AFTER months in which Labour argued that such is the dire state of the economy that Tory spending limits must be maintained, the Chancellor of the Exchequer now says that further cuts in public expenditure are needed.
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The question raised by any talk about varying the structure of taxation is where taxes fall. The richest 10 per cent of families hold 43 per cent of all wealth. The bottom 50 per cent — and be sure that this includes the greater proportion of people who see themselves as working class — possess less than 10 per cent of wealth.
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When the overwhelming majority of voters, including Tory voters, see public ownership of rail, mail, water and energy as desirable this is not simply a yearning for the more efficient delivery of these services and utilities than private ownership is able to provide. More, it is an expression of a clear understanding that revenues from these myriad transactions should not be privately appropriated but applied to the common good.
The present Labour administration has, with rare exceptions, ruled out the recovery into public ownership of privatised sectors and, less performatively than Gordon Brown in his day but no less systematically, has assured the corporate world that not only are the foundations of private ownership safe but that Labour, even more than its Tory predecessors, holds appeasing the bond markets a central part of its economic strategy. Hence the cuts announced today.
Reeves’s dilemma is highlighted by the necessity to find £1 billion to fund the juniors doctors’ pay increase; something similar for the teachers and a backlog of other public-sector pay claims.
Under this system spending is always about priorities. But there is money about. She is already committed by Starmer’s diktat to find £57.1bn in defence spending in 2024-25 which is a 4.5 per cent increase in real terms. No cuts there!
A bigger source of revenue would result from taxing wealth at the same level as income by raising the capital gains and dividend tax rates to the level at which workers pay on their wages.
An even bigger windfall would result from a socialist economy in which all rents, interest and profits arising from human economic activity were held in common rather than being privately acquired.
Just Stop Oil are being branded “fanatics” for disruptive actions whose like hardly raised an eyebrow a decade ago
I wasn’t terribly surprised to see, in the weekend Morning Star, a letter suggesting that while the sentencingof theJust Stop Oil Five was overly harsh, they deserved punishment for their conspiracy to disrupt traffic on the M25.
The Star is, to be fair, generally quite supportive of JSO’s right to protest, while having some knee-jerk types in its readership, particularly in the crusty old tankie set. But such complaints get at the heart of an issue JSO has had for some time — they’re often really annoying even for their nominal allies.
Many of them are quite posh and can sound patronising or smug. Their targets are disruptive but less often to the wealthy and more to a cross-class cohort of art lovers, or pagans, or sports enthusiasts, or holiday makers. And motorists, of course. Roger Hallam, as their most famous face, often acts like a self-aggrandising edgelordwhose projects have a habit of getting people in trouble without much of a plan for long-term support.
It sometimes makes JSO hard to love, and it gives grouches in politics and the media an excuse to label them attention seekers, or cultists, or extremists.
But here’s the thing: for all their PR controversies, JSO aren’t actually extreme at all, and not only in comparison to, say, cops throwing their weight around on a Friday night, or any major event that gridlocks a city centre. Comparing them to similar campaigns from the 1990s or even the early 2000s, JSO are tamer than Lassie. The anti-roads movement,Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!,Reclaim The Streets, even Greenpeace — have all mounted considerably more disruptive campaigns within living memory. You can find reports on some of them in old issues of Freedom and Schnews.
In fact, a quick look through the latter’s archive for mentions of the M25 very quickly turns up this articlefrom 2012, with the Tories already in power, which notes the following action:
On Monday 16th July a Greenpeace co-ordinated swoop saw seventy-seven petrol stations within the M25 shut down, and another thirteen in Edinburgh - hitting Shell on the forecourt and in their pockets. Activists disassembled the emergency fuel shut off switches and chained the pumps together, stopping business for the day.
Twelve years ago, shutting down nearly the entire refuelling system around London and Edinburgh wasn’t considered big enough to fluster the Graun, which reported the whole thing as just another news story for the day. Shell were careful to say they respected the protesters’ views, and the police didn’t even bother to comment! My goodness what a difference a few years makes. Can you imagine the level of dribbling outrage the press would indulge in now?
This impressive gap in the treatment of disruptive protests on the same road is symptomatic of an issue touched on in a recent Freedom discussion, which has been worsening for a long time and accelerated, strangely, alongside the culture wars. While the left was accused of going woke and indulging in cancel culture, the right was becoming so pathetically unable to handle confrontation that it changed the laws to jail people for being annoying. Part of Suella Braverman’s anti-protest law(since struck down) literally gave police the power to break up protests for being “too noisy”.
And now we’re at the point where Hallam and co. are being jailed for 4-5 years each for conspiracy to disrupt the flow of traffic. But what’s worse is they’ve managed to somehow convince the public this is all a response to sudden rising environmental “fanaticism” entailing behaviour we’ve never seen before. A straight-up bald faced lie to a population who, if they are adults, should be able to personally remember examples of this not being the case which has nevertheless sunk in as truth. What a stunning propaganda victory! If the left had done it, you can bet your life the word “Orwellian” would be burning holes in printing presses across the nation.
Which brings us back to our letter writer in the Star. The left (and of course the anarchists) need to remember our history, and why it is that solidarity applies even to people we don’t get on with ideologically (or personally). We need to be much, much better at getting our heads out of our arses and fighting back against the demonisation of disruptive protest. It’s not a matter of whether we approve of JSO or Roger the Public Nuisance, or whether think their work is counterproductive in terms of public opinion.
Because not too long ago what they’ve been doing wouldn’t have been a jailable offence, or even a front page one. Not too long ago, columnists opining about disruptive protest being “anti-democratic” would have been quite rightly ridiculed for their lack of commitment to human rights. JSO’s re-designation as extremists courting much-deserved jail time is our re-designation.
Kier Starmer needs to be pressured on this from all sides. He has, after all, taken away the left’s voice in Parliament. Now he needs to hear it in the streets.
‘Progressive Realism’ Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Regarding the ICC, the case presented by the previous government effectively argued that no international court had the authority to hold Israel to account for its actions in Gaza, no matter how barbaric, as any right to prosecute Israelis had been surrendered by Palestinians during the Oslo negotiations. This very argument has now been directly addressed and demolished by the ICJ, which held that such agreements — between occupied and occupier — cannot deprive people of their rights under international law. Similarly, the ICJ judgment adds extra weight to the demand for an arms sale ban. Following the ICJ’s injunction that states must not aid and abet Israel’s illegal occupation, it is impossible to see how the government can continue to trade arms with Israel. This now sits alongside the responsibility to prevent genocide that flows from the ICJ ruling in January. The same holds with any form of trade that supports these illegal acts. In its judgement, the ICJ also rejected the argument so often used by those who are opposed to pressing Israel to end its occupation — its supposed need for security guarantees — by making clear that security needs cannot justify the acquisition and annexation of territory by force.
Israel is already making clear that it will ignore the judgment just as it ignored the ruling in January and the previous ICJ judgement in 2004 ruling the separation wall to be illegal. It is relying on the standard claim that those calling its occupation illegal and charging it with the crime of genocide and apartheid are liars motivated by antisemitism. It must now convince the world that this argument holds against the ICJ and ICC as well as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the dozens of states who made submissions to the courts. To give any credence to such claims is quite simply not ‘realism’, neither progressive nor any other kind.
The past few months have shown just what the consequences of not holding Israel to account are. At least 40,000 killed in Gaza, the population there on the brink of famine, and as Unicef reported this week, a Palestinian child in the West Bank killed every two days since October. Continuing on such a path, as seems to be the intention of the Labour government, means abandoning any framework of international law. The clarity of the ICJ’s recent rulings makes the test for Lammy’s ‘progressive realism’ very simple — either you stand against occupation, annexation, genocide and apartheid, or you are complicit with it.
Union leaders condemn the Prime Minister’s ‘disgraceful’ decision
SIR KEIR STARMER has been condemned by union leaders for suspending seven Labour MPs for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, as independents including Jeremy Corbyn vowed to work with them to offer a “real alternative.”
Leaders of fire, education, civil service, bakeries and mail unions hit out at the Prime Minister’s “disgraceful” and “completely wrong” decision as they joined thousands backing a grassroots petition calling for their reinstatement.
Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, ex-shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Zarah Sultana and Imran Hussain were kicked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for six months for backing an SNP amendment calling for the cap to be scrapped on Tuesday night.
Ms Sultana, MP for Coventry South, suggested she was the victim of a “macho virility test” today.
“This isn’t a game … this is about people’s lives,” she added.
“I slept well knowing that I took a stand against child poverty that is affecting 4.3 million people in this country and it is the right thing to do and I am glad I did it.”
MP for Poplar and Limehouse Ms Begum said: “Labour’s own 11 affiliated unions support the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap; there’s popular support among the Labour Party membership to see the cap lifted.”
Labour will say this is just a matter of party discipline, but it is a clear demonstration of the government’s priorities
The Labour leadership has told you who it is, over and over again: it is time to believe it. Keir Starmer has suspended seven Labour MPs because they voted to overturn a Tory policy which imposes poverty on children. Sure, another tale will be spun: that by voting for the Scottish National party’s amendment to abolish the two-child benefit cap, the seven undermined the unity of the parliamentary Labour party and were duly disciplined. But that is nonsense.
Such parliamentary rebellions are scattered through our democratic history, and are accepted almost as a convention of government. Boris Johnson suspended multiple Brexit rebels in 2019 and it was rightly seen as an aberration. He did not, for example, exact the same punishment when five Tory MPs backed a Labour motion extending free school meals in 2020. When it comes to Labour history, even Tony Blair never resorted to such petty authoritarianism. Forty-seven Labour MPs rebelled over a cut to the lone parent benefit in 1997 – none had the whip removed.
This episode tells us many things. Firstly, it completely undermines Starmer’s slogan of choice: “country before party”. Starmer knows a policy devised by George Osborne to prevent parents from claiming benefits for a third or fourth child is cruel and fails on its own terms. When Starmer stood for leader, he promised to scrap the limit. After all, it imposes poverty on 300,000 kids, and drives another 700,000 further into hardship. Fifty-nine per cent of families affected have at least one parent in work – like the care workers, supermarket workers and cleaners applauded by politicians on porches and balconies during the pandemic. Research has found that it does not increase employment levels, and may actually make it harder to find work, while having no impact on family size. Charities have identified it as one of the single biggest generators of poverty in Britain.
It is hard to imagine Starmer is unaware of the fact that Osborne devised the policy to stoke public hostility towards and create a Victorian caricature of the undeserving, overbreeding poor. No decent society punishes children for choices they have not made and parents should not be punished for having more children. In Britain in 2024, kids turn up to schools with bowed legs and heart murmurs because of malnourishment, but a vast cost is also imposed on society as the scarring effect of poverty produces lasting lower productivity and employment levels.
Starmer knew this when he told the BBC almost exactly a year ago that he would retain this wicked Tory policy. He made the commitment to sound tough. Contrast with how he genuflects before powerful interests such as the Murdoch empire. By endorsing the two-child benefit cap, Starmer decided to gain partisan advantage, rather than fix an injustice afflicting his country. Party first, country second. Or rather, to be specific: playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable children.
There isn’t the money available, we are told. The price tag is £1.7bn, a pittance given annual government expenditure is £1.2tr. According to the Sunday Times rich list, the 350 wealthiest British households have a combined fortune of £795bn: is leaving their taxes at the same level more important than parents skipping hot meals to feed their little ones? When Starmer told Volodymyr Zelenskiy that the UK would give Ukraine £3bn a year “for as long as it takes”, he acknowledged there is money available for what the government considers a priority. This Labour government simply does not regard child poverty as a priority.
Seven Labour MPs have had the whip suspended for six months after voting against the government on an amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
Ex-shadow chancellor John McDonnell was among the Labour MPs who voted for an SNP motion calling for an end to the policy, which prevents almost all parents from claiming Universal Credit or child tax credit for more than two children.
Mr McDonnell backed the SNP motion alongside Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Imran Hussain, Apsana Begum and Zarah Sultana.
MPs rejected the SNP amendment by 363 votes to 103, in the first major test of the new Labour government’s authority.
Losing the whip means the MPs are suspended from the parliamentary party and will now sit as independent MPs.
Nearly all of the rebels were allies of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who now sits as an independent MP and put his name to the SNP motion.
In a statement on social media, Ms Sultana said she would “always stand up for the most vulnerable in our society”, adding that scrapping the cap would “lift 33,000 children out of poverty”.
