IN a welcome foray into class politics, Sir Keir Starmer has centred Labour’s spring offensive on the NHS, as it prepares for the May contest that will see voters choosing candidates in local elections and the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and the London Assembly.
It is a necessary move made more urgent by the success — relative in comparison to other capitalist economies — of Britain’s vaccination programme which has given Boris Johnson’s government an undeserved chance to prettify its calamitous record.
Our ruling class showed some sense of real politik when, enabled by the wriggle room provided by our exit from the EU, it laid in a sufficient stock of vaccine.
As a contender for political office and the management of the state, Labour must find a way to differentiate itself from the centre ground of politics.
And given the wide public support for our health service among the British public, this must be grounded in policies that resonate beyond the superficial consensus that surrounds the NHS.
The first and essential element is the demand that NHS staff, and all those whose work and commitment put them at the centre of measures to deal with the pandemic, be awarded a substantial pay rise.
Starmer’s pitch to Parliament today went a long way to making this demand one which Johnson must respond to in a way that fits the national mood. In fact, in his reply Johnson signalled that the pay review body conclusions gives him flexibility beyond the government’s present posturing.
First strike to Labour.
It is necessary to place pay and the defence of the NHS at the centre of a Labour offensive precisely because we are in an interregnum between Rishi Sunak’s sunshine Budget bullshit and the real prospect of further austerity measures later in the year.
Such a pay award is justified not simply because of the great collective efforts of millions of such workers over the past year but because public-sector pay has been hobbled by an effective freeze for near a decade, while the knock-on effect has been to depress pay levels across most sectors of the economy, especially for key and essential workers.
The Tory strategic response to a working-class pay offensive is always to play up divisions and foment disunity — and already ministers are trying to drive a wedge between health service staff and other workers, as if a pay rise for one group is at the cost of wages for others.
In personalising the pay issue by comparing the proposed 1 per cent for NHS staff with the 40 per cent bonanza that boosted Dominic Cummings’s wages, the Labour leader displayed a welcome popular touch.
Now he needs to create a new narrative, one that departs from the dreary procession of platitudes over recent weeks which has seen Labour tail-ending traditional Tory economic thinking, and puts his party in front of a real campaign to boost the spending power of millions of working people and weaken the grip that private capital exercises over our health service.
An awful lot of very rich people have got an awful lot richer during the pandemic and a windfall tax on pandemic profits would fit nicely into a tax regime in which wealth and property were taxed up to and beyond the levels at which wages are subject.
Such a policy resonates nicely with pressure currently piled on pharma companies to unlock vaccines for low-income countries.
The big pharma monopolies that find a congenial tax environment in the developed capitalist countries should be compelled to give all the world a fair shot.
