LABOUR leader Keir Starmer launched the party’s ‘business friendly’ election manifesto in Manchester yesterday morning with the promise that a Labour government would put the economic stability of British capitalism above all else.
‘Wealth creation’ Labour proclaimed was at the heart of the manifesto and workers will not be surprised to learn that it’s the wealth of the bosses and bankers that Starmer and the Labour Party are committed to preserving. In a pitch aimed squarely at the bosses, the manifesto pledged not to increase corporation tax and keep a cap on this tax at 25%.
Corporation tax is the tax levied by governments on company profits by UK companies and foreign companies with offices in the UK. Any fear the giant corporations may have had that their profits would be threatened has been dealt with, as Starmer assures them that the tax on profits will remain at the level set by Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in 2023.
Keeping taxes down on the profits made by corporations would be accompanied by ‘tough new spending rules to allow businesses to plan’ and grow. Tough new spending rules means an iron-clad commitment not to fund the day-to-day government spending by borrowing.
This is in line with the cast iron commitments from both Tories and Labour to bring down the massive national debt currently standing at over £2.6 trillion and increasing every week through interest repayments.
Having ruled out any increase in government borrowing and increases in taxation on company profits, how does Starmer intend to pay for the all the claims that a Labour government would reduce hospital waiting times, build thousands of more houses and magically grow the UK economy out of recession?
None of the claims from Starmer, and his chancellor Rachel Reeves, that all this has been ‘fully costed’, stand up to any scrutiny.
Apparently the UK economy, the NHS, the housing crisis and the chronic underfunding of public services can be solved by raising money from increasing VAT on private school fees, closing the loopholes in the tax system used by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes, and a windfall tax on the oil and gas industries.
No serious observer at the launch believed in all these pre-election economic fantasies being spouted by Starmer.
ITV journalist Robert Peston, in the question and answer session following Starmer’s speech, put it bluntly saying it’s a ‘bogus claim’ that growth can rise significantly without spending cuts, to which Starmer replied: ‘We are not going to return to austerity.’
But the only way that any Labour government can try and keep British capitalism from sinking under the weight of the massive national debt is precisely to carry out a savage austerity war on the working class and all the gains of the welfare state.
Starmer may claim that this manifesto is ‘pro-business and pro-worker’, but all previous guarantees about workers’ protection have been shredded in this new manifesto. This came out last Friday when trade union leaders met with Labour leaders to agree and finalise the manifesto.
The Unite union, the largest donor to the Labour Party, refused to endorse Labour’s plans, since they did not, as promised, contain any commitment to end ‘fire and hire’ or to enforce the right of unions to collective bargaining.
The working class is not fooled by Starmer’s ‘pro-business, pro-worker’ manifesto, or a Labour Party whose sole iron clad commitment is to doing whatever is necessary to keep British capitalism from drowning in debt, by making the working class pay.
Any Labour government that emerges after the July 4th election will carry out the same austerity war to the finish against the working class that the Tories were too weak to conclude.
Only the WRP is standing candidates in this election on a manifesto that places firmly before the working class the necessity of mobilising to demand the TUC call a general strike, to create the conditions for the working class to take the power and go forward to a Workers Government that will nationalise the banks and major industries, in order to build a socialist planned economy.
Vote WRP on July 4th and join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the revolutionary party required to put an end to bankrupt British capitalism for all time.
In fact there is little doubt that a socialist revolution in the UK, will drive forward the struggle for socialist revolutions throughout Europe and in the USA, to put an end to capitalism on a world scale!
