Labour Party

The climate credentials of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet :: Keir Starmer

Spread the love

While Keir Starmer is leader of the UK Labour Party and therefore notionally supposedly opposed to Rushi Sunak’s cabinet and government, he’s a Tory pretending to be a Socialist, a red Tory.

https://youtu.be/DDEdFxUZ01s

Keir Starmer has abandoned every one of his Socialist ‘pledges’ on taking over the Labour Party. Included in these pledges is

3. Climate justice

Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do. There is no issue more important to our future than the climate emergency. A Clean Air Act to tackle pollution locally. Demand international action on climate rights.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/23/keir-starmer-denies-abandoning-labour-leadership-pledges

… He denied that the 10 promises he made during the 2020 race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn had been abandoned and insisted they remained “important statements of value and principle”.

However, Starmer refused to confirm that he stood by several of them, including public ownership of utilities and rail services and the abolition of university tuition fees.

He has been repeatedly criticised by some on the left of the party who accuse him of shifting away from the platform he stood on three years ago.

Challenged on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme over whether voters could trust him to deliver the five new national missions, Starmer said the pledges made during his Labour leadership bid “haven’t all been abandoned by any stretch of the imagination”.

He said: “What I’ve had to do is obviously adapt some of them to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Since I ran for leader, we’ve had Covid. Since I ran for leader, we’ve had the conflict in Ukraine. Since I ran for leader, we’ve had a government that’s done huge damage to our economy.” …

On climate commitments specifically,

9 Jun 2023 Labour postpones £28bn green plan as it seeks to be trusted on public finances

… Labour has scaled back plans to borrow £28bn a year to invest in green jobs and industry as the party’s leadership looks to review its spending in an attempt to prove its fiscal credibility.

The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, delayed plans for a green prosperity fund to start in the first year of a Labour government, saying it would “ramp up” by the middle of a first parliament.

She said the decision had to be taken as a result of the poor economic backdrop and rising interest rates, after Liz Truss’s short premiership crashed the markets last autumn. …

18 Jun 2023 Keir Starmer to ‘throw everything’ at plan to get UK to net zero

… Keir Starmer will pledge to “throw everything” at net zero and the overhaul of the UK’s energy system and industries, promising new jobs in “the race of our lifetime” to a low-carbon future.

The Labour leader will seek to regain the initiative on his plan for green growth on Monday, having rowed back earlier this month on a pledge to invest £28bn in a green industrial strategy, a figure that will not now be reached until the second half of a Labour parliament, as well as damaging rows with trade unions over the future of the North Sea.

Announcing a package of policies designed to decarbonise the energy system and industry, Starmer will say: “We’re going to throw everything at this: planning reform, procurement, long-term finance, R&D, a strategic plan for skills and supply chains … Pulling together for a simple, unifying priority: British power for British jobs.” …

This is when the Tories started accusing Labour of pursuing Just Stop Oil policies. “Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, accused the Labour leader of being “the political wing” of Just Stop Oil.” There’s also actually a suggestion of terrorism in Grant Shapp’s comment … that phrase.

His team also rebuffed suggestions of a U-turn on the North Sea oil ban. Rescinding permission for projects that have cleared all regulatory hurdles before the general election would be costly and legally complex, so the party’s proposed ban on new oilfields will not cover projects that have achieved all three levels of consent, for exploration, development and production.

It is unlikely that many of the more than 100 North Sea licences the government is mulling would fall into that category, though one of the biggest – the Rosebank oil and gas field – could clear the final regulatory hurdles soon.

It’s not possible to get to Net Zero if Rosebank is permitted. Just like everything else, Keir Starmer and the Labour party can’t be trusted on the climate.

Which is why he gets heckled by climate protestors

Continue ReadingThe climate credentials of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet :: Keir Starmer

Morning Star: Our NHS at 75: we have still faith, now we need to fight

Spread the love
People on Warren Street in London, ahead of a Support the Strikes march in solidarity with nurse 11 March 2023
People on Warren Street in London, ahead of a Support the Strikes march in solidarity with nurse 11 March 2023

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/our-nhs-at-75-we-have-still-faith-now-we-need-to-fight

Image reads Accident & Emergency, A & E

…

Today the NHS is in a deep crisis. Its millions-long waiting list condemns patients to seriously delayed treatments, often painfully, sometimes dangerously. Its hospitals are so overloaded ambulances line up outside, waiting hours to discharge patients.

Those who can afford it are going private: the number paying for private hospital treatment has risen by nearly a third since 2019.

This raises demand for trained medical workers in the private sector, with reports earlier this year that doctors were being offered £5,000 to recruit NHS colleagues to undertake private work, accelerating a vicious cycle in resource competition when the NHS already carries over 100,000 vacancies.

The logic is towards a two-tier healthcare system in which those who can pay get faster treatment while the “universal” health service is reduced through under-resourcing to basic cover for the poor.

Preventing this means challenging the two main drivers of NHS decline: underinvestment and privatisation.

…

NHS sign

Since Tony Blair first introduced private provision within the NHS, the service itself has become a lucrative source of private profit. Extortionate PFI contracts, state collusion with big pharma over drug prices and reliance on private providers all waste NHS money.

The last risks turning our health service into a commissioner rather than a provider of services, a brand name that masks a for-profit health system.

That betrayal of Bevan’s vision is the current prospectus from both Tories and Labour. Saving the NHS means building a mass campaign for real solutions to its twin crises: a serious increase in investment, and an end to all private-sector involvement.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/our-nhs-at-75-we-have-still-faith-now-we-need-to-fight

Continue ReadingMorning Star: Our NHS at 75: we have still faith, now we need to fight

Morning Star: The anti-boycott Bill helps shield an ever-more extremist Israel from democratic pressure

Spread the love

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/anti-boycott-bill-helps-shield-ever-more-extremist-israel-democratic-pressure

…

The anti-boycott Bill targets the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with Palestine. It is openly a bid to enforce British foreign policy on all public bodies: Communities Secretary Michael Gove claims councils, universities or other institutions which seek to make ethical decisions on how to spend or invest funds are guilty of “pursuing their own foreign policy agenda.”

In banning public bodies from taking stances on international questions at odds with that of central government, the law is part of the creeping enforced conformity chilling democratic debate in Britain, reflected in Tory anti-protest legislation, Labour’s relentless search for heretics to expel and the online censorship of alternative and foreign media in the name of combating “disinformation.”

The cross-party consensus on stripping us of our democratic rights is evident here too. Though Labour proposed a “reasoned amendment,” setting out objections to the Bill without actually amending it, it instructed its MPs to abstain when that fell rather than oppose the legislation.

In an interview with Jewish News, shadow communities secretary Lisa Nandy stressed the party’s support for a ban on BDS, saying Labour’s only concerns were that the Bill might also stop councils boycotting other countries, namely China: suggesting Labour would police enforced alignment with British foreign policy even more closely than the Tories. Her concerns are misplaced, anyway: the Bill breaks new ground by explicitly referencing Israel, giving it a unique impunity from activist pressure under British law, as well as by specifying that it should also cover the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, endorsing Israel’s illegal colonisation projects in practice while continuing to oppose them formally.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/anti-boycott-bill-helps-shield-ever-more-extremist-israel-democratic-pressure

Continue ReadingMorning Star: The anti-boycott Bill helps shield an ever-more extremist Israel from democratic pressure

Business as usual as Starmer proves his loyalty with every rightward move

Spread the love
Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos
Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos

https://www.counterfire.org/article/business-as-usual-as-starmer-proves-his-loyalty-with-every-rightward-move-weekly-briefing/

Lindsey German on … [Keith Starmer] , the establishment’s friend …

The fate of Thames Water should be the end of the privatisation model pioneered by Thatcher in the 1980s. The major utilities and public companies were sold off at undervalued prices, their shares rapidly snapped up by big corporations and investors, prices for consumers rose rapidly, and profits went to shareholders, not to investment. That’s why today the common refrain about most parts of public life in Britain is that nothing works. And it is epitomised by Thames Water drowning in debt and likely to be taken back into public ownership temporarily.

But any form of nationalisation is going to be resisted to the bitter end, not just by the greedy privatised companies themselves, but by the Tories and the increasingly right-wing Labour Party under Keir Starmer. The cheek of the privatised companies was illustrated when the head of another, Severn Trent, convened a meeting of all the water firms to explicitly discuss ways of resisting nationalisation. And it’s no use going to the supposed regulators for help. As the Observer reported, ‘27 former Ofwat directors, managers and consultants [are] working in the industry they helped to regulate, with about half in senior posts.’ So a number of those regulating the industry have moved over to take lucrative positions in…. the privatised water companies.

While investors take the money and run, working class people are left with dire and expensive services that fail frequently because there is no investment. The water companies are publicly disgraced because of their dumping of sewage in rivers and seas, rather than invest in new treatment plants. But in London (and no doubt elsewhere) there have been several burst water mains, risking lives as they cause disruption sometimes for months, because of lack of investment. In the southeast of England, drinking water supplies have failed ‘because of the hot weather’, in what must be the lamest excuse from a company supposed to provide just that.

The answer from government and industry alike is that future investment will have to be paid for by us, through much higher bills and higher taxes. Already gas and electricity is beyond affordable for millions. But the energy companies will set the benchmark for other industries as profits are protected. No wonder nearly 13 million adults struggle to pay bills.

…

https://www.counterfire.org/article/business-as-usual-as-starmer-proves-his-loyalty-with-every-rightward-move-weekly-briefing/

dizzy: Under Capitalism failing companies would normally go bankrupt so that the companies’ debts would be transferred to it’s creditors. This is not the case with the banks in the banking crisis of 2008, the energy companies failures of recent years and it looks like failing water companies now. Instead of the companies creditors shouldering the debt as part of the normal process, the poor public is instead burdened with it. This is great for the banks of course because it means that they can borrow without any risk of default, knowing that they will profiteer from the public regardless.

Dianne Abbott: The idea of renationalisation refuses to die

Take Thames Water into public ownership petition amasses tens of thousands of signatures

Continue ReadingBusiness as usual as Starmer proves his loyalty with every rightward move