LABOUR leader Keir Starmer delivered a speech in Stratford, east London yesterday setting out Labour’s ‘vision’ for the country under any future Labour government.
His speech was exactly 24 hours after Tory leader Rishi Sunak set out the Tory ‘vision’ in the same venue, and the similarities didn’t end there.
Indeed, one reporter was moved to ask Starmer exactly what were the differences between the Tory and Labour parties.
Like Sunak and the Tories, Starmer placed at the centre of his ‘vision’ nothing less than austerity and pay cuts for the working class, and that any Labour government ‘won’t be able to spend our way out’ of the ‘mess’ left by the Tories, and that Labour won’t be getting its ‘big government chequebook out’.
What this means is that Starmer is fully in agreement with the Tories about keeping public spending within the limits of what capitalism can afford – which is precisely nothing for workers.
This became even clearer when Starmer was asked by journalists about nurses’ pay. Starmer was asked if he thought a 19% pay rise for nurses is too much and would he at least say that 2% is too little if that is the offer the government puts forward for the 2023 NHS pay round.
Starmer refused to commit instead saying ‘let’s wait and see’ what the government proposes, but he expects them to compromise and talk to nurses.
Starmer can expect all he likes but the Tories have made it clear there will be no compromise over pay for NHS or any public service worker.
Starmer can’t even bring himself to damn the widely expected pay offer to nurses of a massive real-term pay cutting 2% award.
Starmer has already committed Labour to adopting the super austerity measures of cuts to public services, along with derisory pay offers far below the massive increase in the cost-of-living being carried out by the Tories.
In the days before Christmas, Starmer told the BBC that he accepted the figure from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that there was a £55 billion gap in public finances – a ‘black hole’ that must be filled by spending cuts – and that he accepted the need to bring down the national debt.
There is not the proverbial cigarette paper between the Tories and Labour over the absolute need to cut all public spending to try and rescue British capitalism from drowning in debt and collapsing into bankruptcy. At the same time as promising super austerity cuts for the working class, Starmer used his speech to heap praise on the private sector for ‘creating wealth’, saying: ‘There is no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community.’
In fact, Starmer is committed to extending the reach of the privateers into the public sector, including the NHS. In response to a question on the scope for the private sector to deliver public services, Starmer said he wants a ‘partnership model, where the state works with private businesses’.
The entire speech by Starmer contained nothing for the working class which is rising up in mass strike action demanding wage increases to keep up with spiralling inflation.
For the tens of millions of workers and youth who face the immediate struggle with a Tory government and a capitalist system, Starmer offered nothing except the same demand that workers pay the price for the capitalist crisis.
It was a declaration that any future Labour government would place the economic survival of the bosses, bankers and privateers first and last by a Labour government committed to rescuing a bankrupt capitalist system by making the working class pay.
The Labour Party has abandoned the entire working class and positioned itself as a full bourgeois party ‘fit to govern’ on behalf of the bosses and bankers against the interests of the working class.
Workers must demand the trade unions break completely with the Labour Party and organise the strength of the working class and unions in a general strike to kick out the Tories and take power, going forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and go forward to a socialist planned economy.
