THE forced resignation of Angela Rayner as Labour’s Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister on Friday has been seized by Keir Starmer as an opportunity to drive the Labour government further to the right.
Rayner was forced to resign over non-payment of £40,000 in stamp duty on her £800,000 second home on the seafront in Hove, a failure she blamed on ‘wrong advice’ from her lawyers.
Rayner has long been held up by the trade union leadership as the sole ‘authentic’ representative of the working class in Starmer’s government and credited for being a lone voice in supporting Labour’s promised workers rights bill – that has yet to see the light of day.
It was this pledge to place increased rights for workers into law that enabled the leadership of the TUC to promote the election of a Labour government as a big step forward after years of legal attacks on workers’ rights from successive Tory governments.
It now turns out that this working class ‘hero’ is no different from all the other Labourites in Starmer’s government who climbed the greasy political pole to infest Parliament and reap fortunes while demanding cuts in benefits to the sick and disabled while maintaining the Tory two-child benefit cap responsible for condemning over a million children to ‘deep poverty’.
If Rayner fulfilled the role of working class figurehead in Starmer’s government, her forced removal has been seized on as an opportunity to shift even further to the right.
In place of Rayner, former Foreign Secretary and noted Zionist genocide supporter, David Lammy, is now Deputy Prime Minister, and Justice Secretary.
Yvette Cooper, former Home Secretary who banned the non-violent direct action group Palestine Action making it illegal to demonstrate in support of the group, now becomes Foreign Secretary.
Cooper, with her record of wanting to lock up people opposing Zionist genocide, will doubtless be welcomed by Netanyahu’s Israeli regime as she will now be in a position to keep the Labour government firmly onside with the drive to ethnically cleanse Gaza of every last Palestinian.
Cooper has been replaced as Home Secretary by Shabana Mahmood. Mahmood stands on the extreme right wing of the Labour party, the so-called Blue Labour movement, with a remit from Starmer to ‘get a grip’ on refugees as Labour attempts to outdo Farage’s Reform party over migration.
She is known for her extreme anti-migrant views and her willingness to ‘overhaul’ the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that offers protection to the human rights of asylum seekers and refugees. Mahmood’s first announcement was that asylum seekers would be moved to barracks on former military bases.
Labour is now expanding on the previous Tory policy of housing asylum seekers in atrocious insanitary conditions that caused such a storm of outrage and legal opposition that it had to be abandoned.
With Mahmood in charge, Starmer will be driving for the UK to opt out of any humanitarian law that restricts the Labour government from locking up asylum seekers and deporting them en masse.
The TUC meeting this week in Brighton must not be allowed to stand back as Starmer’s government surges to the right in preparation for a class war and adopting the far-right policies of Farage’s Reform party to try to split the working class by placing the blame for the capitalist crisis on asylum seekers.
The TUC can no longer stand back while Starmer’s government continues to support the arming of Zionist genocide – while arresting protesters.
The enemy of the working class is not those desperately fleeing imperialist wars, or Palestinians facing a genocidal Zionist regime.
The enemy is at home, and the TUC conference has the opportunity to put an end to this crisis by immediately calling a general strike to bring down this treacherous right-wing Labour government and replace it with a workers’ government.
A workers government will expropriate the bosses and bankers, nationalise the banks and major industries placing them under the control of the working class, and build a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward!