THE last week has seen signs of a possible government retreat on its deeply unpopular foreign and domestic policies.

We are talking baby steps.

Rhetorical flourishes against Israel as it massacres and starves a civilian population have paused progress on a trade deal, but not Britain’s active facilitation of its war crimes through use of the RAF Akrotiri base on Cyprus, surveillance and logistical support and arms supplies.

On the domestic front an announcement that thresholds will be tweaked to widen access to winter fuel payments does not amount to a U-turn, nor abolition of the two-child benefit cap or reversal of attacks on social security payments to disabled people.

However, these cracks in the edifice of Keir Starmer’s warfare-not-welfare agenda can be widened. They result from the combination of grassroots pressure with Labour’s catastrophic polling and electoral performance, which party canvassers and elected representatives know from the doorstep has more to do with cuts and genocide than with immigration.

Add to that the suggestion from the Deputy Prime Minister, out on leadership manoeuvres, that different choices might be made which take more from the rich, and we can see that the PM (or at least the Chancellor) is perceived to be in trouble, and this opens up space for more Labour MPs to back the bolder demands for taxes on profits and wealth that have come from Socialist Campaign Group MPs such as Richard Burgon or Jon Trickett.

The small shifts so far are linked to extraparliamentary campaigning and electoral concerns, and both will be essential to further progress. That means more pressure on MPs and continued street protest, including by maximum support for the People’s Assembly national demo against austerity on June 7, just ahead of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement of multi-year departmental budgets.

It also means recent hints from former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that a more co-ordinated left-of-Labour electoral vehicle may soon take shape should not be ignored. Corbyn remains a towering figure on the left — as a former Downing Street adviser observed last winter, his ability to fill a hall anywhere in the country is not shared by any Labour politician, and nationally probably only by the hard-right Nigel Farage. Any such initiative can only strengthen the left, inside and outside Labour.

Unity in the anti-austerity cause depends on identifying the true nature of austerity — a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the rich, through cuts to wages, services and progressive taxes to increase profit. There are winners from the last 15 years, in Britain’s engorged billionaire class and the heightened profit margins of big business.

Unless these are targeted, the government will like its Tory predecessors divide and rule: pitching public sector against private sector and workers against people receiving benefits (many of whom are in work).

Opposition to cuts must go hand in hand with the fight for pay restoration, awards that make up for 15 years of wages falling in real terms; and, as the Unite union put it during a recent People’s Assembly press conference, defeating austerity will rest on industrial action as well as protest.

The outcome of struggles such as that of the Birmingham bin workers will be of nationwide significance — because their city is run by government-appointed commissioners, because it is the largest local authority in Europe and because so many other councils face funding crises, victory or defeat will set the pattern for what follows.

Each of these fronts — for peace, for pay, for services, for social security — is a crucial and current battleground in society. The government is weak: it must be made to retreat before our demands, and not those of a far right that waits in the wings but has nothing to offer on any of them.