The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 26th July 2024
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 26th July 2024
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
As a result of the Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer’s KC MP’s glorious achievement of securing half a million votes less than Jeremy Corbyn secured in the 2019 General Election he got to write his first King’s Speech last week.
Soon after it was delivered the most gracious speech got a rapturous welcome from the trade union movement.
Unite’s General Secretary, Sharon Graham, breathlessly said: “The King’s Speech is packed full of measures which will begin transforming the UK for the better. The King’s Speech shows why Britain needs a Labour Government. The forthcoming Employment Rights Bill is key to rebalancing the relationship between employers and workers, making work fairer.” As an afterthought, she cautiously added: “As always, the detail will be important.”
At the same time big business was largely unconcerned, and indeed welcomed parts of it.
So far all we have are the titles of the promised bills and have little idea about what they will contain, but there are clear signs that they will produce much less than the optimistic titles of the proposed measures imply.
One of these is the measure to “ensure that all significant tax and spending changes are subject to an independent assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility” (OBR). This is all part of a cunning plan to ensure that ambitious spending plans to fulfil election promises will be deemed unaffordable by the senior civil servants and bankers at the OBR, thus giving them an effective veto and enabling Starmer to pass the buck when something is deemed ‘unaffordable’. An early test of this will be the notorious two-child benefit cap, which the new ‘working class’ Chancellor says is too expensive to lift.
On the constitutional front, Starmer has announced plans to remove the last 90 or so hereditary peers from the House of Lords. This will not be a democratic measure to “encourage wide participation in the democratic process”, as he claims, but it is only being done to make room for even more of his cronies. Clearly the best retirement home in Britain is here to stay. Starmer also wants to make it slightly easier for female Anglican bishops to take their places on the red benches. Very progressive indeed.
It is interesting that right-wing think-tanks welcomed Starmer’s commitment to a rapid increase in house building and allowing builders loose on the Green Belt. This building boom is for the private sector only. Mention is made of “affordable housing”, but we all know from long experience that this only means house-builders promising to build a few very slightly cheaper houses to secure planning permission. These promises tend to be watered down or abandoned entirely once the bulldozers move in. The silence about actual council housing is not accidental.
Plans to re-nationalise the railways and establish “Great British Railways” are not as good as they sound. This will allow the transfer from the present private operators to public sector companies when the present contracts expire. It is claimed that this will result in saving £110–£150 million in management fees. Similar policies are promised for bus services at the municipal level.
The train operating companies do not feel at all threatened by this. Rail Partners, their trade association, merely said they hoped to “work with the new transport secretary to ensure the railway is delivering for passengers and freight customers”. American infrastructure company AECOM told the Rail Business website that they were “ready to help deliver the Labour Party’s pledge to implement a 10- year infrastructure strategy and establish the National Infrastructure & Service Transformation Authority”, so capitalists clearly have no fears.
While the Tory plan to deport migrants to Rwanda has been scrapped, largely on cost grounds, it is clear that the underlying assumptions behind that disgraceful measure remain intact with plans to “to strengthen the border and make streets safer”, which means more police raids on nail bars and car washes instead.
We can be sure that the new Border Security Command targeted at “criminal gangs” and measures “to keep the British public safe from terrorism” will also be directed at political activists, as is the norm with harmless sounding legislation ever since the days of the 1936 Public Order Act that, in theory, was aimed at the fascists but was more often used against the anti-fascists.
The statements that Labour will “ensure a strong defence based on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law”, and “continue to give its full support to Ukraine and its people and it will endeavour to play a leading role in providing Ukraine with a clear path to NATO membership”, are essentially declarations that imperialism is in safe hands.
Starmer was too embarrassed to spell out that his Defence Strategy Review will not even think about cutting the already bloated military budget but is only concerned with how best to increase it further. CND, Stop the War Coalition and other anti-war movements could be forgiven for assuming that the change of government is simply a change of the names of ministers.
Perhaps the only good thing arising out of the rise of the Faragist Reform Party is that Starmer will have to tread warily about sucking up to the European Union. We can already see Starmer and his new sidekick Lammy back-tracking on the very belated calls they made to shore up the vote, which called on Israel to slightly moderate their attacks on Gaza. Class collaboration is unsurprisingly the order of the day. We are promised an “Industrial Strategy Council” that will give a few union general secretaries seats and an extra source of income. Needless to say, that sort of collaboration merely involves unions agreeing with what bosses want.
Starmer claims that “securing economic growth will be a fundamental mission” of his government. Not once does the word ‘redistribution’ crop up in the 104-page document The King’s Speech 2024 that expands the regal text delivered in the House of Lords.
Only once in this document to we find the word ‘Repeal’. This appears only with regard to the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act passed last year, allegedly to draw a line under the conflict in the occupied north of Ireland.
From this we can deduce that the promised Employment Rights Bill is going to be something of a damp squib as there are no plans to actually repeal any of the anti-union laws passed between the 1980s and 2016. Not a single word is said about strengthening trade union rights, apart from abolishing the recent Minimum Service Strike provisions that even the most hard-nosed employers think is more trouble than it is worth.
Starmer makes polite noises about matters such as ensuring that employees get employment rights from their first day at work on the grounds that this protects them against unfair dismissal. Real Business, a news website for small businesses, notes, however, that employers could still sack a worker during their probation period. The only difference being is that they will now need a good excuse to do so. Businesses have HR departments to cover themselves in such cases.
The same thing applies to promises that workers should be able to request flexible working, as of right, but this will still be a case of respectfully asking for it. Again, bosses just need better reasons to deny it.
It will be interesting to see what the small print is in the laws to ban fire-and-rehire and zero-hour contracts that will, undoubtedly, allow employers plenty of leeway to continue to exploit their workers.
No doubt whatever the Renters’ Rights Bill contains, thlandlords’ lobby will receive a kindly hearing to ensure there are plenty of loopholes to allow evictions of unwanted tenants.
The new National Wealth Fund is described as being “central to this Government’s mission to deliver growth and a greener economy”. The Starmer Government says this will be making “transformative investments across every part of the country” by “mobilising billions of pounds worth of additional private sector investment”. In other words, it will use public sector money to add to private sector investments in time-honoured fashion with the risks being borne by the public sector and the rewards going to private shareholders.
We have had more detail about Great British Energy, a publicly-owned clean power company that is supposed to increase investment in renewable energy but is clearly based on the same model of public money supporting private capital.
While the Pensions Schemes Bill claims it will support over 15 million people who save in private-sector pension schemes, there is an ominous total silence about the more important state pension that millions depend on as their sole source of income.
There is no reason to despair about this state of affairs, however. The alternative of another Tory government would be much worse. Electoral politics are never the be all and end of political activity. While class consciousness is presently at a low level, major pay battles, particularly in the health service, local government and the railways, are simmering away. They need to be brought to the boil. Workers need a significant pay rise regardless of what the OBR says about affordability. Starmer’s miserable share of the poll shows that the workers are not impressed by him and are impatient for results. It is up to the trade unions to channel that discontent rather than leave it to Reform.