“After winter fuel allowance cuts, the Spring Statement will confirm an increase in military spending whilst reducing social security spending”
We need a left which is a far more impactful and relevant force in politics and in society, writes Ben Folley in our ‘Red Weekly’ column.
The UK election just nine months ago demonstrated how voters’ tolerance of a Conservative cuts agenda grinding down living standards had been exhausted.
Replacing them was a Labour administration elected with the lowest percentage share of any party forming a government since 1945, and with fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour received in its 2019 defeat.
Labour came in as the anti-politics mood of an alienated electorate saw voters desert the Conservatives but not because Labour was able to engage and motivate it.
The Labour government’s positive early initiatives to resolve public sector pay disagreements will not be sustained and real pay will not be restored. The commitment to public ownership is not progressing beyond passenger rail with the new Great British Railways initiative. The impact of the new public sector GB Energy entity will remain limited in a largely private market, and the government is determined not to take a common sense approach of taking the bankrupt private water sector back into public control.
The Government talks of difficult economic decisions and it seems the greatest difficulty it has is rewarding the goodwill of its voters – which it only had in short-supply – through high-profile decisions which harm those on low incomes, such as on winter fuel, women’s state pension, putting child poverty on the backburner, and already risking conflict with unions on public sector pay. Each of these issues has driven down support for Labour.
Despite Starmer being elected leader in 2020 by describing the 2017 General Election manifesto as a ‘foundational document’ and that the party was fundamentally, ‘anti-austerity’, his leadership had spent four years before the election prioritising imposing internal party discipline through purging the left – a sign to financial markets it had dropped Corbyn-era economic policies, dressed up to the media as demonstrating it was a ‘safe pair of hands’.
The October Budget confirmed that Conservative-style government departmental spending cuts would continue. The decision to increase employer national insurance contributions was exploited to drive business opposition to elements of the Employment Rights Bill.
The government is now struggling to catch up with time it has already lost and is overly reliant on time-consuming policy consultations it can ill-afford to wait on.
It seems increasingly dependent on the Tony Blair Institute’s remedy of utilising AI technology to drive efficiencies for economic growth and in public sector reform, a soundbite which has zero-impact on the electorate.
And it is banking on the employment of New Labour-era proposals around choice in public services – such as Wes Streeting’s resurrection of Alan Milburn and his hospital league tables – an agenda which the electorate tired of twenty years ago. And now an extreme job cutting measure in axing NHS England which the Health Secretary boasts is one the Conservatives wish they had done, leaves the Government exposed to any worsening of NHS provision and frustrates normally supportive health unions such as UNISON and GMB.
Now having angered Labour MPs and supporters through the winter fuel allowance and WASPI cuts, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will use the Spring Statement to confirm an increase in military spending whilst reducing social security spending – expected to target disabled peoples’ independence payments.
So, despite Conservative disarray, Labour is pursuing an agenda which is likely to shed votes and so risks securing enough to retain power.
Streeting has gone so far as to say, ‘Reducing the size of bloated state bureaucracy… bringing down the welfare bill. The public is asking ‘What is the point of the Conservative party?‘
With both major parties polling poorly, a technocratic rightist Labour administration such as this is exposed, and its New Labour revivalism will only alienate those whose support it needs to retain. More widely, we are witnessing the rise of a nasty, reactionary agenda in which discredited Conservatives will cynically jump on far-right populism and offer simple solutions in an attempt to try to remain relevant. The Labour leadership offers no alternative to migrant and claimant scapegoating and continues to allow the right to frame the political debate.
Mainstream media assists the broader right in that process and even if the Conservatives cannot restore support the whole political framework shifts rightward creating more space for Reform. As Conservatives capitulate to Reform’s agenda, many in Reform are more vocally supportive of the former-EDL founder Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
This movement right can only be stopped by directly challenging it politically. Preventing that shift right needs an organised left. A Labour Govt should take decisions to lift living standards and convince voters – many of whom it has already alienated – that it has been the positive force for change.
But in its absence, a left needs to be built to organise on issues, that can build confidence and apply pressure to a hostile Labour leadership that it should pursue the correct course of action in government.
The past fifteen months has shown the movement in support of the Palestinians can grow and sustain itself, maintaining repeat mobilisations targeting the government, members of parliament, local authorities, and the media to demand justice. These mobilisations have forced begrudging shifts in government policy, on the language around a ceasefire including impacting votes at the UN, in funding UNRWA, and imposing limited sanctions on Israel.
If we are to have a greater impact on politics as a whole, we need a left which is a far more impactful and relevant force in politics and in society, winning the arguments on employment, on incomes, on funding and organising public services, as well as challenging militarism and the rise in racism, to be an effective counterweight to the current rise of the right.
- The Red Weekly Column will appear each Monday on Labour Outlook from one of our regular socialist contributors.
- Ben Folley is on x/twitter and on bsky.
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Featured image: Anti-austerity protester in London – photo credit CC BY 2.0 Julian Stallabrass
