A week after removing the whip from key Jeremy Corbyn ally, Diane Abbott MP, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has taken the axe to Corbyn’s headline policies too.
On Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto pledge to abolish tuition fees, Starmer said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are likely to move on from that commitment”.
“When we have come up with what is the fairest option, then we will announce that.” What would be fairer than giving young people today what Starmer and a whole raft of other MPs had – free university education with maintenance grants?
Nationalisation
What about Corbyn’s pledges to nationalise energy, water and mail? Starmer’s reason for jettisoning these policies too: “There is a huge outlay of money to nationalise some of these companies”. Not true.
Why should the muck-spreading, profiteering, water company bosses get any compensation? So too the energy bosses, like those of BP that made £4 billion profits in the first quarter of the year. Nationalising these companies under democratic working-class control, with compensation only on the basis of need, could be free.
Starmer is proclaiming from the rooftops, addressing the capitalist class: ‘Labour would govern in your interests’. That’s why the Socialist Party calls for a trade union-backed workers’ list of candidates at the next general election, fighting in the interests of workers not the bosses – as a step towards establishing a new mass workers’ party. This should include Jeremy Corbyn standing in Islington North, outside of Labour if he has to.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) stand in the local elections on 4 May was part of that same fight – with striking workers, students and those kicked out of Labour among the candidates – putting up a fighting socialist alternative to austerity.
