THE LABOUR government of Keir Starmer continues its collapse into total chaos and breakdown this week with a sharp turn to the right orchestrated by the latest ‘new hope’ for its continued survival.
Last week, Starmer’s army of ‘advisors’ launched a briefing war aimed at Health Secretary Wes Streeting with dire warnings that Starmer would fight to the bitter end against any attempt to oust him as Prime Minister.
Streeting, who only survived being thrown out of Parliament himself at last year’s general election by around 500 votes, graciously pledged his undying loyalty to Starmer.
No such loyalty was shown by Streeting to the NHS with his intention to sack 18,000 staff before moving on to privatise the entire health service.
At the weekend, a new threat to Starmer’s grip on power emerged in the form of the Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Mahmood is being touted in an article by Kamal Ahmed in the right-wing Daily Telegraph as someone who ‘would make a better prime minister than Keir Starmer.’
What makes Mahmood so attractive to the right wing press, ‘one of the few rays of sunshine in an otherwise bleak landscape’ as Ahmed calls her, is the proposed changes she intends to introduce to the UK asylum system.
The new laws that were announced yesterday involve changing the refugee status for those fleeing wars making it harder to claim asylum.
Refugees will be forced to wait 20 years before they can apply for permanent settlement, with refugee status becoming temporary and subject to review every 30 months to determine if their home country is now designated as ‘safe’ for them to be returned to along with their families.
In order to make it easier to deport asylum seekers, Mahmood is proposing legislation to instruct the courts on how they are required to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which is incorporated in British law through the Human Rights Act.
She plans to negotiate reform of Article 3 of the ECHR, which protects migrants against ‘inhuman and degrading’ treatment, which both she and other ministers complain has been used by refugees seeking asylum.
While the Tories and Farage’s Reform party have called for the UK to leave the ECHR, Mahmood and the Labour government are opposed to leaving completely on the grounds that it also underpins trade deals.
Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp criticised the plans as ‘very small steps in the right direction’ while other Tory MPs have suggested they could support Mahmood’s plans if she faced a rebellion from backbench Labour MPs.
There are already indications that Labour MPs will indeed be revolted by the sight of Mahmood and Starmer adopting precisely the same policies advocated by both Tories and Reform. These policies aim to split the working class by laying blame for the collapse of British capitalism at the door of the most vulnerable people who have been forced to flee their homeland through imperialist wars and devastation.
As Labour MP Stella Creasy wrote in the Guardian newspaper yesterday: ‘If this policy becomes law the UK will require ICE-style raids to remove people’. This would also require a government dedicated to enforcing these brutal laws.
With Starmer on his last legs as Prime Minister, the drive by capitalism is towards some form of reactionary coalition between the right-wing of the Labour Party and the Tories.
Workers, however, see clearly that the real enemy is at home – a Starmer government and the barbaric capitalist system that can only survive through wars against the people of the world and war against the working class at home to dump the capitalist crisis on the backs of workers.
The way forward for workers is to put an end to this reactionary Labour government by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick it out and bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and welcome every worker from any country to join in building a socialist society.
