THIS week has clarified battle lines in the war being waged against working-class people in Britain and beyond.

US President Donald Trump’s blitz of executive orders, shredding obligations including over global warming and international co-operation on eradicating disease, set the tone in the world’s most powerful country — as did the fascist salute given by the world’s richest man Elon Musk at his inauguration.

But our immediate concern must be how Britain’s Labour government is aligning totally with the corporate assault on civic, social and environmental rights.

One of Labour’s few redistributive policies attempting to tap the immense wealth of the filthy rich — a crackdown on the abuse of non-dom status to avoid tax — is to be softened, Chancellor Rachel Reeves says, because she has been “listening to the concerns” raised by the non-dom “community.”

She won’t listen to concerns over children trapped in poverty by the discriminatory two-child benefit cap. 

Or over the impact of restricting winter fuel payments when energy prices are twice what they were a couple of years ago, even when those concerns convince her own party to vote against the policy at its conference, and prompt Labour’s biggest affiliate Unite to challenge the government in court. 

Or even over the U-turn on compensating the Waspi women, despite leading Labour politicians having championed their cause for years.

Reeves’s selective approach to people’s concerns applies to the environment too, even as yet another severe storm closes schools and transport systems, and despite years of worsening floods and failing crops. Sod the science, says Reeves, growth trumps net zero.

Limiting action on the accelerating climate catastrophe to measures which don’t affect corporate profits is one reason the world continues to warm uncontrollably.

Reeves is less flamboyant than Trump with his “drill, baby, drill” mantra, but just as irresponsible. The climate-denialist right will want more, of course — the Telegraph this week published calls for Britain to win the race to open up the Antarctic to oil extraction — and no doubt over time Labour will give it to them, not that this is likely to appease our increasingly unhinged right-wing press.

Labour’s growth policies across the board simply turn government into a doormat for big business. Rather than publicly fund infrastructure projects in the public interest, Labour will scrap regulations to weaken rights to object to construction by the private sector. 

Reeves dismisses the importance of ecological diversity (“bats and newts” are derided as reasons things can’t be built) though Britain has among the lowest biodiversity in Europe and the documented collapse of insect populations will have huge, and as yet partly unknown, effects on agriculture and the natural world. 

The same deference to the right of construction firms to do as they please applies to housing. But it is not over-regulation which stymies house-building in Britain but land-banking aimed at keeping prices high. Urban development in major cities like London and Manchester is blighted by developers’ lack of accountability to communities, as working-class neighbourhoods are driven out by construction of luxury flats designed to accumulate value, not house locals. 

Labour’s trumpeted local government reform could have involved community empowerment, a revived municipal socialism. Instead it gives a select few with money and influence greater power to push the rest of us around.

In that, Labour marches alongside the international radical right push to dismantle democratic curbs on corporate power. Less extreme than Trump or Musk, but in their camp. The intensified crackdown on protest is a logical part of this project.

The question of the day is democracy versus capitalism. Defending our communities and rights as citizens means building resistance through any means we can: trades councils, People’s Assembly branches, even Morning Star supporters’ groups can be hubs to bring activists together. The future is looking ugly if we cannot unite to do that.