In what amounted to a declaration of war on asylum seekers, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told The Sun that ‘we rightly talk about the importance of climate change, terrorism and hostile foreign powers when it comes to our national security. But we now need to put dealing with the threat of people smugglers on the same footing.’ What better way to push the idea that asylum seekers crossing the channel are but one step short of being terrorists? Whatever the details of Labour asylum seeker policy, the notion that it is time to ‘smash the gangs’ is intended to be the presentational framework. Tory ‘illegal immigration’ will become Labour ‘illegal immigration’, confirming that a Labour government in 2024 will be no less reactionary than the Tory one it replaces. If there is any doubt, look to the Labour decision not to revoke licences to develop the Rosebank oilfield in the North Sea even though every scientific opinion is against it. Robert Clough reports.
Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party in April 2020 on the basis that he had signed up to ten pledges which supposedly would represent a continued commitment to Corbynism. That was to please the left: in fact Starmer had plotted constantly against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Once leader, he made it clear where he really stood ideologically, announcing he would refrain from ‘scoring party political points’ in parliament and that he would instead ‘engage constructively with the government’. There would be no fundamental disagreement between him and the Tory government, only differences over policy execution. ‘Constructive engagement’ would show that his ten pledges were just political ballast to be jettisoned when expedient – among them any pious notion of a ‘compassionate’ and ‘dignified’ migrant policy.
Hammering the shadow cabinet
Within months he was displaying the ruthlessness with which as Director of Public Prosecutions he had treated those arrested in the riots that followed the police execution of Mark Duggan. In June 2020 he had disposed of his principal opponent in the leadership election, Rebecca Long-Bailey, sacking her from the shadow cabinet for ‘liking’ a supposedly anti-Semitic tweet. In September three front-benchers were summarily despatched to the back benches for defying an instruction to abstain in a vote on the Overseas Operations Bill which would exempt British armed forces personnel from prosecution under the European Convention on Human Rights – they voted against. Two more were disposed of a month later when they also refused to abstain, this time on the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill which would allow senior police officers to grant immunity to undercover agents whatever crimes they committed.
A few days later, at the end of October 2020, it was Corbyn’s turn: responding to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on alleged anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, he managed a bleat of dissent and had the whip withdrawn and his membership suspended. Although his membership was restored, in March 2023 he was blocked from standing as a Labour candidate in the next general election.
Expelling the left
In the meantime Starmer also set about expelling anyone who uttered a word in defence of Palestine: this was now treated as straightforward anti-Semitism. Organisations associated with the left were proscribed; 11 MPs who signed a pacifist Stop the War statement on the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 which condemned the Russian invasion but offered mealy-mouthed criticisms of NATO’s role were instructed to withdraw their signatures or have the whip withdrawn. They all meekly complied: £86,000 a year buys a lot of principles. Hundreds have been expelled over the last three years, entire Constituency Labour Parties suspended. Labour candidates who may have had slightly radical sympathies have been prevented from standing such as Jamie Driscoll, at present Mayor of North of Tyne, who was barred in June 2023 from standing as Labour Party candidate for Mayor of the North East.
Renewing relations with big business
Disposing of internal opposition has been a key part of the strategy for building an alliance with key sections of the ruling class – the industrial, manufacturing, energy and distribution monopolies and of course the banks. The last few months have seen the Labour Party leadership cement this coalition. Monopolies in the arms, fossil fuel and energy supply sectors are hosting fringe events at Labour’s conference in October. These include US giant Boeing, Babcock, a British missile manufacturer, Palantir (which is now responsible for handling NHS data), British Airways, SSE, construction monopoly Taylor Woodrow, Cadent Gas and private health care companies. 200 senior business people have signed up to attend a special business forum at the conference with Starmer, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, all at a cost of £2,520 each. Another 180 have been put on a waiting list.
Their enthusiasm for Labour is not just driven by the uncertainties of the post-Brexit years and the complete incoherence of Tory government policy: they like the commitment to a ‘more active state’ that ‘is willing to act in the national interest, pursue national goals, and invest in building the capacity of the industries that will determine the nation’s success tomorrow – working in partnership with a dynamic private sector as it does so’, as set out in Labour’s A new business model for Britain. This promises more private contracts for state services, favoured by the likes of Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting who trumpets the need for even more private sector involvement in the NHS to address a waiting list which now stands at 7.8 million and rising. The icing on the cake for the ruling class is Labour’s decision not to end charitable status for private schools; abolishing the current VAT exemption will hit the smaller institutions far more than the largest – and wealthiest.
No relief for the working class
However, there is a warning: the business model ‘rests on the principles of sound money and financial responsibility, so vital to ensuring businesses can and will invest’ and affirms that ‘every line in our [election] manifesto will be fully costed and fully funded’. In other words, the largesse of the state will be very carefully rationed, and the recipients are not going to include the majority of the working class. Its author, Rachel Reeves, takes care to include Labour’s favourite tropes about ‘hard-working families’ who are ‘doing the right things’, recalling her 2015 declaration that ‘We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those out of work.’ She along with the new Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall had been among the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs who in May that year refused to vote against then-chancellor George Osborne’s vicious Welfare Bill which introduced freezes on benefits, the bedroom tax, the overall benefit cap and the so-called two-child policy which denied state benefits for a third child born after April 2017.
With the support of the majority of trade union leaders, Labour has ruled out a commitment to abolish the two-child rule – even though it would lift 1.1 million children out of poverty. Even worse, Labour promises only to ‘look into’ scrapping the cruel requirement for women to declare whether their third child was conceived as a result of rape. Labour has also pledged to continue with benefits sanctions, and has overturned its pledge to get rid of Universal Credit. Any notion that a Labour government will reduce levels of poverty child or adult is illusory: Streeting cynically made this clear when he stated that ‘false hope is worse than no hope’. Starmer’s support for the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the 2023 Public Order Act which together represent a major assault on the right to protest confirms that a Labour government will resort to crude repression to ensure that false hope becomes no hope. What is there for the ruling class not to like?
Trade union leaders onside
The majority of trade union leaders are content with Labour’s maintenance of the four anti-trade union laws passed by the 1979-97 Tory governments – they provide the framework which helps them control trade union disputes as they have done for the past year. Importantly, the September TUC Congress called for continued support for NATO and its proxy war in Ukraine, with trade union leaders such as GMB General Secretary Gary Smith joining supposed left MP John McDonnell at a fringe meeting to make clear that there should be no negotiations prior to a Russian defeat. That the TUC also called for Labour to support universal free school meals is neither here nor there as it has no plans to fight for such a policy, and Labour has said flatly it has no plans to implement it. Differences between the TUC and the Labour Party at these events rarely have any significance, and with the 2023 Congress, none at all.
No vote for Labour
As we move into the general election period, calls to ‘kick the Tories out’ will intensify. When they are echoed by the left and self-proclaimed socialists however, they are just deceitful. Firstly, they beg the question: whose army will do this? Clearly it will not be the so-called organised working class: the trade union leadership would never allow such unconstitutional action. Second, they separate the Tory government from the class forces that lie behind it and so reduce the problems facing the working class to one of parliamentary representation. Third, they imply that there is an alternative which will promote the interests of the working class – and in today’s conditions, that must mean the racist, imperialist Labour Party. These people want to keep the working class tied to the Labour Party and the trade union leadership. That also means binding it to those sections of the ruling class who want a Labour government and see the trade union leadership as a force which will contain working class resistance to further impoverishment and repression: it is reaction all along the line. Genuine socialists will be defined by their rejection of the Labour Party, their dismissal of the ‘kick the Tories out’ slogan as childish nonsense, and their fight for a new working class movement independent of and opposed to the trade union leadership and the Labour Party.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 296 October/November 2023
