wes Streeting argued, “People who give to political parties are showing the same philanthropic spirit as people who give to charity. I think this is actually a noble pursuit. I think it is a good thing to do.” I had to read that quote twice.
More damage, though, will be done by the key economic and social policy decisions made by the government. The refusal to remove the two-child benefit cap, echoing New Labour’s cut to lone parent benefit in 1997, and PM Starmer’s view that the long term ill should look for work shows a willingness to kick down on those who most need support.
Residualisation: the future form of social regulation
However, it is the removal of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners not on benefits that is an indicative policy for the future. Nobody thinks the winter fuel payment cut is necessary in terms of the immediate national budget. Not even the Institute of Fiscal Studies believe it was necessary in order to reassure ‘the markets’, a line Reeves got her junior ministers to parrot, hoping the memory of the Kwarsi Kwartang debacle budget would help in the PR battle. Nor do Labour’s ruling-class allies need reassuring that Starmer is here to do their bidding whatever the Labour Party Conference votes for. They know it – he is their man.
The winter fuel payment cut presages a broader strategy of means testing and residualisation and signals a final assault on what remains of the post-war welfare state’s universalism. While the grave of the post-war settlement was dug by the Coalition Government, Starmer’s role is that of the undertaker who will roll the corpse in, fill the grave and pat down the soil.
Labour will move to residualise every state service to those on benefits and to shrink the national and local state further. Readers not on state benefits are about to enter the world of an ever vanishing national and local state. The only parts that will survive the process will be policing, prisons, the border force, the security services and the body of armed people that form the military.
Wherever you look residualisation and privatisation will be the key. It is difficult to predict the precise content and sequence but one step might be free prescriptions for those over 60 being ‘rationalised up’ to the pension age – why should those who are 60 to 67 and in well paid jobs not pay for their prescriptions?
Tax incentives may be offered to those who ‘choose’ a private provider via personal contributions to an individual health care fund, paralleling the decade long pressure to obtain a workplace pensions. All around us we see adverts for different forms of private health care. This will be encouraged so that the cash-strapped NHS can focus on those with the least income. And, what, it will be argued, is wrong with that?
Local government, now on the verge of financial implosion, will solely focus on the essentials, that of social care for the elderly, those with significant disabilities and young people in care. These and all other services will be residualised to those out of work or on a pension or on disability benefits.
Other services will become fully chargeable. Many are already charged for garden bin collection – aren’t people with gardens mostly better off? Normal waste collections will be reduced in frequency or a charge made if you need an extra bin – is this not a good environmental strategy? As is letting council land ‘re-wild’ as local authority cut back on estate management jobs.
Local libraries will become a thing of the past or run by volunteers – the “big society”. Youth services will be residualised to those in contact with the criminal justice system. The less visible but crucial local planning departments will be outsourced to private architecture and planning consultancies who will sign off each other’s planning applications as robust.
The harder you look for the remains of the post-war settlement the more you realise that it is barely visible in most people’s lives, bar the NHS, and how threadbare it is for those who need it.
So as well as being the undertaker, Starmer’s main social policy task is to formalise through legislation the new post universalist welfare state. It will look remarkably like what we see across the pond in the United States, the only substantial nut left to crack being the triple lock on pensions which was only introduced in 2010, while the NHS will continue to dissolve in an acid bath of personalisation and privatisation.
State of the working class and its ability to respond
The political direction of travel of the Labour government and the Labour Party is to resume the path that Blairism set out in 1997 and heal the split at the end of the 19th century between political Liberalism and the politics of Labourism. To finally transform the Labour Party into a US type Democrat Party with the backing of business unionism. What does this mean in terms of working class organisation?
The working class is much less an organised force that it was just under half a century ago. In 1979 there were 13.5 million workers in trade unions – over a third of the workforce. Today there are 5.5 million workers in trade unions – just over a fifth of the workforce. Eight out of ten workers are not in a union.
For the most part, the most radical and politicised section of the working class have left the Labour Party without having found another political home.
There are also millions of disaffected and unorganised working-class people who will look for the solutions to their own social crisis in the next period. The question is to which political force will they turn? We have seen the dangers of the AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France, the Freedom party in Austria, and others.
There is no guarantee that the least organised section of the working class will not turn to the far right if the socialist left is not able to offer a radical solution to the social crisis our class faces before the next general election. We are not on the verge of fascism but a section of the working class which doesn’t feel represented and isn’t part of the labour movement is much, much more vulnerable to messages from Reform, which is infested with the far right.
So, for example, the banners carried on recent demonstrations to “support pensioners, not migrants” is a warning: the far right will counterpose in this fashion and socialists have to have a platform and program that offers a solution to the social crisis based on unifying the working class, rather than dividing it.
This is not going to be possible from the ward party meetings of the Labour Party. It is obvious an alternative pole of attraction is needed. Marxists need to organise for the creation of a new kind of mass party of the working class with socialist politics, and quickly.