Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out the Labour government’s stall within days of taking office. On 9 July he attended the Washington NATO summit to repeat his election commitment to raise Britain’s defence spending to 2.5% of GDP and to confirm that Labour would honour the pledge of £3bn annual aid to Ukraine’s war effort made by the outgoing Tory government. A few days later he signed a £3.5bn export finance agreement with the Zelensky government, and invited the Ukrainian president to a cabinet meeting to discuss the 600-strong ‘shadow’ oil tanker fleet which Russia has built up to help evade Western sanctions.
Restoring British imperialism’s international standing is a priority for Starmer, and he followed up the Washington visit with attendance at a meeting of the European Political Community to ‘reset’ relations with Europe. There his principal concern after whipping up support for Ukraine was ‘illegal immigration’ which he described as ‘no longer a challenge, but a real crisis’. Applauding Italian fascistic Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni after a bilateral meeting as a great fighter against ‘illegal immigration’, Starmer sought negotiations with France over returning ‘illegal migrants’. He also said he would consider offshoring the processing of asylum claims elsewhere after cancelling the Rwanda contract of the outgoing Tory government. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper meanwhile promised The Sun an acceleration of deportations with more raids on car washes, beauty salons and nail bars. A plane chartered to take asylum seekers to Rwanda on 23 July took off instead to return 55 Vietnamese migrants: they will have been victims of human trafficking.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy was shaking Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hand within ten days of taking office and not uttering a single word of condemnation of the latest massacre of Palestinians. His call for an immediate ceasefire is more for a domestic audience which is appalled at the continued genocide; Lammy knows that Netanyahu will take no notice. Meanwhile the King’s Speech told us what Labour does not consider a priority: the abolition of the two-child benefit cap which has driven an estimated 1.6 million children into poverty and even destitution. Claiming it cannot afford this step, the government has set up a taskforce to investigate poverty and its causes – as if this was in no way understood – and suspended seven Labour MPs from the Parliamentary Labour Party who supported a Scottish National Party amendment calling for the immediate abolition of the cap.
Labour has therefore once again made it clear where it stands: on the side of British imperialism, and against the working class and oppressed both here and abroad. It has a massive majority – 172 seats – and the confidence of the dominant sections of the ruling class. There is nothing progressive about it: its purpose is to navigate British imperialism through a time of increasing inter-imperialist rivalries while doing the minimum necessary to keep the bulk of its electoral support – the better-off sections of the working class – on side. British capitalism is in such dire straits that maintaining even a basic level of profitability will need to be paid for by the mass of the working class. With Chancellor of the Exchequer projecting a deficit in public finances of £20bn, austerity will continue unabated.
Robert Clough
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
