Pile on the pressure!

Mark Best, Socialist Party National Committee

May’s election results were a disaster for Keir Starmer. Workers and young people expressed their discontent by voting in many different ways, but the overwhelming message is that Labour and the Tories – the two main parties of the establishment – can’t deliver what is needed for working-class people.

Some Labour grandees begged their MPs not to oust Starmer now – the instability and chaos would not go down well with the bond markets. None of them were saying he should stay because he’s doing a good job! Now Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham are preparing their own paths to power.

Starmer’s getting a small taste of what it’s like to live under the threat of eviction. Workers and young people experience a very different housing crisis. Which sits alongside a cost-of-living crisis that never truly went away, and over a decade of austerity.

A new phase in the cost-of-living crisis is unfolding. The prices at the supermarket and the petrol pump have already started to increase, while our pay packets remain the same. Those at the top expect the working class to suffer the consequences of the economic turmoil Trump’s war on Iran has unleashed.

The weakness and tumult at the top of government is an opportunity that the working class can make use of. We need to prepare now for the type of action that can win for our class.

We won’t be made to pay for the bosses’ crisis. Workers across the trade union movement can take steps now to prepare to fight to defend our living standards and livelihoods. Fight for the kind of serious action that can maximise our power. The discussions at the National Shop Stewards Network conference can be a launchpad for this.

The thousands of new councillors can be put on the spot: will you stand and fight with us for the resources our area needs against a weak and rotten Labour government, or will you continue doing their bidding? Campaigns to defend and extend vital services can be linked together with bold demands to build the council houses we desperately need, reopen libraries and youth clubs, and more.

And if the system of the bankers and bosses can’t afford what we need, then we can’t afford their system. The lack of resources to invest in improving the lives of all is down to the billions and billions of profits that are sucked away into vaults or gambled on the financial markets.

There is an alternative to the doom spiral of the capitalist system and the endless attacks on our living standards. The working class in power owning and controlling the wealth and resources of society with a democratic socialist plan of production, in Britain and internationally, would guarantee an end to the poverty, war and destruction. Join us in that fight.