BRITAIN’S anti-austerity movement the People’s Assembly stages renewed demos this weekend as price rises hit tens of millions like a ton of bricks.
Twenty-two million households (the overwhelming majority of the 27.8 million across the UK) are being clobbered by 54 per cent rises in energy bills. This alone will plunge many into poverty and debt.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak is ploughing ahead with a National Insurance rise that picks working people’s pockets.
Runaway inflation is raising prices across the board, and is higher than average when it comes to essentials such as staple foods. Inflation is also shrinking the value of many people’s pensions.
The pain inflicted on ordinary people is a direct result of government choices. A wealth tax as moved in Parliament by Labour’s Richard Burgon could easily raise the sums Sunak hopes to with his tax on workers.
A windfall tax on energy producers’ soaring profits could fund real relief for households; while public ownership of the energy sector would introduce real price controls.
French citizens with publicly owned energy are seeing the rise in their bills capped at 4 per cent, something that should be thrown in the face of every Tory MP who tries to blame global markets or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the rise in our living costs.
The scale of suffering could spell serious trouble for the Conservatives, as many Tory-leaning newspapers are already warning.
Campaigns for May’s local elections should be a platform to put a real alternative, and will be in certain areas such as those where the Communist Party is standing, but whether Labour can convince people that it is “on your side” as its election slogan says is less certain.
The relentless attacks on its own members have weakened its ability to get the vote out and by haemorrhaging membership and insulting trade unions Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership has left it short of funds.
Politically, its refusal to propose policies that would address the crisis such as public ownership (even though they are often its own conference-endorsed positions) leave its critique of the government weak.
Even so, it is a Tory government that is responsible for this emergency and inflicting as heavy a defeat on that government as possible across these elections should be the priority for the whole of the left.
Not least because of the pressure that will put on ministers to change course for fear of losing power entirely at the next election, a real possibility not because Starmer’s obsessive war on the left has made his party more electable but because no government can expect to remain popular while forcing down living standards at this rate.
If the last round of local elections appeared to consolidate the Tory grip on “Red Wall” areas seized in 2019, the picture this year could look very different.
A lifeline for Labour this may be, but that changes very little unless policies that make a real difference are adopted.
Labour’s broad acceptance of the economic status quo, combined with persecution of anyone arguing for more fundamental change, limit its potential to force the Tories to change course.
And even if Labour were elected, this approach would restrict it to tweaks and temporary fixes rather than policies that address the gulf between the richest and the rest.
If we accept that pressures causing high inflation may last a long time, that Russia’s war and Western responses to it will cause long-term disruption to trade and commodity prices, and that coping with climate change requires real changes in the way our economy is run, we must recognise that no party at Westminster is prepared to address this crisis.
The cost-of-living demonstrations and the TUC’s New Deal for Workers tour need to make good that omission by raising a political alternative and building support for it from the ground up.
