AFTER 14 years of chaotic Conservative government in which living standards deteriorated and incomes for working people fell relative to the real cost of living; when climate change increasingly affected our daily lives; when war and genocide dominated the news agenda and when millions of people abandoned hope of ever owning their own house or finding one at an affordable rent, British people increasingly blame the Labour government for the country’s economic woes.
When the comparators are Boris Johnson’s roller-coaster ride of corruption, incompetence and brazen hypocrisy; Liz Truss’s failure to understand the underlying logic of the very capitalist system and being congenitally incapable of understanding how it works; or Rishi Sunak’s tone-deaf management of popular expectations it seems bizarre that a Labour government — just a few months into office — should take the blame for the state we are in.
Or, to put it another way, carry the can for capitalism’s crises.
It is not surprising when you consider that this present government has no foundational belief in anything other than 21st-century monopoly capitalism wedded to the dictatorship of our bourgeoisie in thrall to the bond markets.
In as far as working people had expectations that things could get significantly better, this government has worked doggedly to ensure that such illusions are unfounded.
Labour’s betrayal of the Waspi women — a moral failing as well as a endorsing a straight forward act of larceny — has offended people well beyond the band of deserving women directly affected. In Parliament the SNP will put forward its Waspi compensation Bill which will have Labour MPs trooping into the chamber to give the Scottish Nationalists another stick to beat Labour every election until this parliament runs out of time.
Where Labour trailed changes that might be made possible by a tax take from the parasitic class of nom-doms Rachel Reeves backed off the moment she sipped a cocktail at the Davos tribal gathering of the super-rich.
Labour’s tin ear to the real-life problems of families with more than the “officially sanctioned” number of children is just one example of the kind of economic thinking that sees subsidy for working-class families as of no significance compared to mitigating the tax liabilities of rich landowners.
Two-fifths expect their financial situation to get worse over the next 12 months.
The gap in perceptions between the political class and the people is sharply exhibited by the latest Ipsos survey which shows big divides between MPs and the public on priorities for economic growth.
MPs prioritise new national infrastructure projects and closer business ties with the EU for economic growth, while the public focuses on improving public services, job creation and better wages and workers’ rights.
Of course there is no necessary contradiction between these objectives.
But to combine public infrastructure spending (socialist construction?) with enhanced workers’ rights and higher wages; treating public services, health and education as part of the social wage rather than private profit, is a people-centred solution to our country’s economic problems. The key factor is taking the profit system out of the equation.
In the real-life test of this theory under socialism life expectancy in the USSR — 25 years in 1920 — doubled in one generation. In a generation, under Chinese socialism, it doubled from 33.4 years in 1945.
With Keir Starmer’s government the problem is not simply that they are not very good at politics. They are better at running a police regime in the Labour Party than they are in sensing what working people might want. There may be a connection between these two things.
