LABOUR Prime Minister Keir Starmer spelt out his intention to build up Britain’s capitalist state to take ‘control’ of people’s lives.
Starmer made this declaration in his speech to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday, where he invoked the old ‘take back control’ slogan used by the Vote Leave campaign during the Brexit campaign.
Addressing delegates for the first time as prime minister, Starmer insisted he was ‘willing to be unpopular’ in imposing decisions to exert government control, citing as examples the NHS, energy, justice, education, the office and the economy, as areas the public would have to accept being dictated to by a Starmer government.
The Daily Telegraph noted Starmer’s speech ‘marked a stark contrast to his first speech as Prime Minister in July, in which he told the public he would “tread more lightly on your lives”’.
Back in July, Starmer was keen to emphasise, above all to the international investors and private corporations, that a Labour government would not be interfering in the ability of the bosses and bankers to make profits out of exploiting workers and the public sector.
Starmer stressed restrictions on the right of privateers to pillage the NHS would not be introduced by a ‘light touch’ by the Labour government.
His latest speech, however, was squarely aimed at reassuring these same capitalist vultures that the Labour government was prepared to impose its dictatorship over the working class to force them to accept the pain and sacrifices demanded by a capitalist system that is diving headlong into economic collapse and bankruptcy.
When Starmer talks of building up the state, he is talking about strengthening the capitalist state to take on and discipline the working class.
In their huge economic crisis, the ruling class are demanding an end to the illusion of a neutral State acting as an arbiter between the competing interests of workers and capitalists, and the imposition of a virtual dictatorship over the working class and its trade unions in the interests of capital.
In his speech to conference yesterday, Labour’s health secretary Wes Streeting made it clear that this strengthening of the state is to be used to drive the sick off waiting lists and back to work.
Streeting revealed plans for ‘crack teams’ to be sent to 20 hospital trusts in areas of the country with the highest rates of ‘economic inactivity’.
Streeting pledged to roll out ‘Formula One pit stop’ surgery clinics with surgeons and nurses working day and night for seven days a week with patients wheeled in one after another before being swiftly ejected from hospital to take their place in the queue for jobs.
The sick and elderly are just drains on the capitalist economy for Starmer and Streeting, with their inability to work and produce profit for the bosses making them fit only to be treated like disposable car tyres, while NHS workers are worked to the point of exhaustion.
This is what Starmer means when he promises the state will take back control of people’s lives.
With the entire capitalist system gripped by a historic economic and political crisis, the ruling class can no longer live with the old form of bourgeois democracy and must seek to impose a new form of rule, capable of defeating a powerful working class that will not accept seeing its lives and future destroyed for the profits of the bankers, hedge funds and shareholders.
The working class is more powerful than Starmer and a Labour government already splitting apart under the impact of a world crisis that is driving imperialist wars in the Middle East and a war to the finish against workers at home.
The time has come for the working class to demand its trade unions organise this power by calling a general strike to bring down Starmer’s government and seize power replacing the capitalist state with a workers state and socialism.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership of the British Socialist Revolution.
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