UNITE’S determination to put Labour on the spot at Labour conference over winter fuel cuts and adherence to Tory “fiscal rules” is appropriately confrontational.
Unions will engage in talks this weekend with Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds in a bid to avoid a public row over apparent backsliding on the New Deal for Workers employment rights package.
Powerful currents in the trade union movement pull against direct criticism of what remains a very new Labour government after 14 years of fierce hostility from Conservative administrations, especially given genuine positive changes on rail renationalisation, workers’ rights and, this year at least, public-sector pay.
But it would be a serious strategic mistake to let ministers entrench discredited Treasury policy that condemns Britain to repeat the austerity nightmare of the 2010s.
Most immediately for the millions of pensioners who face a freezing winter, stripped of public support by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and the millions of children whose futures will be blighted by poverty because a Labour government won’t lift the discriminatory two-child benefit cap.
But also because Labour has internalised the warped logic of austerity, and it is nonsensical to imagine Britain can recover from the damage it inflicted by repeating the prescription.
So captured by Treasury dogma is Starmer that, addressing the TUC, he described the Office for Budget Responsibility — an unelected body set up by George Osborne to police public spending — as a “watchdog that is there precisely to protect working people.”
No, it’s there to subject economic policy to supervision by “experts” whose advice has consistently engorged the assets of the rich while holding down wages and social spending.
Breaking with Reeves’s fiscal rules is key to everything: restoring real-terms pay after 15 years of decline, fixing a crumbling school and hospital estate, arresting the accelerating collapse of council services — or indeed nationalising the water and energy sectors so bills can be lowered so people don’t even need winter fuel payments.
Most importantly, it’s key to calling out Labour’s “reform or die, there’s no more money” misdirection over the NHS, which is severely underfunded compared to its continental counterparts.
Everything trailed by Health Secretary Wes Streeting ahead of the election indicates Labour plans to accelerate the private-sector infestation that has driven the NHS to its current desperate state. We cannot wait passively for Labour to unveil its “reimagining of the NHS” in spring: we need to be preparing for battle now, and it begins at Labour conference.
Using the coming week’s Liverpool summit to force a policy vote, rather than relying on fireside chats with ministers, draws attention to the proper purpose of Labour conference in democratically deciding the party’s policies.
Starmer has worked to undo the steps taken by his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn to empower Labour members, reducing conference to its status under Tony Blair, an extended rally for loyalists to cheer the all-powerful leader.
The crackdown on members’ democratic rights was welcomed by right-wing MPs who resented efforts to make them accountable to the grassroots under Corbyn, but now extends to MPs themselves. They are cast from the back benches for defying the whip — unprecedented authoritarianism in a parliamentary party and one that has left it so cowed that just one MP dared to side with the labour movement and the public in voting against winter fuel cuts.
MPs will only find the courage of their convictions when pressure other than that of the whip’s office is brought to bear — pressure from the trade unions which founded their party and from the constituents who can kick them out.
Defeating Reeves on winter fuel payments at conference might not change government policy right away — but it will encourage the gathering revolt we need.
