ON SUNDAY April 28 I commemorated International Workers’ Memorial Day, remembering the dead and fighting for the living. This May Day, this is even more important as thoughts of the global working class are focused on Palestine. 

The doctors, journalists and aid workers who have paid the ultimate price for doing their job. The alleged reports of mass graves at two destroyed Gazan hospital sites, including medical staff still in scrubs who refused to abandon their patients. Journalists targeted while clearly identified as press, or as with Wael al Dahdouh, his family targeted and bombed while he was reporting live on air. 

The killings of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers have added to the ever-growing picture of workers in Gaza being targeted. Our government is complicit in their deaths, refusing to condemn clear violations of international humanitarian law, resisting calls for a ceasefire and continuing arms sales to Israel. 

No-one should ever be killed for doing their job, and the deliberate targeting and killing of these workers in a conflict points to clear violations of international humanitarian law.

Remembering the dead and fighting for the living carries a heavier weight this year for us all. This International Workers Day, we recommit our fight for truth, justice and accountability for their deaths.

Here in the UK, the Tory government is clinging on with their fingernails. 

Fourteen years of Tory austerity, the stripping down and selling off of our public services, and attacks on pay and working conditions have driven widening inequalities and plummeting living standards for working people.

Now, as the Tories desperately try to cling to power, we are fighting historic attacks on the right to strike and the right to protest, and a vicious culture war as a last-ditch attempt by this government to save their skin by turning worker against worker.

Labour is committed to deliver the biggest change in employer-worker power relations in a generation. Our New Deal for Working People pledges a pay rise for all, rights for employees from day one, an end to zero-hours contracts and bogus self-employment, and the repeal of anti-trade union laws.

The reinstatement of sectoral bargaining through Fair Pay Agreements will reverse over four decades of neoliberalism. If passed in its current form, the next Labour government will give workers the tools to turn the tide on exploitation, precarity and declining pay and conditions.

A combination of economic impact of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis has triggered a wave of worker solidarity not seen for decades. Together, we must redistribute power and wealth, expel the market from our public services, and democratise our economy – boosting living standards across the board.

These policies don’t cost a penny and will reap many benefits for workers and the economy. Despite this, calls are emerging from the capitalist class – both inside Labour and out – for our party to water down our agenda for workers. 

Working people are struggling to make ends meet, with in-work poverty at record highs, public-sector workers using food banks and child poverty soaring.

One in six workers are in poverty, while in my constituency of Liverpool Riverside 10 children in a class of 30 are living below the breadline.

As a lifelong trade unionist, a proud socialist MP and one that has stood shoulder to shoulder on pickets with workers throughout my working life and as a Labour Member of Parliament – I know that these policies are not won in Parliament, they are won in the workplace.

The detail of the New Deal for Working People was fought for by workers in struggle, developed by our trade unions, and it will be delivered by the whole labour movement. We must defend it every step of the way until it is over the line.

It’s not that we can’t afford Labour’s New Deal for Working People. We can’t afford not to deliver it. 

Kim Johnson is Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside.