The price of everything is cranking up again, our services – the NHS, schools, universities, local councils – are crumbling from years of austerity. And despite a Labour government promising change, two years on, it feels like nothing has.
Attacks on pensioners’ winter fuel payments, disability benefit cuts, the initial refusal to remove the cruel two-child benefit cap, hiring Mandelson dripping with sleaze to try to suck up to Trump… All are piled onto the mountain of reasons people have for wanting Keir Starmer gone.
This issue of the Socialist is going to press before the results of the 7 May elections for the Welsh Senedd, Scottish Parliament and thousands of seats in English local authorities. But we already know Starmer’s Labour faces a beating.
Many will have picked up Nigel Farage’s right-populist Reform UK as a weapon with which to club Starmer’s Labour government, wanting to express anger at ‘broken Britain’. Many will have voted for the Greens, Plaid and independents too, among them those wanting to deal Starmer a blow from the left.
The working class faces a new wave of the cost-of-living crisis. And attempts by any politicians to make us pay – again! – for another crisis of their system won’t just be meekly accepted.
In these elections, the Socialist Party was part of a 300-strong Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition stand. We raised how fighting, socialist elected representatives could be part of leading the working-class fightback, by using elected positions to defy austerity attacks on our services, helping to mobilise a movement that says ‘we won’t pay for Trump’s wars – make the super-rich pay!’ We put pressure on Greens and left-wing independents to take the same approach.
And we explained how such a fightback, with the involvement of and lead from the seven million-strong trade union movement, is the most effective way of cutting across support for Reform.
The crushing blow for the Labour government is for the same reasons the Tories were smashed less than two years ago – because they are governing within a capitalist system in crisis, and so are attacking the working class and overseeing stagnant or falling living standards while the bosses get richer.
The working class needs its own party, one which fights for socialist change.
