LABOUR leader Keir Starmer, in his keynote speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday, pledged that he is ‘not just pro-business’ but wants to be a partner with business, and invited business to ‘drive forward our modern industrial strategy’.
Starmer claimed that Labour offers a ‘fresh start’ after the twelve years of Tory governments and will get the UK ‘out of this endless cycle of crisis’.
Quoting former Labour leader Tony Blair, Starmer pronounced that Labour is ‘the political wing of the British people’ and that Labour under him ‘can achieve great things’.
The great things Starmer was promising to achieve amounted to nothing more than a fantastical wish list of promises that completely ignored the very real crisis that is destroying the lives of tens of millions of workers and their families.
While paying lip service to the agonies of poverty and deprivation being heaped upon workers at every moment, all Starmer could promise was economic growth sometime in the future, transforming bankrupt British capitalism through being a ‘green growth superpower.’
The centre piece of this economic fantasy according to Starmer will be a publicly owned green energy firm he grandly announced would be called Great British Energy.
At a stroke, this company would harness wind and other renewable energy sources to solve the energy crisis completely ignoring the unpleasant fact that this is something that will be years in the future and offers nothing for families freezing in the days ahead.
This announcement was greeted rapturously by conference delegates who chose to overlook the fact that Starmer deliberately ignored the issue of nationalising the energy companies as the only real way to deal with the profiteers and their profiteering and ensure affordable gas and oil for workers.
Starmer’s speech was heavy on very easy denunciations of the Tories and very short on any policies to expropriate the bosses and get rid of the backward capitalist system.
It was unreal in the sense that the reality of the economic crisis driving bankrupt British capitalism into the gutter had no place in Starmer’s speech. How could it, when Starmer was a Director of Public Prosecutions!
Instead, delegates were treated to Starmer’s very empty boasting as to how he had changed Labour and that it was no longer the party of Jeremy Corbyn and had moved to the centre of politics, making it an acceptable partner for big business and world imperialism telling conference that his approach was ‘Country first, Party second’.
He went out of his way to state that Labour stood alongside Ukraine and that support for NATO, was ‘non-negotiable’, so committing Labour to supporting the Tories pouring billions of arms to the imperialist war to weaken Russia.
He agrees with the Tories that forcing the working class to pay for this war is a price worth paying for capitalism to try to reconquer the world.
Starmer’s speech, while completely ignoring the immediate crisis, was clearly designed to prove to the capitalist class that under him Labour was now ‘fit to govern’ – not for the working class but for the bosses and bankers that he is desperate to partner with and please.
For the tens of millions of workers and young people who face the immediate struggle to pay for food and heating, and with mass unemployment looming as businesses close down under the impact of inflation, Starmer offers nothing.
This is why the issue of the hour is the building up of the revolutionary leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Young Socialists, to lead the British socialist revolution.
Capitalism has had its day and we must not allow it to drag humanity over the edge of the precipice with it.
The TUC Congress is meeting in Brighton on Tuesday October 18th, when it will be lobbied by the WRP and Young Socialists and many workers and youth.
We will be insisting that the TUC calls an immediate general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government based on workers’ Councils of Action throughout the UK. This the way forward. Join the lobby to demand the TUC calls a general strike!