Wrong: Owen Jones tells Labour “abandon anti-austerity”


Sarah Sachs-Eldridge, Socialist Party national organiser

Owen Jones is completely wrong to say it’s time to “abandon anti-austerity”. He wrote Labour should stop using the term in the Guardian (Labour can’t just gloat over Osborne’s mess – we need a positive alternative, 28 October).

Austerity is planned poverty for the working class and, as Jeremy Corbyn said, a political choice. There isn’t a lack of wealth. It is in the wrong hands.

Jeremy Corbyn

While the obscene fortune of the richest 1,000 grows by half a billion pounds a week, food banks are set up at hospitals to stave off a malnutrition-driven readmissions crisis.

It is wrong to claim ‘anti-austerity’ is “a term that has never really resonated with the public”.

But hundreds of thousands are marching and campaigning. It was Jeremy Corbyn’s explicit anti-austerity message that won him the Labour leadership.

This was despite the establishment’s campaign of poison against him. And thousands are engaged in battles to defend the jobs, homes, services and benefits the austerians seek to deny us.

Owen’s right, we need to be “pro something”. The Socialist Party campaigns for free education, a £10 an hour minimum wage now and massive investment in council housing.

These measures would have a big impact on the lives of those suffering austerity. But that won’t be delivered without a mass working class movement – and a government that breaks with austerity and commits to taking the wealth off the 1%.

But he is utterly wrong to put forward capitalist Germany as a model. Capitalism has the exploitation of the working class at its heart.

And as for abandoning ‘anti-austerity’ – the problem is most Labour MPs haven’t even adopted it! At best they are austerity-lite. Getting rid of them is part of the task of forming a party capable of leading the anti-austerity movement.

Labour councils

A key part of that is the call on Labour councils to refuse to implement cuts, as the socialist-led Liverpool council did in the 1980s. Instead they built 5,000 council homes and created well-paid jobs and real apprenticeships.

Owen rejects this. He proposed in his blog on 29 August that councils instead “protest cuts and emphasise they are imposed by the Westminster government”. This will not stop workers being sacked by Labour councils or save services.

You abandon ‘anti-austerity’ if you want, Owen. But we won’t!