DOES the Labour Party leadership intend to win the next general election?

The question can be forgiven because its feeble response to the issues facing the people of Britain indicates otherwise. 

Indeed, cynical voices are being heard suggesting that it might be better to let the Tories deal with a resurgent economic and financial crisis after May 2015 while Labour bides its time until the crisis passes.

Any such perspective betrays the hopes and interests of the workers and people of Britain. Labour cannot abdicate its responsibility to govern in their interests.

The problem is that it would fail to do so unless it radically changes its policies. 

Despite Tory crowing about Britain’s economic recovery, we still have more than two million people unemployed (over 6 per cent of the workforce), half of them young people (with a jobless rate of 17 per cent).

It means nothing when we are told monthly by the monopoly media that “more people are employed than ever before.” 

Britain’s population and workforce have increased almost every year since the end of the Black Death in 1350.

Certainly we have more low-paid, part-time or precarious jobs than ever before. 

What’s needed now is a massive programme of investment in public services, public-sector housing, green technology and manufacturing. 

That means taxing the rich and big business, closing down tax havens under British jurisdiction around the world and directing private capital to where it is most needed.

Yet at the moment, Labour threatens to continue the Tory-Lib Dem austerity drive against public services and the poor, albeit more softly and over a longer period as “austerity-lite.” 

While Labour’s pledge to reintroduce a 50p top rate of income tax is welcome, a modest wealth tax on the very rich would wipe out Britain’s public spending deficit overnight.

Repealing the bedroom tax would end a nasty assault on the unemployed and disabled. 

Allowing councils to use the proceeds of council house sales to build new homes would signal another step forward. But Britain’s housing crisis cries out for a massive programme of public-sector house-building, backed up by training programmes to help create millions of new jobs.

Cancelling plans to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons system would free up to £100 billion for socially useful investment. 

The dithering over renewing or replacing Trident continues as Labour maintains its loyalty to the US and Nato, instead of adopting an independent foreign and defence policy for Britain.

The two Eds, Miliband and Balls, witter on about a “cost of living crisis.” Yet they refuse to control the costs of food and clothing while the retail monopolies pile up the profits. 

Nor will they commit the next Labour government to a substantial rise in the statutory minimum wage or to compulsory equal pay audits in the private as well as the public sector.

As the slogan of the TUC demonstration on September 20 puts it, “Britain needs a pay rise.”

Workers in the public and private sectors, together with the unemployed, pensioners, students, carers and people with disabilities, all need a substantial rise in incomes to boost economic demand. 

This would a create a sounder basis for economic recovery than building sandcastles based on house-price inflation, household debt and yet more subsidies to the banks through “quantitative easing.”

Labour’s plans to freeze household energy charges will bring only partial and temporary relief, even prompting the “big six” monopolies to get their price rises in early from the end of 2012. 

Appointing a new regulatory body would be a waste of time.

For five decades from the 1940s, Britain managed to expand and modernise its gas, electricity and water industries without parasitical private directors and shareholders. Who needs them now? 

Public ownership would be a vote-winner, with even the right-wing tabloid newspapers supporting renationalisation. 

A massive investment programme in non-nuclear renewable energy, gas storage and a national water grid would create long-term energy security and create more than a million jobs.

Furthermore, instead of subsidising Britain’s railways so that shareholders can continue to receive fat dividends, the whole industry should be taken back into public ownership. 

Instead of tinkering with the franchise system, the next Labour government should legislate to shorten the franchises and then renationalise each section for free as these expire. 

What a vote-winner that would be among the millions of rail passengers who pay the highest fares in Europe for one of the worst services.

Then there is the distorting domination of the British economy by the spivs, crooks and gamblers of the City of London. 

A Labour government should extend public ownership and control into the banks and markets and channel their funds into low-interest investment in new housing and sustainable, productive industry.

However, the prospects for Labour changing course and winning the general election next May 8 are poor.

The manipulated National Policy Forum in June laboured to produce a weak mouse or two. 

Miliband’s leadership has not clearly broken from Blair-Brown neoliberal economics and US-Nato militarism.

The failure to confront the EU, which is driving austerity and privatisation across Europe and destabilising the former Soviet republics, is handing a gift to Ukip which opposes the EU from the right when Labour should be doing so from the left.

At the very least, Labour should be promising electors a referendum on EU membership, not least to redeem the broken election pledge of 2007.

In reality, Labour will not ditch its supine posture on the EU until the trade unions end their inexplicable love affair with this anti-democratic pro-big business European club. 

How much more pain must the European Commission and European Central Bank inflict on the people of Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal and Italy before Britain’s unions join their continental comrades and reject EU policies? 

How many more privatisations does it take? How many more European Court of Justice rulings must there be against collective bargaining and the right of member states to demand decent labour standards? 

While last month’s Labour NEC elections produced some welcome gains for the left, the special conference reforms will entrench centralised diktat and further weaken the links with the trade unions, perhaps fatally.

In this context, the proposals to form a trade union party, linked to Labour at least for the time being, are worthy of consideration.

In the meantime, we need the trade unions, the People’s Assembly and the peace and other progressive movements to campaign together against austerity, privatisation and war, in favour of the kind of policies set out in the People’s Charter.

On every front, the prospects for success would be stronger if we had more readers for the Morning Star and more members for the Communist Party.

The labour movement needs its own mass party. But it also needs a militant party active on every front, based on Marxism, rooted in the working class, part of an international movement and with its own programme for revolutionary change, namely Britain’s Road to Socialism.

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.