Labour’s policy has been to maintain and even intensify austerity to serve capitalist and imperialist interests, so we must build a new left, argues Lewis Akers

It’s hard when so many important events are occurring across the world to find the motivation to pay attention to the tedium that is British politics. However, it is crucial the left pays attention as opportunity after opportunity is provided to us by the callousness of the Starmer government to organise the anger and frustration of working-class people into a popular campaign against austerity and war.

So what is the situation at the moment for the Starmer government? 

Although Starmer has been boasting that his government has a whopping majority and will use it to push through a pro-growth agenda, I think it’s worth pointing out a few clear things. Starmer and Labour didn’t win because they were popular but because, as Terina Hine argues, the Tories were transparently unfit for office and mired by corruption and scandal.

Labour won because they weren’t conservatives, not because people liked them. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that Starmer has had the shortest honeymoon period of any incoming PM and the lowest initial approving ratings of any PM. Starmer’s approval ratings have plummeted by around 45% since becoming PM, meaning he is now less popular than Sunak: a hard task to manage! He is not a popular person or politician. This has been further exacerbated by the fact that his government has been implicated in the same sleaze and infighting as the outgoing Tory government.

Starmer himself has received more freebies than any other MP since 2019. Suits, junkets, clothes, glasses and other perks. Even if we put this aside, as somewhat trivial, we can see it as symptomatic of a wider problem of the Labour government, and something which has made them deeply untrustworthy.

To compound the freebies scandal, they have been seen to offer cash for access where companies can pay thousands of pounds for private access to the government. Imagine what Labour would have said if the Tories had done the same?

We have seen time and time again that Labour are purporting to be a pro-worker government while at the same time cosying up to international capital. You can be pro-business or pro-worker but not both. One comes at the expense of the other.

All of this is plain to see for the public, which explains the lack of trust and popularity. Although Starmer has a large parliamentary majority, his vote share was lower than Corbyn’s in both 2016 and 2019, which means he doesn’t have a base to mobilise to either defend him or to campaign for him. He will rely on establishment lackeys in the media and business which, for normal people, will further compound the fact that he and his government are out of touch.

So what do we mean by Starmer and austerity? 

The politics of Starmer are very much a continuation of Blairism and the failed Labour politics of the 2010s of obsessively copying the Tories. However, I think, unlike other iterations of Blairite revivalism, it would be wrong to say this is Tory-Lite, it’s full Tory! 

Starmer, throughout the run-up to the election, didn’t run an optimistic campaign. He harped on about the difficult choices which were going to be necessary following the election. That there was a black hole in the public finances that would need to be filled through tough decisions.

These tough decisions will not affect the rich and the powerful. As a result of austerity, billionaires have seen their wealth grow exponentially: between 2020 and 2022 it increased by 150 billion pounds. It won’t affect the arms companies or the military who have seen year-on-year increases in military spending, with spending exceeding £25 billion pounds for the first time in the last financial year, and Labour backing this. Outside of this, we have seen £7.5 billion in military aid for Ukraine since the Russian invasion.

The people who it will affect are the working class and public-sector workers, who will start to feel the squeeze more and more over the term of the Starmer Government. There are two key examples which are topical: the two-child benefit cap and the winter fuel payment cut.

Labour has refused to lift the two-child benefit cap which was introduced by the Conservative government in 2015 and implemented from 2017. It is one of the hallmarks of the cruelness of the austerity measures of the 2010s. The cap means that most families can only claim benefits from the government for their first and second child. The cap currently impacts around 1.5 million children who are in households with more than two children. Lifting the cap would lift half a million children out of poverty and give them a more comfortable existence. However, Labour are content not to relieve hundreds of thousands of children from poverty and to use the savings from keeping the cap to fund the exorbitant military spending we see in the UK.

The second example is the cut to winter fuel payments for pensioners. In simple terms, this will mean that only pensioners who are in receipt of means-tested benefits or the pension credit top-up will be able to claim the winter fuel payment from now on. This means around ten million pensioners will miss out on essential money to heat their homes this winter at the same time there are record high gas and electric bills. These haven’t fallen to normal levels since the cost-of-living crisis. Many of them will only be pounds above the cut-off.

Age UK reckons 2.5 million pensioners who have a desperate need for the fuel payment will miss out. Many of those ineligible for pension credit are still on low incomes and as a result will have to choose between heating and eating.

The two most callous parts about Labour’s plans for the winter fuel payment are firstly that the Labour Party admitted to not having done an impact assessment of its plans. Therefore, there is no knowledge or interest about the potential impact of the plans on either individual pensioners or public services such as the NHS, which are already stretched during winter. Two, the party in opposition opposed Tory proposals to do away with the winter fuel payment and published their own analysis of how the plans would throw pensioners into poverty. And yet, they are now following the Tory policy.

Hypocrisy and thoughtlessness like this are a hallmark of austerity politics. Although Labour faced a minor rebellion over their position on the two-child benefit cap, there was not enough principle on display to show that Labour is redeemable as a party of the working class.

However, austerity isn’t limited to these topical issues. We will see more councils fold under the pressure of budget cuts. We will see private healthcare used to plug the gaps in the NHS at a cost to the taxpayer, rather than the restoration of a properly funded NHS. And we will see no attempts from the Labour Party to use taxes on the rich to raise funds because they are scared that it might throw their pro-growth, pro-business agenda off course.

So what are the opportunities for the left?

The movement around Palestine has been one of the biggest returns to street politics that we have seen in a decade. It’s had a massive impact on both the tone of politics at large and formal establishment politics. The movement pushed for Suella Braverman to be sacked and succeeded. We pushed the devolved governments to support a ceasefire. We changed the narrative with the public at large by gaining popular support from anti-war politics. We have disrupted business as usual by supporting the election of independents elected on a Palestine-plus ticket, more than Reform or the Greens, but without the media attention.

The movement has immense power which we can utilise to push forward a more progressive politics. As the left of the movement, we should be using our influence to push for left-Labour MPs to break with the party completely and to unite with the Palestine-plus independents to push for a new organisation of the left which puts forward a hard position on Palestine with pro-worker politics. We can also use the movement to highlight the fact that while Starmer makes cuts because of supposed fiscal ‘black holes’, they pour billions into fanning the flames of war in Gaza, Ukraine and beyond. This can be a useful argument as it ties the question of anti-war politics to concrete domestic questions which affect working-class peoples’ day-to-day lives. We need to take the fight to the politicians as ruthlessly as we did with the Tories – no honeymoon for warmongers.

We also need to get involved in the trade unions. Many of them have been bought off by the piecemeal reforms which have been promised as part of Labour’s new deal for working people. For many, their silence, and their compliance with the Labour government has been bought at the lowest rate. We have also seen a number of trade unions and the TUC take hawkish positions on increasing defence spending. This will provide fertile ground for the left to build an alternative industrial strategy than the trade union leaders. Part of that has to be the need to push trade unions to break with Labour. We need to push trade union leaders to honour their word to stop backing Labour if they don’t back workers. This can only be done by organising at a rank-and-file level.

To do this, we need organisations like Counterfire working in a non-sectarian way with like-minded comrades to push forward a socialist agenda within the movement at large. Counterfire plays a key role in organising around socialist politics in mass movements and working in a non-sectarian way with others across the left to achieve real advancements for the movement.

Lewis Akers is a Scottish trade unionist and Counterfire member. He is a branch secretary for Unite The Union and a member of the Conter Editorial Board.