Hannah Ponting, Liverpool Socialist Party
After 14 years of Tory austerity, many hoped that a Labour government would pose a positive alternative and mark a shift in policies towards those that support ordinary people. It is evident that the Labour Party no longer works in the interests of working-class people.
This can be seen very clearly through the numerous cuts made by the Labour government towards particularly vulnerable areas of society. Like the cuts made to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance and to disabled people’s benefits, including freezing Personal Independence Payments (PIP) so that they don’t rise alongside inflation, and cutting incapacity benefit.
There are also attacks on students and young people. Alongside the rise in university tuition fees, there are proposed cuts of £500 million in education, even floating the idea of axing the guarantee of universal free meals for infants.
Labour’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap also keeps many children and families in poverty.
And all this at a time when everything is going up. But our wages don’t keep up.
In the face of this continued austerity, increasing crisis, destruction of council services and even more privatisation in the NHS – now delivered under a different party banner – it is important, now more than ever, that the working class has a political voice.
We need to build a new mass workers’ party, grounded in socialist policies and with the backing of trade unions, in order to provide a genuine alternative.
This is why members of the Socialist Party stand as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) in elections: to provide a clear alternative for workers, and to offer a signpost towards the kind of political movement we urgently need.
Where they are taking place, we are standing in May’s local elections to put a socialist challenge to Starmer’s Labour, as well as Tories and Reform, at the ballot box.
