NO-ONE can doubt the strength and depth of opposition across politics to Labour’s welfare cuts. It even found reflection in the Commons itself at Prime Minister’s Questions, the traditional centrepiece of the conventional political week.
Diane Abbott was heard in respectful silence as she dismissed Sir Keir Starmer’s pretence that the cuts in benefits had a moral purpose.
“This is not about morality,” she said. It “is about the Treasury’s wish to balance the country’s books on the back of the most vulnerable and poor people in this society.”
This analysis is correct. The decisions to maintain the two-child benefit cap, to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners, to ignore the ombudsman’s ruling in favour of the defrauded Waspi women clearly indicate the government’s priorities.
Now we are warned that there is more to come, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves planning to announce further swingeing cuts in public spending next week.
The argument that this is not a new round of austerity is threadbare. Labour’s only defence is that these cuts are not as large as those ordered by David Cameron and George Osborne during the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition.
But that is the point — this fresh assault on the public realm comes after years of immiserating austerity, when most services have already been cut to the bone and beyond.
Abbott is right to attribute this to the malign influence of the Treasury, and the fact that Starmer and Reeves are more than happy to serve as its pliant instruments.
Because this is about choices. In another intervention at PMQs, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer pointed this out. She told Starmer that millions were struggling in “a deeply unfair, unequal economic system” while billionaires got ever richer.
Why, she asked, put the burden for tackling the crisis on the elderly, children, the sick and disabled “rather than on the shoulders of the super-rich with a wealth tax.”
Denyer spoke for large numbers of Labour MPs in advocating a wealth tax. She exposed the falsity of Starmer’s claim that those “with the broadest shoulders” would bear the burden of solving the miserable economic inheritance bequeathed by 14 years of Toryism.
The truth is that the Starmer-Reeves agenda is entirely dictated by the needs of finance capital, mediated through the Treasury and the military.
There is no question, of course, of arms spending being affected by this renewed austerity — on the contrary it is slated to carry on rising for the next decade. Critics of the welfare cuts should not be reticent about making this connection.
Trying to protect spending on services without challenging this renewed militarism hands the Starmerites a free pass by allowing a key argument to go unchallenged.
Starmer’s priorities have a mounting number of victims. Again in Commons questions, Northern Ireland social democrat Colum Eastwood identified one, a deeply disabled constituent able to access benefits under the Tories but now facing destitution as her personal independence payments are withdrawn.
Eastwood then asked the key question. Given all that — what is the point of Labour?
It is a question millions across the country, including many who voted Labour last July, are now asking. This is governance in the interests of capital, not labour by any stretch.
The left in Labour must transition from protest to action against the government if there is to be any positive answer to Eastwood’s question. Issuing statements is not enough if Starmer and Reeves can continue to count on votes in Parliament and canvassers in the country for their anti-worker programme.
Absent that fighting approach, the logical conclusion must be that something new, articulating the values of socialism, is needed.
