Editorial of the Socialist issue 1292
“I’d also like him to say that we’re not going to take this country down austerity mark 2. People voted for change. They need to see change. And he needs to reverse the winter fuel allowance [decision] and let people have that £300 they can put their heating on this winter.”
This was the advice Unite the Union’s general secretary Sharon Graham gave to Sir Keir Starmer before his address to Labour Party Conference. But both Starmer and his ‘iron’ chancellor Rachel Reeves maintained their mantra of ‘unpopular decisions’ as they set the scene for their first budget on 30 October – snuffing out the prospect of a significant increase in public spending, desperately needed by the working class after 14 years of Tory austerity and the cost-of-living squeeze.
Reeves set out her ‘fiscal rules’, “a framework of economic and fiscal stability” – not to borrow to fund day-to-day spending and to reduce national debt as a share of the economy. The only tweak that she may propose out of that spending straitjacket is some ‘flexibility’ regarding capital/infrastructure spending.
Serving the bosses’ interests
That is a recipe for faithfully following Tory spending limits. Starmer refused to step back from his planned cut to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. This is a clear sign to the fat-cat bosses that he will faithfully serve their interests, but also a signal to the working class to limit its expectations about what his government will deliver. Reeves is now indicating that she may even pull back from her ‘crackdown’ on non-dom tax avoidance, typically used by much of the super-rich.
But that doesn’t mean that, like all pro-capitalist governments, Starmer’s can’t be forced into concessions, against its will. Even Rishi Sunak’s Tories were forced by the strike wave to up his initial offers on public sector pay.
Towards the end of 2022, the leaders of the Royal College of Nurses (RCN) offered to suspend their impending strike, the first in the union’s history in England, Wales and Scotland, if Sunak would agree to serious talks on pay. The Tories arrogantly refused, forcing the RCN to call strikes. But the result was that a new generation of nurses, along with the many other workers over the last few years, have learned the essential lesson, that you win far more if you are prepared to fight.
It is therefore ironic but not accidental that it is now RCN members who are the first public sector workers to vote to reject a 5.5% pay offer from Labour. Starmer has sought to buy time for his new New Labour government by pitching public sector pay offers at 5% and over, and many of these have been accepted, with the recommendation of the union leaderships. It is also part of his attempt to draw the union leaders into partnership with his government and the employers – something he pushed in his address to TUC Congress earlier in September.
The right-wing union leaders are all too willing to sign up to this, indicated by their welcoming comments to Starmer’s Labour conference speech. However, the more left-wing or militant union leaders are not all so clear in putting forward an alternative to the trajectory set out by Starmer and Reeves.
In the last few weeks, we have seen Mick Lynch of the RMT, which is not affiliated to Labour, not raise any concerns on Newsnight about Blairite health minister Wes Streeting’s NHS ‘reforms’. Although that word has long been a code for cuts and especially privatisation, a long-held viewpoint of Streeting.
CWU general secretary Dave Ward correctly lambasted the record and legacy of Royal Mail privatisation that threatens the jobs of 130,000 workers. But as he did at the TUC, Dave refused to demand that Labour re-nationalises Royal Mail, which is not only CWU policy but also Labour’s! It was passed at the party conference two years ago, in the middle of the postal strike.
The RCN rejection vote is a taster of the other trend starting to be felt within the trade union movement – to be prepared to confront any Starmer austerity agenda both industrially and politically. It is a struggle being felt within a number of unions, including the civil service PCS union, where the left NEC majority is resisting the leadership’s attempts to settle on pay with the government. This is the music of the future as workers will inevitably come up against Starmer’s spending limits.
This mood was eventually reflected at Labour’s conference, when Unite’s motion to oppose the cut to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance was passed. In moving the motion, Sharon Graham contrasted Starmer’s policies with the manifesto of the 1945 Labour government, which nationalised coal and the railways and created the NHS: “Written at a time when our debt to GDP was 270 per cent. Nearly three times higher than it is now. Yet, no mention of cuts, no mention of austerity and certainly no mention of making everyday people pay.”
Changed Labour
But this is a very different Labour government. As Starmer said on 5 July, they ‘won as changed Labour and will govern as changed Labour’, echoing the New Labour speech by Tony Blair in winning office in 1997. Unite the Union has welcomed Reeves’s comments on capital and infrastructure spending, but should demand that this should include a massive intervention into Tata Steel, Grangemouth and Harland and Wolff to save jobs and defend communities, on the basis of nationalisation.
At one point during his conference speech, in response to a delegate heckling him over Gaza, Starmer chided: “This guy has obviously got a pass from the 2019 conference. While he’s been protesting, we’ve been changing the party. That’s why we got a Labour government.”
Starmer has moved to rub out any semblance of the policies of Jeremy Corbyn from Labour, returning it to its New Labour status as safe for big business. Even when suffering the censure of losing the winter fuel motion, it was pushed back to the graveyard shift of the last session of conference, when Starmer had already departed to New York for the United Nations Assembly, partly to shore up the murderous Israeli regime. In any case, Starmer will ignore the vote on the Unite motion, showing again that Labour’s conference is an undemocratic rubber stamp, leaving members and affiliated unions powerless.
Corbyn’s transformative 2017 manifesto won 3 million more votes than Starmer’s Tory-lite programme got in July. But Labour’s conference, on the back of the continued suspension of the seven Labour MPs, showed once more that Starmer’s Labour will govern in the interests of the capitalist class, not workers.
TUC passed a motion which included an amendment from PCS, inspired by the left NEC majority, that demanded a recall congress if Starmer moved away from his New Deal promises in his first 100 days.
Such a balance sheet will be required when that deadline hits in the next few weeks, and as Reeves sets out her first budget on 30 October. But as part of this resistance, the unions must begin the discussion of the political alternative needed to supplement and strengthen militant industrial action.
