Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer meeting multi-national investors. Photo: No 10/CC
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer meeting multi-national investors. Photo: No 10/CC

Sam Ward, Leicester Socialist Party

Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves, after admitting to gossiping parliamentary insiders that she’s “running out of ideas”, has come up with some new schemes to get the economy growing. And unsurprisingly, she wants to move the dial more towards companies and the super-rich at the expense of workers and consumers.

Labour plan to go on the offensive against the powers of regulators and consumer protections. Former Amazon executive Doug Gurr has been appointed as the new head of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – a slap in the face to workers. How can he be expected to fairly oversee big business and monopolisation? Amazon is notorious for harbouring poor and exploitative working conditions and brutal union busting. It has built an eCommerce monopoly that has destroyed the high street.

Riskier regulations

Attacks on workers don’t stop there. Reeves recently visited Davos to speak at the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of capitalists. She went on the offensive against both workers and consumers, advocating for the creation of a “riskier regulatory environment”. Fewer regulations, like health and safety or looser planning restrictions, will mean the capitalists can make higher profits while working-class people have to accept the consequences – unsafe products, financial products with dodgy clauses, or environmental damage.

To show big business that the new Labour government is firmly on their side, Reeves recently intervened in a car financing Supreme Court case. She urged the court not to hand out compensation, potentially over £30 billion, to consumers harmed in the motor finance commission scandal protecting the interests of motor lenders and car dealerships. Dealerships were incentivised to offer loans with higher interest rates that earned them more commission.

Non-dom nonstarter?

One of the few promises Labour made during the election campaign that could hit the super-rich was abolishing the non-dom tax status. Non-dom status enables people who live in the UK to avoid paying UK tax on money made abroad because their permanent home (for tax purposes) is outside the country. Promising to scrap this status, a loophole created for the ultra-wealthy, in their manifesto was one of the few policies workers and unions welcomed. Now, rather than scrapping the status entirely, Labour are set to water this promise down after “listening to the concerns of the ‘non-dom community’”.

It’s been six months and the Labour government has already revealed its cards. The Labour Party no longer has the interests of the working class at heart. That is why we need a new party, built from the trade unions, drawing together workers, young people and activists from workplaces, and community, environmental, anti-racist and anti-cuts campaigns, to provide a fighting, socialist political alternative to the pro-big business parties.

As part of this socialist alternative, the Socialist Party fights for demands that would put working-class people in the driving seat, not bosses and scammers.