austerity

Jeremy Corbyn: Surprise, surprise – Labour is reaping what it has sown

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Image of Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-new-party-labour-uk-poverty-b2827322.html

Instead of addressing child poverty, homelessness, poor working conditions or any of the real issues impacting this country, Labour has chosen to deflect the blame and pour billions into arms, says Jeremy Corbyn. Britain is tired of having no political choice – and we’re here to fix that

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Over the past year, the government has continued a programme of austerity and privatisation. It has refused to lift the two-child benefit cap, the single biggest driver of child poverty. It has tried to take away the winter fuel allowance. It has increased the bus fare cap. And it has tried to take away £5bn from disabled people, curating a two-tiered benefit system that deprives thousands of people of a dignified life.

There is one area where the government has been very generous, though: arms spending. Government military spending is now at £31.7bn, which is a 6 per cent increase in real terms from last year. Imagine how much better ordinary people’s lives would be if we spent that money on schools, hospitals and green energy instead.

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People have had enough of a political regime that serves the interests of billionaires and corporations. They have had enough of a government that inflicts suffering at home and enables genocide abroad. They have had enough of broken promises from political parties that fail to deliver real change.

Original article at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-new-party-labour-uk-poverty-b2827322.html

Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Keir Starmer explains the moral case for cutting disability benefits. He says work will set you free.
Keir Starmer explains the moral case for cutting disability benefits. He says work will set you free.
Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine 'Private Eye'.
Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.
Continue ReadingJeremy Corbyn: Surprise, surprise – Labour is reaping what it has sown

Morning Star Editorial: Purge of dissenting MPs is a sign of Starmer’s weakness

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/purge-dissenting-mps-sign-starmers-weakness

 Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in Downing Street, London, on his first official visit to Britain, July 17, 2025

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Just 12 per cent of the public approve of the government’s record, a historic low. Current polling shows the great majority of Labour MPs losing their seats at the next election, either to Reform, or to the new left party struggling to be born, or in Scotland and Wales to nationalist parties.

Certainly, at present it is as easy to see the suspended four — and the already-whipless John McDonnell and Apsana Begum who rebelled a year ago against the two-child benefit cap — securing re-election as independents than as candidates of the Starmer regime.

It is certainly hard to see this move breaking resistance to the new austerity agenda going forward. Only successful leaders can hope to get away with this sort of crackdown.

So this latest exercise in authoritarianism speaks only to Starmer’s loss of capacity to advance his right-wing agenda, as well as to his consigliere Morgan McSweeney’s blinkered view that whatever the problem is the answer lies in attacking the left.

But it is also a challenge to the Labour left. Over the last five years it has consistently failed to find the means to arrest the Starmer-McSweeney purge of the left, often for want of the simple virtue of sticking together when under attack.

The response to the latest suspensions has been robust, in words at least. The left has shown it can inflict defeats on the government, reversing specific policy proposals.

But it is now beyond obvious that only a fighting plan to actually oust Starmer himself has any prospect of reversing Labour’s dismal prospects in time to save the next election. They should take every opportunity — and even create them — to express no-confidence in this government of austerity, war and authoritarianism.

Failure to do so will certainly turbocharge the case for the new socialist party being promoted by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The appeal of that venture rests in part on the perception that Labour is a lost cause.

Starmer’s latest sanctions against dissent tend to make that case. He has flung down the gauntlet — the left in the PLP, the affiliated unions and the membership must pick it up.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/purge-dissenting-mps-sign-starmers-weakness

Keir Starmer justifies why he has to travel abroad so much
Keir Starmer justifies why he has to travel abroad so much
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.

Continue ReadingMorning Star Editorial: Purge of dissenting MPs is a sign of Starmer’s weakness

Austerity’s authoritarian trajectory: why jury trials are under attack

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/austeritys-authoritarian-trajectory-why-jury-trials-are-under-attack

 FW Pomeroy’s Statue of Justice standing atop the Central Criminal Court building, Old Bailey, London

PROPOSALS to restrict the right to trial by jury are presented as the only way to salvage a system in crisis.

Former judge Sir Brian Leveson says we must act to avoid “total system collapse.” The backlog in court cases is huge — 77,000 cases await trial in the Crown Court — and Leveson is right that leaving defendants and victims of crime waiting years can have a terrible impact on their lives.

But these are dangerous proposals which must be seen in context: firstly, of the cuts to justice budgets from 2010 onwards, and secondly, of the increasing authoritarianism of the state and the courts which is already undermining jury trials.

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[M]inisters may have other motives. As Tim Crosland of Defend Our Juries has warned, authorities are increasingly wary of the way a “jury of one’s peers” — that is, of randomly selected ordinary people — tends to resist political instruction and acquit defendants for actions they deem morally justifiable.

Judges have resorted to ordering defendants not to explain their actions, even banning references to climate change in court in some cases involving direct action by environmentalists.

Removing the right to a jury trial entirely from a swathe of offences increases the state’s power to shape prosecution outcomes.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/austeritys-authoritarian-trajectory-why-jury-trials-are-under-attack

Keir "I support Zionism without Qualification" Starmer supporting genocide.
Keir “I support Zionism without Qualification” Starmer supporting genocide.

Continue ReadingAusterity’s authoritarian trajectory: why jury trials are under attack

John McDonnell: Labour alienated its core and failed to attract Reform voters. Now will Starmer change tack?

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/03/labour-reform-voters-keir-starmer-local-elections

Keir Starmer visiting the defence contractor Leonardo in Luton, 2 May 2025. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/PA

The local elections showed that voters feel betrayed. But in a party that brooks no dissent, that message isn’t getting through

The response from Labour spokespeople so far to the loss of Runcorn and Helsby – and to the election results as a whole – has been especially tin-eared. There doesn’t seem to be any understanding of the deep-seated emotion in the reaction of Labour supporters to the party’s behaviour in government over the past 10 months. There used to be talk of the need for emotional literacy in politics. What we are witnessing is a staggering level of emotional illiteracy.

Labour supporters feel deeply that their party has turned its back on them. It’s not just that they feel they are not being listened to. It’s that the Starmer and Reeves government is doing things that they believe no Labour government should ever do.

After 14 years of enduring year after year of austerity under the Conservatives, there was such a collective sigh of relief in getting rid of the incompetent, corrupt and brutal Tories. There might not have been much in the way of inspiring politics from Keir Starmer in the run-up to the election last July, but at least we had a Labour government.

The problem now is that, at times, the government is unrecognisable as a Labour government. This isn’t the traditional argument about whether the Starmer administration is behaving like old Labour or New Labour. It’s whether it’s Labour at all in the eyes of people who have supported us or would want to support us.

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Guardian article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/03/labour-reform-voters-keir-starmer-local-elections

Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel's Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don't do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.

Continue ReadingJohn McDonnell: Labour alienated its core and failed to attract Reform voters. Now will Starmer change tack?

NEU president slams Labour’s renewed austerity

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(left to right) Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner clap their hands during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, September 22, 2024

NATIONAL Education Union (NEU) president Sarah Kilpatrick slammed Labour’s renewed austerity today, telling the NEU annual conference that Tory welfare cuts had killed her disabled father.

She accused ministers of “perpetuating and repeating the shameful pattern of punching-down and finger-pointing” by “balancing the books on the backs of the poor.”

On the first day of the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, she described how her father had died at the age of 56 after being stripped of his disability benefits under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

She said that she had experienced poverty as a working-class child in Newcastle upon Tyne and was his carer for a number of years.

“As Iain Duncan Smith gleefully applauded the welfare cuts, I represented my father in a tribunal against the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] decision to remove his disability benefits,” she told delegates.

“He’d had his gas cut off. Couldn’t afford groceries. His elderly mother was adding tins of food to her shopping to bulk up what I was buying for him, but he isolated himself further still.

“He lost a lot of weight during that time and never really recovered.”

In 2013, her father became one of an estimated 120,000 people who died as a result of the Tories’ austerity programme, she said.

“When Wes Streeting brags to the Tories across the benches that Labour have done what they never could and slashed the welfare bill, this is what they mean,” said Ms Kilpatrick.

“Let’s be clear. Nearly two decades of economic permacrisis has not been caused by disabled people.”

Nor has it been caused by the elderly, refugees, the trans community or children in poverty, she said.

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Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/neu-president-slams-labours-renewed-austerity

Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Continue ReadingNEU president slams Labour’s renewed austerity