Karl Marx once compared capitalism to an insatiable vampire, gorging itself by sucking the life out of the working class. As a trusted servant of British capitalism, it seems that ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer has also developed a taste for blood.
By chopping billions from welfare to fund billions for warfare, the Prime Minister has proven his readiness to feed imperialist carnage abroad by sacrificing the vulnerable back home.
Even infamous slasher villains from Hollywood horror-flicks would be impressed by the comfort with which the Labour leaders wield the knife.
With their latest cuts to disability benefits, Starmer’s government has already gone further than even George ‘Scissorhands’ Osborne – the former Tory chancellor – was willing to go.
In today’s blood-curdling House of Commons announcement, Labour’s Rachel Reeves outlined the Treasury’s Spring Statement.
On top of £4.8 billion hacked away from the welfare bill, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ is set to slash spending on the civil service by 15 percent.
Meanwhile, despite the government’s empty promises to ‘get Britain growing’, the 2025 economic growth forecast was halved from 2 percent to 1 percent.
With the British economy faltering, Starmer and his ministers are feeding workers and the poor into the meat-grinder – cooking up a platter of austerity to ensure that Britain’s ravenous creditors get their pound of flesh.
While the bosses and bankers feast themselves, the working class will be forced to survive on a Dickensian diet of thin gruel.
This is the bleak future ahead of us under capitalism. Rather than appealing for crumbs, with calls to ‘tax the rich’, the leaders of the labour movement must mobilise workers and youth to demand the whole bakery.
We say: make the billionaires pay for this crisis!
Pressures mount
Starmer and Reeves entered Downing Street promising nothing. Within weeks, however, even these low expectations were being further shrunk, with hand-wringing talk about ‘tough decisions’ needed to fill a £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the government’s finances left behind by the Tories.
Since then, the situation has only deteriorated.
The Chancellor’s Autumn Budget provoked a backlash from investors and speculators. Promises of ‘turbocharged growth’ have fallen flat, with official figures from January showing a contraction of the UK economy by 0.1 percent. And shockwaves from across the Atlantic, including the threat of tariffs and an escalating global trade war, have only added to the instability and uncertainty.
Add to this the rush for rearmament across Europe – in the wake of Trump’s effective abandonment of NATO, the western imperialist military alliance – and it is clear that the pressures are mounting on all sides for British capitalism and its representatives.
Bitter medicine
This is the dire backdrop to Reeves’ latest economic announcement; a statement that, in the words of the Financial Times, is “written in red ink”.
The Chancellor is delivering an entire pharmacy’s worth of bitter medicine: a halving of UK growth forecasts for this year; stagnant productivity and stubborn inflation; and £5bn of extra cuts to public spending, on top of the same amount already axed from the welfare budget.
The Chancellor is delivering an entire pharmacy’s worth of bitter medicine: a halving of UK growth forecasts for this year; stagnant productivity and stubborn inflation; and £5bn of extra cuts to public spending / Image: The Communist
All of this, meanwhile, is merely the appetiser for the main dish of brutal austerity that Starmer’s government is expected to serve up in the autumn; “a holding operation – a patching-up of the public finances – ahead of more radical surgery later this year,” according to the FT.
And that is before the worldwide crisis of capitalism really begins to bite, including the fallout from protectionist measures and any number of other potential hazards – economically, diplomatically, and politically.
Broken Britain
Even Tory shadow ministers have labelled Labour’s economic programme as “austerity, just with a different name, a different face” – a bizarrely brazen admission of the draconian nature of the Conservative’s own policies whilst in power.
Years of cuts and attacks, under successive Tory and Labour governments, combined with decades of decline and decay, has fuelled a deep sense of anger and discontent in society.
There is a hatred of all the traditional parties; a resentment towards all those establishment politicians who are seen to be upholding a rotten system.
This explains the rising support for Farage’s Reform, which according to some surveys now tops the polls, on the basis of its demagogic pledges to fix ‘broken Britain’.
The more astute strategists of capital are aware of this fact. Underpinning the phenomenon of right-wing populism, states leading Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley, “is the feeling that politics no longer works for ordinary people – that it is elitist, unresponsive to and dismissive of their concerns.”
“As long as the mainstream parties can be painted as defenders of the status quo,” he continues, “mavericks will retain an appeal.”
The problem for capitalist establishment, the FT journalist remarks elsewhere, can be put quite simply: “you cannot do any form of liberal [i.e. bourgeois] democracy on economic stagnation.”
This is the cold reality facing the ruling class, which is increasingly losing control of the situation in all countries. Their system has hit a dead-end. For humanity to move forward, capitalism and its custodians must be overthrown.
Splits and struggle
The perspective ahead is one of intensified crisis at all levels, and with this a sharpening of the class struggle.
Starmer’s militarism and austerity is preparing the way for an almighty social explosion.
The perspective ahead is one of intensified crisis at all levels, and with this a sharpening of the class struggle. Starmer’s militarism and austerity is preparing the way for an almighty social explosion / Image: The Communist
Labour’s ‘guns before butter’ approach is deeply unpopular. According to one recent poll, a plurality of UK voters want the government to prioritise the needs of those unable to work over the needs of British imperialism.
Feeling this pressure from below, splits are already beginning to emerge inside the Labour Party. Backbench MPs, and even cabinet ministers, are openly voicing their concerns about the scale of the painful cuts that the government is proposing.
When it comes to voting these measures through, Starmer can expect to face an embarrassing and damaging mutiny from those behind him.
Unfortunately, so far, the response from the so-called ‘left’ has been timid, to say the least.
The widespread demand for ‘welfare, not warfare’ is correct. But from the mouths of the trade union leaders and social reformers, such words ring hollow.
The role of communists is to fill this slogan with revolutionary content: to show the connection between the warmongering of ‘our’ imperialist ruling class, and their attacks on the working class in Britain; and to link all of this destruction and misery back to its underlying cause – the crisis-ridden capitalist system.
“To be radical,” Marx stated, “is to grasp the root of the matter.” Today, this means identifying the source of our problems – capitalism – and organising to sweep away this decrepit system through socialist revolution.
Join us – the revolutionary communists of the RCP – in this task.
Labour’s war on the poor – For welfare, not warfare!
With their fresh round of savage cuts, Labour has thrown down the gauntlet and declared war on the poor.
Tens of thousands of those unable to work are estimated to lose around two-thirds of their income as a result of Labour’s onslaught on Britain’s welfare safety-net.
According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation think-tank, meanwhile, as many as 1.2 million people currently claiming personal independence payments could be worse off by around £4,300 a year, due to draconian changes to eligibility criteria.
Many who require assistance with washing or going to the toilet will now have a vital lifeline snatched away from them, adding to the daily indignity and misery that capitalism imposes upon the most vulnerable in society.
This naked cruelty is only the tip of the iceberg. Not only the poor and disabled, but the entire working class is set to be battered by the deepening crisis of British capitalism.
Only months ago, ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer was pledging to “put more money in the pockets of working people”. Now, however, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicts that living standards for the majority of UK households will fall by the end of the decade.
The charity’s researchers suggest that the average family will be £1,400 worse off by 2030, representing a 3 percent decline in disposable incomes – on top of the hit that ordinary people have taken over the last 15 years or more.
Workers and youth must mobilise against Labour’s austerity agenda, and reject Starmer’s militarism mania. While the ruling class demands ‘guns before butter’, our slogan must be for ‘welfare, not warfare’.
Instead of enriching the bankers and fuelling the imperialists’ war machine, we must seize their fortunes and overthrow their system.
We need a revolution against the billionaire class and its craven representatives, to put an end to the barbarism of capitalism once and for all.