LABOUR will begin its conference this weekend in bullish mood.
The win in Rutherglen & Hamilton West shows the Scottish National Party is in trouble.
Its collapsed vote cannot be attributed solely to its previous MP Margaret Ferrier’s disgrace: Scotland’s ruling party has floundered since the sudden resignation of Nicola Sturgeon in March, beset by financial scandals and struggling to convince its base it has a realistic plan for independence.
That’s good news for Labour. Since its wipeout north of the border in 2015 its inability to compete in Scotland has seemed an insurmountable barrier to power at Westminster. Now it is back in the game.
That’s the case in England too. The Conservative Party conference earlier this week was an embarrassment. A lively hard-right fringe was little comfort to a Prime Minister it focused on attacking.
The PM’s own keynote address was a flop, bizarrely making the cancellation of a long-term project its main announcement. This was a party that expects to lose the next election.
Keir Starmer says the changes he has made to Labour are responsible for its improved fortunes.
This is a partisan account: it relies on writing the 2017 election, in which a socialist-led Labour Party made big gains, out of history and blaming its left leadership rather than the attempt to prevent Brexit he himself spearheaded for 2019’s reverses.
Labour is benefiting from its adversaries’ problems. Any government presiding over a doubling of energy bills in little more than a year, rampant food price inflation and soaring housing costs would be plunging in the polls. North of the border, the SNP’s woes are even more obviously self-inflicted.
But the task for the left is less to analyse why Labour is currently riding high than to assess what a Labour government would mean for our country.
There are ominous signs here. Big business is pulling out all the stops to influence a government in waiting. An exclusive business forum with Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves on Monday has 200 company executives shelling out £2,520 each to attend; corporate sponsorship of the conference has more than doubled in a year.
Starmer’s Labour is wide open to business influence. Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has received funds from US healthcare corporations; he is an open advocate of increasing NHS reliance on the private sector. Labour dropped its proposed tax on Big Tech following meetings with Google.
While public fury exploded at privatised water companies for their reckless abuse of our environment, Labour was sending secret emails to water CEOs asking for meetings on how to sell continued private ownership to the public.
Yet the crises in these services cannot be resolved without real change. Water privatisation has been a costly disaster. A parasitical private sector costs our NHS the Earth. And properly taxing the obscene profits being racked up by monopolistic firms is essential to fund our creaking public services.
If Labour is not to be a corporate plaything in government, unions must find ways to counter the business lobby.
As Unite’s Sharon Graham has warned, financial competition with the corporate sector is a non-starter.
The union is instead putting resources into community-based campaigns that challenge Labour representatives to sign up or be shamed at local level.
Campaigning for public ownership and a major redistribution of wealth — policies polls show command majority support — is essential, but unions must also look at how a cost can be imposed on Labour when it does not listen, including when it comes to electoral challenges by those forced out of the party, from Jamie Driscoll to Jeremy Corbyn.
Too often we settle for crumbs from Labour on the grounds it remains preferable to the Tories. We will get nowhere with such an approach. As Labour approaches power, it becomes more important than ever to rock the boat.
