Lindsey German on militarism and misanthropy

For the past two months, I’ve woken up fearing what new horror Donald Trump has planned for his own people and for those of Palestine. But I’m now feeling the same way about Keir Starmer. Has there been a worse Labour prime minister than Starmer? Tony Blair was a neoliberal through and through and took us into an illegal war in Iraq. But at least there was some attempt to improve elements of domestic policy.

With Starmer there is no attempt to even suggest that things can only get better. There is something of the psychopathic leader about him. His belligerence over Ukraine and the need for European rearmament has made him warmonger-in-chief across the continent. While he talks of peace in Ukraine his call is for more intervention. While there is growing scepticism for the Dad’s Army-like plan to send ‘peacekeeping’ troops to Ukraine (the British army doesn’t have the troops and the Russians wouldn’t accept it) he wants to send British ships to Black Sea and provide air cover.  This is an escalation of British intervention in the Ukraine war, not a peace plan.

Similarly, when his foreign secretary David Lammy said that Israel’s bloody ending of the ceasefire in Gaza was in breach of international law, he was rapidly rebuked by a Downing Street spokesperson, desperate not to condemn an ally which it is arming to commit genocide and which it helps with surveillance planes over Gaza flying direct from Cyprus.  

At same time as distributing largesse to the military and the arms manufacturers, we know that Starmer has working class living standards and quality of life in his sights. An astonishing article in this week’s Observer shows that, according to Joseph Rowntree Foundation research, all British families will be worse off by the end of this parliament – with the poor hit hardest. We already know that disabled people are being hit particularly hard, with some likely to lose two thirds of their income through vicious cuts.

The budget statement will only continue what has marked Starmer’s government so far: attacks on incomes and services for working class people while leaving the rich their money, power and privilege untouched. On Wednesday Rachel Reeves will announce further draconian ‘tough choices’ which will make all of our lives worse in different ways – in the case of some people catastrophically so.

Reeves refuses to tax the rich but is launching further cuts this week. These are supposedly due to lack of sufficient growth, ie stagnation, and an increase in government borrowing. There will be savage cuts to the civil service supposedly in the name of ‘efficiency’ but in reality this will lead to worsening services plus privatisation. Cuts will be made to civil servants while outsourcing firms while be paid to provide inefficient services whose key motive is profit.  

The last 40 years have shown us this in spades. Every bit of infrastructure in Britain doesn’t work: airports – epitomised by the closure of Heathrow on Friday –  rail, roads, energy, water, prisons.  Britain’s essential services and infrastructure are the most privatised of any country in world.

Any normal capitalist state would protect itself by ensuring that it controlled essential services. But Britain is now so run down that it will take billions of investment in these services and this the government refuses to do. So our water, electricity and toher utilities are a scandal of under investment and over pricing. They are in hock to hedge funds and foreign investment who are accountable to no democratic body, whose regulators are a complete joke, and whose first priority is to shareholders rather than to investment. So we have decades of neglect coupled with aging and stretched workforces and a consequent lack of resilience in crises – this is true from climate emergencies to water main leaks to fires in power stations.

Starmer has no notion of dealing with any of this.  Instead he ploughs on: blame the Russians, wave the flag, scapegoat disabled people, refugees and the unemployed. The political consequences of this are complete disillusion with Labour from its voters of only last summer, and a surge in support for Reform. I don’t see any way the far right party won’t win the Runcorn by election, especially since the Labour candidate is organising a tribute act to them.

Politically the left needs to assert itself: campaigning against these latest cuts and their knock-on effect locally, building for the mass demo against austerity on June 7th and supporting any serious electoral challenge to the politics of despair. I think Starmer will be the gravedigger of Labour, but we cannot allow a vacuum which the right will fill.

This week: I will be demonstrating in Downing Street at 11 on Budget Day Wednesday, along with DPAC and others, with the call for ‘welfare not warfare.’ We need a big, united campaign to defeat Reeves and Starmer, over disability cuts and much more, which makes the June 7th demonstration against austerity 2.0. On Saturday I will be attending the We Demand Change summit in London, which will be bringing together a big conference to discuss how resist the multiple attacks facing us. Please join me at any of these if you can.

I’m also going to a police station on Thursday to be interviewed under caution for alleged breach of conditions under the Public Order Act on 18 January. Continuing to protest against injustice is the best way to defend our civil liberties, so that’s what I’ll be doing this week and over the coming months.