Josh Asker, Socialist Party Executive Committee
Only French president Emmanual Macron is more unpopular than Keir Starmer, out of the leaders of the G7 group of rich capitalist nations. Starmer has a net approval rating of minus 44%. Both are less popular than the Japanese prime minister forced to resign last week, after less than a year in post.
Strikes and protests erupted in France on 10 September, set to escalate with all unions having called action for 18 September. Workers have been joined by youth angry about yet more austerity. France is on its third prime minister this year, Macron’s party unable to put together a collection of politicians to vote through the latest budget (see pages 12-13).
Britain’s capitalists will be gnawing their nails with concern, watching events unfurl across the Channel, because they are looking at their future. In both nations, the capitalist class faces a crisis whereby its traditional parties have seen their support disintegrate on the basis of governing in the bosses’ interests, carrying out brutal austerity.
For two years, trade union leaders have failed to organise a mass expression of workers’ anger at Macron’s austerity in France. Now that anger has exploded onto the surface, as it will inevitably in Britain. Socialists have a vital role acting as a lever to organise pressure on the leadership of the trade unions to act (see page 6).
Since the return of politicians to Westminster, Starmer’s government has resumed its crisis. Angela Rayner’s tax affairs and Peter Mandelson’s mixing with Jeffrey Epstein will only confirm in the minds of workers that this is a government like those before it – riven by cronyism, acting in the interests of the bosses. Starmer’s lavish dining with Trump and the king hammers it home.
For huge sections of the working class, any illusion that Starmer’s Labour was going to bring reprieve from brutal austerity is dead. As the Socialist Party has pointed out, it came into office elected by a lower share of the electorate than any government in over 100 years. It has got way less popular since, of which Labour politicians are acutely aware.
Austerity Budget looms
But Starmer’s government stumbles on. Milestones include the planned 26 November Budget, in which the capitalists are insisting the working class is made to pay. A recent Financial Times editorial menaced: “Leaders may prefer to delay hard choices, but if they cannot muster the willpower to rein in spending, then markets will impose it for them – swiftly, decisively, and on terms no government would willingly choose”.
Another milestone is the May 2026 elections, in which Starmer’s government will face the electoral consequences of working-class anger against it.
It is those contending class pressures which will continue to drive further splits and divisions in Starmer’s government and in the Labour Party. Starmer’s cabinet reshuffle is him lining up loyal austerity lieutenant’s for another brutal budget.
The deputy leadership election, triggered by Rayner’s resignation as party deputy leader, will not be contested by candidates that can be described in any way of being on the left. The chosen candidate of the Labour left, Bell Riberio-Addy, got just 24 nominations, failing to meet the threshold of 80 – a threshold doubled in one of Starmer’s first moves as leader, as part of a raft of changes to prevent a left challenge.
Nonetheless, the deputy leadership election will be a conduit for discontent within Labour’s ranks, its ever-diminishing membership but above all its MPs and councillors concerned for their comfortable positions. It will further bring to the surface all of the growing splits and divisions.
Lucy Powell is the candidate set to win support from those wanting to express discontent, against Starmer’s cabinet member Bridget Phillipson. Powell however, is not an insurgent figure, she has served as a shadow cabinet member under Ed Miliband and Starmer, and was one of those who resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as part of the 2016 ‘chicken coup’.
There will be those, including trade union leaders, who will argue that the workers’ movement’s best interests are served by getting behind opposition candidates in the leadership of the Labour Party, firmly consolidated in the hands of the capitalist class.
In fact, the workers’ movement’s best interests are in the working class having its own independent political voice. To defy the demands of the capitalist ‘markets’ for yet more brutal austerity, it will in the course of struggle need to be won to a socialist programme including taking the vast wealth and resources out of the hands of the super-rich capitalist bosses, nationalised under democratic workers’ control and management.
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ announcement has raised the sights of hundreds of thousands to the possibility of a new mass workers’ party developing. The crisis of the capitalists’ political representation is a huge advantage, but it has to be pressed home by the working class building its own new mass party, armed with a socialist programme.
