WITH the mood change at Number 10 Starmer is going and much is possible. The Makerfield election result, taken in conjunction with earlier results, suggest not that Reform UK is broken as an electoral force but, at least, that a political majority of electors are prepared to lend their votes to whoever is best placed to defeat it.

Thus Reform UK may not be able to form a government, even with a revived Tory Party, but the mere possibility that things may change needs to be translated into immediate measures that arouse confidence that a Labour government under new leadership can make things substantially better.

Breaking the private ownership of the energy industry and making gas and electricity affordable before a new winter means tackling the private owners of the energy industry.

Imposing order on the food sector — from farms to supermarkets — necessarily entails measures to coerce big farmers, incentivise smaller farmers and compel price cuts on the monopoly supermarket sector.

Health service delivery belongs in the public sector and ending the subsidy to private healthcare profits that NHS privatisation entails is the first step.

Each of these areas of the economy and public service, and more, are given over to the kind of voracious rent-seeking that privatisation is designed to deliver.

Decades of these policies have produced a cost of living crisis for working people and a sense that nothing works and we are caught up in powerful forces beyond our control.

But when a Labour government makes material changes in the real life economies of working people it can change the way politics is done.

And if Labour fails to make things better, or, like the Starmer/Reeves regime makes things worse, then the political price is the kind of government crisis that has given Andy Burnham his chance.

But there also needs to be a new way of doing things within Labour and this is the time for the Labour-affiliated unions to act more directly in shaping both events and policies and for those no longer affiliated to bring what pressure they can to bear on shaping government policies.

Beginning to undo the damage of decades of neoliberalism and imperial war demands a reset of the British economy.

It is important that unions act in the collective interests of the working class as a whole and no purpose is served by obscuring the fault lines in thinking that presently exist.

Those who think that a kind of militarised Keynesism is the way to retool British industry and guarantee the jobs of skilled workers need to consider what Britain’s participation in the EU/Nato war drive means.

We have had decades of imperial wars that have produced nothing of value to the British people but have driven ever higher profits in an armaments and aerospace industry that is where the British and US economies are most integrated.

Breaking the profit nexus that binds our ruling class to its transatlantic cousins means uncoupling ourselves from the drive to war with Russia.

The most authoritative representatives of our ruling elite have made it clear that ramping up spending on weapons comes at the cost of schools, housing, education, health and public services.

As importantly for the re-establishment of a productive manufacturing and high skilled economy is the need to direct investment into those sectors of the economy that need it and those regions where capital investment is the only route to economic revival.

Politics in general and class politics in particular hang on a critical moment in which, unless the working class becomes a force acting in its own interest, then we will be subject to the untrammelled rule of capital for another generation.