YESTERDAY, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer delivered what was billed as a keynote speech that would outline once and for all the policies Labour would fight the next general election on.
Prior to the speech in Manchester, Starmer claimed the five ‘national missions’ he would be proclaiming would form the ‘backbone’ of the next manifesto, leaving workers in no doubt that any future Labour government would be a spineless creature completely under the domination of international finance capital and the bosses.
These national missions turned out to be nothing more than a vague list of wishes, interspersed with reassurances to the bankers and bosses that Starmer was their true ‘friend’, who would magically produce the stability to make the vast profits that they crave.
The stability that capitalism demands, and Starmer is eager to support, requires the ‘stability’ of a working class that has been beaten into submission to the point where the entire costs of the recessionary economic crisis of capitalism can be shoved on their backs.
This was the underlying message when he announced his wish list that included promising to secure the ‘highest sustained growth’ in the G7 group of rich nations.
Starmer was careful not to explain how British capitalism, which has sustained the lowest rate of growth amongst the G7 nations, was going to achieve this astounding feat. Instead, he came out with vacuous general statements saying his ‘vision’ for the UK was: ‘Not state control or pure free markets, but a genuine partnership, sleeves rolled up, working for the national interest.’
Starmer insisted that a mission-driven Labour government would be ‘working in partnership with business, trade unions and civil society’.
He stressed that: ‘I am not concerned about whether investment or expertise comes from the public or private sector,’ a deliberate rehash of the Tony Blair New Labour programme of private/public partnership.
This was the programme of Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, that threw open the NHS to the privateers and paved the way for the private investors to leech billions out of hospitals and the health service.
It sits nicely with Starmer’s pledge that the NHS needs not extra government money but ‘reforms’, exactly the position of the Tories – reforms that open the door to the giant health corporations to privatise the NHS out of existence.
As for the immediate struggle of millions of workers fighting for wage increases to protect them from raging inflation, Starmer didn’t regard them as worthy of any mention in his speech.
He was completely unconcerned with the day-to-day struggles of ordinary workers and their families, instead, conjuring up a solution to the recessionary crisis driving workers into poverty as being simply getting a Labour government – bosses, bankers and trade union leaders round the table – to force workers to roll up their sleeves and work for the ‘national interest’.
There is no national interest between workers and the capitalist class of bosses and bankers, whose only interest is in making profits by screwing down the conditions and wages of workers.
Starmer has made it quite clear where he and the Labour Party leadership stand in this class war – firmly on the side of capitalism.
When Starmer talks of reviving British capitalism through attracting international investment, this can only be done by convincing the world financiers that they can make huge profits. Profits that can only be realised through making the working class pay for the crisis.
When Starmer stood for the leadership of the Labour Party three years ago he pledged that a Labour government would bring about common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water. Today that pledge has been dumped, along with any Labour Party member or MP who expresses support for socialist ideals, or even support for striking workers.
Starmer’s spineless speech was nothing more than an audition to his capitalist masters to prove that he is fit to join in a national government with the Tories to save capitalism from a working class that is refusing to see its lives destroyed by the crisis.
Workers have already decided that enough is enough and that what is required is not some Starmer/Tory coalition but for the trade unions to immediately call a general strike to bring down the Tories, or any coalition that emerges, and go forward to a workers government and a nationalised socialist planned economy.
