A NEW Labour prime minister addressing the TUC two months after sweeping to power might expect a hero’s welcome.
Instead, Keir Starmer’s trip to Brighton is overshadowed by anger at his government’s decision to remove winter fuel payments from millions of pensioners.
Ministers’ attempts to defend this cruel cut, accompanying another looming rise in energy costs, have bordered on the absurd, with economists deriding Commons leader Lucy Powell’s claim that it helped avert a possible run on the pound.
The official rationale for a cut that will reduce spending by £1.3 billion this year makes no sense: more likely Chancellor Rachel Reeves picked an eye-catching target to send a message about the government’s determination to uphold its “fiscal rules.”
It has done — in the process exposing the warped Treasury ideology that prioritises what the TUC has slammed as “unnecessarily restrictive and arbitrary” financial targets over keeping the elderly warm in winter.
The workers’ parliament’s call for a “high-profile public campaign to make the case for a more radical, progressive and credible economic strategy,” in a motion moved by Unite, identifies different choices the government could make.
It includes proposals for serious tax reform, including the overdue implementation of a wealth tax. This would raise the money needed to fund public services and the NHS — which, contrary to Westminster rhetoric insinuating it is too expensive, is seriously under-resourced compared with healthcare systems in neighbouring European countries, with a study by the Health Foundation in 2022 finding NHS spending would need to rise by £40 billion a year to match French per capita health spending, or £73bn to equal Germany’s.
But it would also, importantly, identify the redistribution of wealth as an aim of fiscal policy. The myth of “broke Britain” needs to be exploded: this era of under-resourced and collapsing services is also what the Sunday Times Rich List describes as a “golden age for the super rich.”
We have 100,000 NHS vacancies in a year when the Big Four British banks (HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest) posted their highest annual combined profits ever; we have a government punishing pensioners to save £1.3bn when energy giants Shell, BP, Equinor and ExxonMobil raked in more than a billion a week in profits between them through 2023.
Only a transfusion of some of this colossal wealth can save our services. But securing that involves class struggle.
Labour has indicated, by opening discussions with unions on industrial strategy and the future of services, and by settling public-sector pay claims, that it seeks more constructive industrial relations.
It has not indicated any willingness to confront the power of capital, even in sectors facing total meltdown like water.
So it needs to feel pressure to do so. The public campaign agreed by the TUC is a beginning: power concedes nothing without a demand, and the labour movement can win public backing for an alternative economic and political strategy.
But Labour must also face consequences if it defies the movement’s wishes, especially when it takes punitive action against MPs brave enough to support union policy against the whips, like the seven suspended for rebelling over the two-child benefit cap.
MPs need to face pressure from below as well as above. The gathering storm of bankruptcies and sweeping service cuts hitting council after council show the impact of austerity economics at community level, and present an opportunity for unions to link up with local campaign groups to become a force to be reckoned with in local politics.
Labour may have made government more accessible for unions, but Westminster remains a bubble, isolated from the concerns of working-class people. The huge Palestine solidarity movement demonstrates that the politics of protest can shift state policy: and the campaign for a different economic settlement must be rolled out on the streets and in workplaces, not confined to conversations with the Cabinet Office.
