PM Keir Starmer’s humiliating defeat and capitulation to the rebellion of 127 Labour MPs, over his proposed welfare cuts on Thursday night, has thrown his premiership and the Labour government into the biggest crisis of its 12 months in office.
As part of his policy for change – that is to force the working class to pay for the bankruptcy of British capitalism, and to reduce the spiralling public debt – cutting the Personal Independence Payment to the disabled caused uproar among his backbench MPs who were terrified of losing their lucrative seats, due to workers’ hatred of Starmer’s betrayal after electing him with a landslide majority only last year.
Following his u-turn and later subsequent partial reinstatement of the winter fuel payment to pensioners, immediately upon taking office, Starmer is widely recognised as pro-business and pro-capitalist because of these vicious attacks on the working class at home, and for his support for foreign imperialist wars abroad in Gaza and the Ukraine.
With the UK economy shrinking by 0.3 per cent in April 2025, and with wealthy investors fleeing the UK, calling it an economic basket case, the Labour government is confronted with the stark choice of raising crushing taxes, or butchering the public services and the Welfare State, or both.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ doomed policy of ‘growing the economy to generate wealth’ is ludicrous during a raging world economic and political crisis, with US president Donald Trump wreaking havoc with international production and with trade tariffs and military wars to try to ‘make America great again’ at the expense of the rest of the world.
Militarising the UK economy is a desperate attempt to revive manufacturing in the UK with state military spending, to make Britain a world ‘military production super power’.
At this week’s NATO meeting in Belgium, EU leaders agreed to increase military spending to five per cent of GDP to combat an invented threat of a possible Russian invasion.
Furthermore, NATO leaders also committed to a 10 per cent military spend by the 2030s. However, NATO is split over these quotas, with Spain for one refusing to endorse the five per cent target.
In Germany, the stock of Rheinmetall, a tank manufacturer, rocketed about 250 per cent over the past year and is up a staggering 1,600 per cent since the start of the Russo-Ukraine war.
There’s also plenty of public money for Starmer to order 12 new nuclear submarines (from Babcock) and a squadron of new, phenomenally expensive, nuclear bomb-capable F35A jets from the US and with the actual US bombs returning to the UK again after 20 years.
As the Daily Telegraph’s Alistair Heath commented yesterday: ‘It’s all over for Sir Keir Starmer, a hollow husk of a Prime Minister stripped of his last vestiges of authority and credibility. His premiership, not even a year old, is already on borrowed time.’
Pre-election, Starmer demanded: ‘No more illegal wars and the introduction of a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales.’
He also called for an ‘increase in income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners’, the dismantling of Universal Credit; the abolition of tuition fees; the nationalisation of utilities; and the end of NHS outsourcing.
Britain is now becoming ever more polarised with a failed parliamentary system of government which is preparing for war, even a nuclear World War III, to try to resolve its unresolvable debt crisis.
Clearly no amount of parliamentary fiddling will resolve this crisis. Shock therapy is required.
However the working class has not had its say yet. Workers will urge their trade union leaders to actively oppose all spending cuts, public sector and NHS privatisation and all tax increases.
The TUC must be forced to call a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism, to nationalise the economy and banks for a planned economy and an end to all imperialist wars.
For this revolutionary task, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International must be built in all the imperialist countries to carry out the victory of the world socialist revolution. There is not a moment to lose!
