Counterfire’s editorial in this month’s freesheet on Starmer’s cuts and how we fight for welfare not warfare

The mask has fallen. The true face of Sir Keir Starmer’s party, elected to end fourteen years of Tory rule, is now clear for all to see. It is the face of war, repression and austerity, indistinguishable from its Tory predecessor.

After slashing the international aid budget, Labour in government has now promised to deliver the biggest cuts to disability benefits in British history. An assessment for the government’s Department for Work and Pensions admitted that 3.2 million families in England and Wales would be worse off as a result of changes to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP). The purpose of the cuts is to redirect billions more to arms spending, much of which will end up in the pocket of the US military industry.

The fear and anger in society is palpable. The Mirror denounced the spring statement as an act of ‘balancing the books on the backs of the poor’, while Alun Davies, a Labour Member of the Senedd, told the BBC that it ‘scares the most vulnerable people in our society, and that’s deeply distressing to see’. A study in the British Medical Journal warned of a further decline in the health of the country.

No wonder that the government is intensifying its attacks on the right to free speech and protest. The arrest of six women by dozens of police officers at a publicly advertised meeting to discuss climate change and Gaza at Westminster Quaker Meeting House in London on 27 March was so outrageous that it made the front page of the quintessential establishment paper, the Sunday Times.

But it was not an isolated incident. It was just the latest instance of over-policing by the Met that proves that the violent arrest of Chris Nineham, the vice chair of Stop the War and chief steward on the national Palestine demonstration on 18 January, one of 77 arrests on the day, was no aberration. Neither was the subsequent police charging of PSC director Ben Jamal and other protestors, or the police interviews under caution of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, after the same demonstration.

These unprecedented attacks on the leadership of the largest and most sustained political movement in recent British history are part of a concerted effort by the government to criminalise resistance as it attempts to transform the welfare state into a warfare state. Such a trajectory mirrors wider moves in Europe to rearm as the declining West under US leadership tries to meet the challenge of multipolarity and the rise of China.

It can be no wonder that under such circumstances Labour is tanking in the polls. Unfortunately, at the moment, it is the racist Reform UK that is benefiting most. But a swing to the right is not inevitable. There is a real desire in British society for a left-wing alternative. Over a thousand people joined the Budget Day protest outside Downing Street organised by Disabled People Against the Cuts and Stop the War, showing that there is a combative mood on the left.

Indeed, we have seen hundreds of thousands routinely march in solidarity with Palestine for a year and half, and five independents were elected to Westminster on the back of the mass movement. It is now imperative to unite anti-war activists, disability campaigners, trade unionists, anti-racists and others around the slogan of ‘welfare not warfare’ and to make the national anti-austerity demonstration on Saturday 7 June in London, called by the People’s Assembly, as big as possible, and a point of focused, mass resistance from below.