By Mark Buckley
All across the major Western countries political upheaval is being caused by economic weakness, austerity and the war drive. Britain is no exception.
The common political feature is the rise of right wing leaderships, a racist offensive designed to divide workers and the rise of authoritarianism. Again, this is all true in Britain. The unusual feature here is all this takes place under a government nominally of the left.
This combination, of politics typically associated with the right and far right under a Labour government in office has opened up a large cleavage between the party leadership and its natural supporters. In effect, the Labour party started the last general election campaign with 44% of the vote, which fell to 34% on polling day itself and is now 23%. On the current political trajectory there is no sign that the haemorrhaging of votes will be staunched any time soon.
The crisis of Starmerism
This rapid decline explains the current crisis of Starmerism as a political project, which has even led to discussions about how long he can survive. The recent MRP polling suggested that Labour would lose 273 of its current seats, with no prospect of forming the next government. The potential impact on MPs, across all wings of the parliamentary party, has fuelled the recent rebellions and partial U-turns on both the winter fuel allowance and the cuts to disability benefits. The rebellion against Starmerism has been centred on MPs precisely because they fear losing their seats.
Those fears are well-founded, not least because further unpopular spending cuts and/or tax rises are the inevitable consequence of current policies. Unable to spur growth because the government has chosen to cut public investment, and with the economy close to stagnation, Starmer recently announced a huge increase in the military budget at the NATO summit.
This was purely designed to placate Trump, and to stave off the threat of further tariffs as has been threatened to the Spanish government, which refused to spend additional money to meet Trump’s war aims. But the political consequence is clear. With investment already being cut, the funding for the real hole in British government finances caused by the war drive must come from other government spending on welfare or on departmental spending, or both. The alternative is to increase taxes. The two largest tax heads are income tax and VAT, which both largely come from workers and the poor.
The war drive deepens austerity
Austerity is not only here to stay, but the scale of the military spending splurge, an extra 32 billion in total, means that it will be sharply increased. For comparison, the last cuts to welfare amounted to 5bn, while the average annual level of austerity under Cameron and Osborne was 35 billion (adjusting for inflation). From a worse starting-point, the austerity to come will be as deep as the Tory-led Coalition’s.
The government’s response is to ramp up the level of government-sponsored racism and to increasingly clamp down on protest through a series of authoritarian measures.
Racism and authoritarianism
The main thrust of the racist campaign is around the issue of asylum-seekers, who have been vilified, as well as an offensive against allowed migration, especially through student visas. Asian communities, especially Pakistani men, have been targeted for officially-sponsored campaigns of slander. All rights and international norms in these areas are being undermined or denied outright.
A similar approach is being taken to protest, especially on the issue of Palestine. Popular bands are being banned and investigated by police, leading campaigners have been threatened with police charges and direct-action protestors proscribed as terrorists. Recent research showed a near-tenfold increase in the use of nuisance laws since 2019 to detain protestors, yet fewer than 3% of whom are ever charged with an offence.
Divide and rule racism and a clampdown on the right to protest are both consequences of the reactionary agenda on war and austerity, an inevitable consequence of them. Given that the economy continues to stagnate, there is little prospect of a spontaneous let-up on this offensive. It is more likely that as the war drive develops the austerity required to pay for it will also become a greater attack on workers and the poor.
Socialists and defensive struggles
Socialists should be clear that they are in a series of interrelated and defensive struggles. The creation of the Labour party, which is both a liberal/labour party politically and organisationally a general confederation of the labour movement as Lenin characterised it, is a gain for that movement, a step towards independent working class consciousness and activity.
Starmerism is undermining it from the right and socialists fight to defend it. Because Starmer and his allies are promoting a completely reactionary agenda on all fronts, Labour is losing votes in all political directions simultaneously. There can be little confidence that we have reached the limit of Labour’s decline. Labour must be defended against the Starmer cabal.
That process may even accelerate if the formation of a new party comes about. Clearly, there are some differences among the key participants. But an independent party, whose aim is to offer a genuinely left social democratic alternative could gain a foothold in the mass of the population. It would be the first organised expression of popular rejection of war, austerity and racism.
At the same time, some fundamental aspect of bourgeois democracy are under attack, the rights to free speech, to protest, to assembly, to asylum. In Britain all of these rights were won by workers and the oppressed from the ruling class. Even with their own limitations, they must be defended by socialists against an increasingly overbearing state, and an authoritarian government.
Broad alliances will be needed in each case, as with the coalition to push back the welfare cuts, which stretched to MPs the centre and even the right of the parliamentary Labour party. But with the scale of the offensive only now becoming apparent, it is clear that these alliances will be increasingly necessary.
Image: Members of the opposition frontbench and shadow cabinet of Sir Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party, at Prime Minister’s Questions, 7 February 2024; Photo by UK Parliament / Maria Unger; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.