This Labour budget is austerity by another name

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Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/31/this-labour-budget-is-austerity-by-another-name

Jeremy Corbyn, MPs and politicians from the Green party, Plaid Cymru and others respond to the budget.

Labour’s first budget punishes the “working people” they claim to support. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised to deliver real change to the electorate, after 14 years of Tory rule. This week, they have broken that promise. This budget is austerity by another name.

While we welcome the government’s decision to invest in school and hospital buildings, it is extremely disappointing that these investments have been undermined by a swathe of public sector cuts, cruel attacks on the worst off, and a dogmatic refusal to redistribute wealth and power. These are not “tough choices” for government ministers, but for ordinary people who are forced to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table.

Labour is raising defence expenditure to 2.5% of GDP while telling us there is no money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is a lie. There is plenty of money – it’s just in the wrong hands. The richest 1% in the UK hold more wealth than 70% of Britons. By refusing to impose a wealth tax, this government has chosen to force vulnerable communities to pay the price for years of economic failure, instead of making the richest pay their fair share. Labour’s first budget shows us whose side they’re on.

Years of austerity and privatisation have decimated our public services and pushed millions into poverty, disproportionately impacting women, people of colour and disabled people. Making millions of children, working, retired and disabled people poorer damages our entire economy and stretches our public services. An austerity economy is a false economy.

We, along with nearly 100 progressive Independent and Green politicians across the country, are calling on the Labour government to: 1) introduce wealth taxes; 2) abolish the two-child benefit cap and stop attacking welfare recipients; 3) reverse cuts to winter fuel; 4) restore the £2 bus cap; and 5) invest in a Green New Deal.

We refuse to believe that child poverty, mass hunger and homelessness are inevitable in the sixth largest economy in the world. A progressive movement is growing up and down the country, demanding a real alternative to this race to the bottom between Labour and the Tories, which has seen the new government perpetuate decades of austerity and rampant corporate greed.

The Tories’ collapse allowed Labour to come to power with the lowest vote share ever won by any single-party majority government. Labour haemorrhaging votes to progressive independents and Greens in their heartlands should be a lesson to this government: you are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day – and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril.


Jeremy Corbyn MP Independent, Carla Denyer MP Green party co-leader, Adrian Ramsay MP Green party co-leader, Sian Berry MP Green partyBen Lake MP Plaid Cymru, Ann Davies MP Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts MP Plaid Cymru, Llinos Medi MP Plaid Cymru, Zack Polanski Green party deputy leader and London assembly member , Leanne Mohamad Independent candidate for Ilford North, Jamie Driscoll Former North of Tyne mayorAndrew Feinstein Former ANC MP and Independent candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, Leanne Wood Former leader, Plaid Cymru, Beth Winter Former Labour MP for Cynon Valley, Hilary Schan Chair, We Deserve Better and Independent councillor in Worthing, Anthony Slaughter Wales Green party leader

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/31/this-labour-budget-is-austerity-by-another-name

This blog has previously experienced copyright take down notices. I am republishing this letter in full on the basis that the original authors have and retain rights of copyright and that they have indicated that they wanted it published by submitting it to the Guardian newspaper.

Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Continue ReadingThis Labour budget is austerity by another name

Thoughts of the Day 29 October 2024

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Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.
Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.

There are news reports that Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott have been urged to apologise for backing gangster Chris Kaba after criticising police following his death. [ed: uncertain that he should be called a gangster.]

He was unarmed and police didn’t know who he was when he was killed. There were claims following his inquest that he had shot somebody 6 days previous to him getting killed by police. He was never tried of this alleged crime of course because he was dead. You can’t retrospectively justify his killing when an unarmed, unknown man was killed by armed police.

Continue ReadingThoughts of the Day 29 October 2024

Jeremy Corbyn: Peace and solidarity must guide us in building a united international left

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/peace-and-solidarity-must-guide-building-united-international-left

PEACE: Former Labour Party leader and now independent MP Jeremy Corbyn speaks at a London rally for Palestine, September 11 2024

Speaking at the Podemos congress over the weekend, JEREMY CORBYN MP outlines three crucial areas for building a powerful leftist movement across Europe: opposing austerity, promoting peace and combating the far right

AS we look to build a united left across Europe, there are three key issues that can form the basis of a strong, powerful movement: anti-austerity, peace and opposition to the far right.

Europe is heading toward a renewed era of austerity. We have witnessed attacks on wages and conditions all over Europe. Working-class living standards have fallen. Wages have stagnated. Meanwhile, there are more billionaires than ever before.

Inequality is not inevitable. It is the result of decisions that governments take to take money from the many and give it to the few. Last week, the British government celebrated its 100-day anniversary.

In that time, it has made two supposedly “tough” choices. One is to keep children in poverty by retaining the two-child benefits cap, refusing to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. The second decision was to cut the winter fuel allowance for 10 million pensioners.

We are told that these have been “tough choices.” Every day, my constituents make tough choices. Tough choices like deciding whether to heat their homes or put food on the table. Tough choices like taking out a loan to pay for this month’s rent. Tough choices like selling their home to pay for their family’s social care.

The government knows that there is a range of choices available to them. They could introduce wealth taxes to raise upwards of £10 billion. They could stop wasting public money on private contracts. They could launch a fundamental redistribution of power by bringing water and energy into full public ownership.

Instead, they have opted to take resources away from people who were promised things would change. There is plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands — and we will not be fooled by ministers’ attempts to feign regret over cruel decisions they know they don’t have to take.

Austerity is not a tough choice. It is the wrong choice. The British government tells us there is no money. At the very same time, they are committing to raising defence expenditure to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/peace-and-solidarity-must-guide-building-united-international-left

Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Continue ReadingJeremy Corbyn: Peace and solidarity must guide us in building a united international left

Forget Corbynism 2.0. Something bigger is happening on the British left

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Original article by Michael Chessum republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

March for Palestine | Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images

A new generation across the UK is demanding political representation. But this unstoppable force is meeting an immovable object, the Labour Party

A new generation across the UK is demanding political representation. Yet, this unstoppable force is now meeting an immovable object, the Labour Party.

On one hand, despite its failure to leave behind much grassroots organisation, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership galvanised millions. This generation now knows what it’s like to have a voice in the political mainstream. It won’t tolerate being shut out of the political process indefinitely. The success of Green and independent candidates at this year’s general election was in part driven by this fact.

Meanwhile, the realities of climate breakdown, renewed austerity and a genocide in Gaza continue to alienate many. The British public backs the renationalisation of energy by a margin of four to one, the introduction of a wealth tax by a margin of eight to one, and a ban on arms exports to Israel by about three to one.

On the other hand, the Labour Party is a fortress. Many advisors and politicians of the Labour right regarded the party’s defeat under Corbyn in 2019 as a lucky escape, and remain terrorised by the prospect of losing their careers to an insurgent political force. Starmerism is a relentless campaign on behalf of this professional political class, which is determined to shut the left out. Their hubris is an existential threat not just to Labour’s role as a political home for the left, but to the party itself.

Both wings of the Labour Party are being blindsided by this process. The Labour right, and the commentariat that lives in its orbit, likes to think in terms of historical cycles and playbooks. The crushing of the post-Corbynite left was a repeat of Kinnock’s expulsion of the Militant Tendency. 2024 was just 1997 with TikTok.

Starmer’s first act in government – blaming the outgoing administration for an economic mess and indicating a shift towards austerity – was both a conscious mimicry of Tory George Osborne and an homage to New Labour’s fiscal hawkishness.

The Labour left’s attachment to the past is more nostalgic. Its leaders – Aneurin Bevan, Tony Benn, Corbyn – are stripped of their failings and revered. Its heroic defeats – the 1981 Deputy Leadership campaign, the Greater London Council’s fight for survival, Corbyn’s general elections – are endowed with their own folklore.

Life on the outside is unthinkable and futile, as illustrated by every past attempt (the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, Left Unity) to build an alternative. “It is the Labour Party or it is nothing”, as Bevan once wrote, chiding members of the Independent Labour Party when they split in 1932.

Both wings of Labour are good at producing a sense of collective memory that reinforces the party’s standing as immutable, and which relates new events to past ones. Neither are good at understanding when reality diverges from the historical script.

In 2015, the left challenged for power, and in doing so broke the old system. Tony Blair did not bother to get rid of Tony Benn. Yet Starmer almost immediately expelled Corbyn and changed Labour’s rule to ensure that no one like him could lead the party again. He has already suspended seven MPs for voting to abolish the two-child benefit cap. It is only a matter of time until more feel forced to rebel.

A politics from below

The real politics happens outside parliament. We’ve already witnessed huge protests take shape against the massacre in Gaza, and the coming years could see mass movements and industrial unrest over cuts and living standards. Having lived through the Corbyn years, the participants of these movements are unlikely to be satiated by the prospect of a soft left Labour leader some time in the 2030s.

Labour’s initial plans will provide some relief. The Employment Rights Bill is likely to be the most significant improvement in workers’ rights in decades. The renationalisation of the railways will also prove popular. But what happens once these progressive measures have been exhausted?

The Green Party came second behind Labour in 39 seats. Pro-Palestinian Independent candidates have made inroads into safe Labour areas. For this to have happened while Labour was in opposition is unprecedented. Unless the new government rapidly shifts its approach on public spending, redistribution and green investment, it will face an earthquake.

“Unless the new government shifts its approach on public spending, redistribution and green investment, it will face an earthquake”

To have any success, the post-Corbynite left will have to ditch its obsession with icons and celebrities. Despite its roots in social movements, Corbynism became a tightly centralised project, in which activists were given little, if any, role in determining policy and strategy. Even now, discussion of the left’s future beyond Labour seems to centre on the intentions of Corbyn, his former advisors, prominent commentators, or MPs.

Building a serious political project is about representing a solid base in society. This task flows from organising, and having roots in social and industrial struggle, not how many Twitter followers you have.

The green surge

Much of the left will also have to get over its age-old sectarianism towards the Greens, who have emerged as by far the most serious organised force to Labour’s left.

If you listen to many old Labour left activists, or read many socialist newspapers, you will be presented with a critique of the Greens that is at least two decades old. They are portrayed as ‘Tories on bikes’ and alternative medicine enthusiasts. Their ability to win seats in North Herefordshire and Waveney is said to be the product of triangulation towards right-wing rural voters. The compromises of Green parties in France and Germany are held up as the inevitable destiny of the UK Greens.

On the contrary, the Greens have become a major force precisely by occupying a space to the left of their sister parties in continental Europe. Since the turn of the millennium, their membership has risen twelve-fold to around 60,000. Waves of new members – from the ‘green surge’ of 2014 to today’s recruits – comprise its activist base.

Many joined on a radical environmental basis, but just as many did so to oppose austerity, champion freedom of movement, or fight for Palestinian rights. There might be a case that their time would be better spent in Labour, or that party affiliation often operates more like a consumer identity than a political strategy. But the existence of a genuinely left-wing, and increasingly successful, Green Party in Britain is simply a fact. Any attempt to rebuild the left as an electoral force – from within Labour or outside – must take account of this.

The landscape of the British left following the fall of Corbynism is still emerging. The only people who are definitely wrong are those who claim to know exactly what will happen. Perhaps Starmer will move back to the centre-left. Perhaps the social and industrial movements won’t materialise. There are many socialists – including me – who remain in Labour and will keep chipping away.

One thing we can be certain of is that things will never go back to the way they were before the Corbyn moment. The late 2010s unleashed forces that are only beginning to shape our politics. The left must adapt if it is to survive.

Original article by Michael Chessum republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingForget Corbynism 2.0. Something bigger is happening on the British left

Middle East on brink of all-out war

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/middle-east-on-brink-of-all-out-war

A man documents the damaged buildings at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburb, Lebanon, October 1, 2024

ISRAEL’S invasion of Lebanon looked close to having ignited all-out war in the Middle East last night as Iran launched multiple missiles at Israeli targets in response.

It was unclear how Israel or the US, which has stationed huge forces in the region to back Israel up as it continues its Gaza genocide, would react as the Morning Star went to press.

The Israeli military followed up its violation of Lebanese territory by warning residents of nearly two dozen border communities to evacuate, hours after announcing the start of “limited” ground operations against the Hezbollah resistance movement.

British peace activists condemned Israel’s invasion and its attempts to portray it as a “limited” operation.

Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn told the Morning Star: “Israel’s decision to send troops into Lebanon, a sovereign nation, is no ‘limited ground operation,’ it is an invasion.”

Mr Corbyn also blasted British policy in the Middle East, saying: “Our government’s hypocrisy is on full display. Its failure to defend international law and stand up to Israel is a moral disgrace.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/middle-east-on-brink-of-all-out-war

Continue ReadingMiddle East on brink of all-out war