Starmer unpopular – but what will opposition look like?

Editorial of the Socialist issue 1302

You probably don’t need the Socialist to tell you Keir Starmer is unpopular. His net approval rating has plummeted in his first months in office, as it has for all of the recent austerity politicians acting in the interests of the super-rich bosses. Not that Labour started its time in office popular, securing the votes of just 20.1% of the electorate in the general election.

What has happened so far under this Labour government to in any way quench the burning anger and frustration with crumbling services and the cost-of-living crisis? In fact, the callous decisions to keep the two-child benefit cap, and cut pensioners’ winter fuel payments are only adding fuel to the fire.

It will find an expression, as it did during the strike wave. The trade unions can give working-class anger an organised expression under pressure of workers’ desire to fight back.

Strikes

Starmer’s government wants to give itself credit for bringing public sector strikes to a close. By calibrating pay deals to the level they judged enough to stop strikes, and with the assistance of trade union leaders to peddle the myth that Labour can ‘change’ British capitalism so that it serves both the interests of workers and the capitalist class.

Besides, Starmer’s government hasn’t stopped public sector strikes. Teachers in non-academised sixth form colleges are striking demanding a funded pay rise. There has been a whole spate of local NHS strikes over pay grading and outsourcing.

Nor will it indefinitely be able to prevent nationwide strikes developing.

23 million people will get their chance to express dissatisfaction with Labour at the ballot box in the May 2025 local elections, the majority in local authorities led by the Tories. It is highly likely that, of the minority who decide to vote, an increased proportion will take up the ‘Reform stick’ to hit both Labour and the Tories.

One recent poll puts Labour third, behind the Tories and Reform. At real-life ballot boxes, in the 101 council by-elections contested between the general election and 13 November, Labour’s vote share was an average of 30%, to the Tories’ 25% and Reform’s 19%. All election statistics and opinion polls only give a glimpse of the views of a certain section of the population at any given time.

The phantom of a future Nigel Farage prime minister will be conjured, playing on many working-class people’s understandable fear and disgust of his Reform UK. “If this Labour government goes down, what comes next will be Faragism, either as a Reform UK-Conservative hybrid or neat and undiluted,” Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland writes.

And so, the argument goes, by sections of the capitalist establishment including Labour, echoed by sections of the trade union leaders: ‘Don’t do anything that might weaken this Labour government’.

Phantom Farage

But the next general election will take place in a completely different economic, social and political context than that which exists today, just five months into the new government. There will be huge opportunities for the working class to stamp itself on events, and in doing so knock the wind out of other forces cynically and opportunistically trying to misdirect working-class anger.

Freedland despairs about the ‘inevitable’ rise of ‘nationalist populism’, pointing to international examples such as the threat of the far-right Marine Le Pen in France.

He doesn’t mention that the New Popular Front won the most seats in the election this summer and that the ongoing political crisis in France includes a surge in support for the left-wing France Insoumise. Or that the French government’s collapse coincides with redeveloping strikes. There are huge opportunities for the working class to seize the political crisis and get the upper hand.

In Britain, there is no course charted straight from Labour failure to ‘Faragism’. And no possible imagined future that doesn’t include a resurgence of class struggle – the memory of the strike wave still fresh, protests and political opportunities for the working class. Every possible step has to be taken to make sure that those who try to hold things back with ‘don’t do anything that might weaken this Labour government’ are swept aside or otherwise forced to bend to working-class pressure.

That’s why the elections to the leadership bodies of key trade unions taking place in the first months of 2025 are so important. And why the Socialist Party will be standing and campaigning, alongside others, for fighting trade union leaderships prepared to take on this Labour government, and prepared to take steps towards the trade unions themselves building political opposition to Labour at the ballot box.