Lindsey German on working for the clampdown Labour party-style

What sort of government would cut the benefits of some of the poorest people in order to spend more on weapons and wars? What sort of government boasts that it is able to make cuts that even the Tories did not dare to do? The government of Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting, that’s what. And it even has the temerity to argue that it’s very name – the Labour party – means that it is the party of work.

This grotesque caricature means that the present government either doesn’t know or is too callous to care that the party’s name stems from trade unions’ desire to have a political voice in parliament to stand up for workers against the system of exploitation. No one founded it thinking its plan was to force the sick and disabled into work through vicious cuts to their already miserly incomes.

It is enough to make you sick to your stomach – and even some Labour MPs can’t stand it. That’s the meaning of the hasty likely retreat on freezing PIP payments, which give disabled people a very small amount a week in order to offset the considerable extra costs involved dealing with everyday life and work. But we know that whatever concessions are made this week, they are a result of fear of rebellion from normally docile Labour MPs, and the onslaught on the poor and sick will continue. This will be through scapegoating and impoverishing the most vulnerable, while giving free rein to the privatisers, developers and deregulators, all in the name of growth.

Wes Streeting may well live to regret his foolish boast in parliament that the Tories were too weak to cut benefits, unlike Labour. He should be ashamed of his claim that there is an ‘overdiagnosis’ of mental health conditions. But the whole Labour government has now been confirmed as callous and brutal towards the very people it is supposed to represent. We have had the axing of the winter fuel payment for pensioners, refusal to lift the two-child cap on benefits, the refusal to compensate the WASPI women who had to work several years longer to receive their pensions, the raising of bus fares by 50%, and continued austerity to public services. The cuts in overseas aid to some of the poorest people in the world have been justified to finance arms spending. And all the while there has been a complete refusal to tax the rich or in any way encroach on the profits of the major corporations.

It’s worth remembering that we’ve been here before. While Labour is strongly associated with the creation of the modern welfare state through the 1945 government, its first majority government, in 1929, tried to implement savage attacks on the poor and unemployed in 1931, in the middle of the Depression. This led to a split in Labour with prime minister Ramsay McDonald (a much more talented and originally left-wing figure than Starmer) joining with the Tories to form a National Government, and rump Labour left in the wilderness until the postwar election.

So far the economic crisis is not so deep, but living standards have not recovered from the 2008 banking crisis, and the British economy is stagnant, not growing. We can only imagine how much more draconian cuts would be in a time of further contraction – and how much Labour would cling to its militarism and weaponry in those circumstances.

The signs that there is dissent within cabinet and even the most right-wing Labour ministers are sensing unrest over this question show how weak this unpleasant bunch are. The government has a big majority but it has little support on the ground. Its supporters find they are greeted with anger when canvassing. Starmer’s pathetic mock Churchillian language and pretence is galling – his latest being ‘let the guns fall silent’ when calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine which he rejected only weeks ago. His poll ratings remain abysmal despite these attempts.

This weakness can be turned to our advantage. We must fight very hard against these latest cuts, but also against the whole priority of this government, which is backing genocide in Palestine, urging massive increases in arms spending, and doing nothing to alter the record levels of inequality at home.

Only a minority voted Labour last year, and few who did signed up for these atrocious policies. Organising for welfare not warfare has never been more urgent.

Supporting Palestine is not a crime

We’re now a year and a half into Israel’s war on Gaza. The growing recognition that this is a genocidal attack, that Trump and Netanyahu want to ethnically cleanse not just Gaza but the West Bank, continues to cause revulsion at Israel’s acts. These include the deliberate cutting off food and electricity in recent days, the report showing that Palestinian prisoners have suffered sexual assault at the hands of the Israelis, the attacks on refugee camps in the West Bank.

But the response of Israel’s friends in the US and here is to clamp down on protest and solidarity with Palestine. The case of Mahmoud Khalil, student at Columbia University in New York, who has been seized and held in detention pending deportation for organising protests for Palestine, is a particularly shocking case. But it is part of a wider clampdown on the highly effective protests on US campuses, deemed by Trump to be ‘antisemitic’. They of course nothing of the sort and include among them many Jewish activists who are also protesting at the treatment of Khalil.

We are seeing a tightening of the already limited right to protest here in Britain. Policing of demonstrations is getting more restrictive, with arrests, exclusion orders, and now the increasing line coming from the Metropolitan Police that it is not acceptable to protest over Palestine anywhere in the general vicinity of a synagogue at any time on a Saturday, because it presents a threat to the Jewish community.

This is despite the fact that there has never been an attack on a synagogue connected with any of our marches, that none of them are on the route of any marches, and that our marches are aimed at Israel not Jews, who regularly attend the demos in large numbers. The argument that our protests should not take place on a Saturday is a denial of our civil liberties and ignores the fact that is the traditional day for protests of all kinds, including by many Jews at various times.

Why should Palestine marches be forced to another day when Jewish people have, quite rightly, attended protests, party conferences, as well concerts, football matches, plays and public meetings on Saturday?

The treatment of the Palestine protests is discriminatory. While we are kept considerable distance from synagogues, the right-wing protests against us are given very lenient treatment and allowed often within touching distance of our protestors.

This discrimination is the thin end of the wedge – if it succeeds then there will be more restrictions on these and other demonstrations. I said in my speech at Saturday’s demo that they want to clamp down on protest to remove Palestine from the public eye, and to chill people into doing nothing. Both in the US and Britain there’s no sign of that happening.

This week: I will be protesting against the visit to parliament of the Israeli foreign minister on Thursday at 9am on Parliament Square – these people should be treated as the war criminals that they are. I’m rereading some books about the founding of the women’s liberation movement for writing I’m doing and highly recommend Sara Evans’ Personal Politics if you can get hold of it. It’s about women’s involvement in the civil rights movement and the student movement in the US led to a consciousness of women’s oppression.