“GLOBAL economic headwinds” may be battering the British economy — but Rachel Reeves’s commitment to a discredited Treasury orthodoxy is still intact.

The Chancellor’s speech confirms something unions and Labour MPs need to act on: this government is not merely in the last chance saloon. It clings to delusions which spell permanent immiseration for working-class people — and its leaders must be replaced if Labour is to have any chance of winning the next election against an emboldened racist right.

As crippling as the commitment to “fiscal responsibility” — by which Reeves means a refusal to increase public spending to reverse the impact of 15 years of austerity — itself is the comforting illusion that Starmer-Labour’s election last year indicated public confidence in it.

“I will take no risks with the trust placed in us by the British people,” she insists. But when we on the left point to the flimsiness of Labour’s mandate it’s not just sour grapes. The likes of Reeves may really believe that they turned an unelectable Labour Party around by abandoning the transformative economic vision of the Jeremy Corbyn years, but the evidence does not support that: Labour got a smaller vote in 2024 than in 2019 and a far smaller vote than in 2017.

Managing to lose votes on its previous performance, given the enormous unpopularity of the Tories by 2024, is a remarkable sign of how little enthusiasm ever existed for this government or its policies. And that must be grasped if Labour is to understand the rise of the far right: as Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate told a crowded conference fringe meeting, the sense that Labour and the Tories are equally representatives of a broken system feeds the rise of Reform UK.

Imagining that victory in 2024 was an endorsement of the changes Starmer made to the Labour Party rather than simply the default outcome of the Tory vote collapsing allows politicians to underrate the extent of public disgust with politics as usual.

Most trade unions realise that the government is unpopular, and that addressing yawning inequality is a must if it is to change that — hence Unison’s call for a wealth tax in response to Reeves’s speech, and the TUC’s demand for higher taxes on banks and gambling companies. But the streets have already run out of patience.

The demand that Starmer go is not just a rallying cry of the far right, though it is one. It is heard on Palestine demonstrations and anti-cuts protests. Disabled activists, one year into a Labour government that has replaced a Conservative one with an appalling record of attacks on disabled and sick people, were rallying outside conference yesterday celebrating the fact that the revolt over cuts to personal independence payments almost brought Starmer down — and vowing to finish the job.

This is really not “politics as usual.” There are few precedents for a government elected with such a huge majority being so loathed and so unstable — but, tellingly, one of the few is its immediate predecessor, though Labour’s popularity has nosedived faster even than Boris Johnson’s and from a much lower starting point.

Like the rapid succession of hottest years on record announced by meteorologists, this is a warning of a deeper rooted problem. A crisis of legitimacy of the British political and economic system, one which is currently fuelling the most dangerous far-right threat in our country’s history. Unless the left and labour movement break with that system the far right will win.

Reeves’s only response to a looming leadership challenge from Andy Burnham yesterday was to attack his call for an end to slavish submission to the bond markets. Yet without that, escape from the austerity doom-loop is impossible. Unions should not be waiting idly to see whether the parliamentary party revolts against Starmer, but organising the coup de grace.