Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaigners stage a protest on College Green in Westminster, London, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivers her Budget in the Houses of Parliament, October 30, 2024
HMRC’S ignorance about how much tax British billionaires pay exposes the missing factor in government announcements on public spending.
Tight finances are used as excuses to attack pensioners and deny justice to the wronged, like the Waspi women.
Even when — thanks to a welcome revolt against Rachel Reeves’s renewed austerity by Labour MPs — cuts to disability payments are reduced in scope, ministers suggest the pain will be shunted sideways: it will make it harder to lift the two-child benefit cap, or force a regressive freeze on income tax thresholds (so they don’t rise with inflation, distributing the tax burden downwards).
The public accounts committee’s Lloyd Hatton says its report is “not concerned with political debate around the redistribution of wealth,” and is intended solely to address shortcomings in HMRC’s ability to collect the tax owed.
But the doubt it casts on HMRC’s own estimates of the “tax gap” (the difference between tax owed in theory and tax collected) has significant implications for public spending choices.
Besides, the failure to introduce land and wealth taxes is one reason the very wealthy are able to hide their assets, and indeed real incomes, so effectively.
The concentration of extreme wealth among an ever smaller number of people is accelerating. It is pronounced enough — with just 50 families owning as much as the poorer 50 per cent of the British population — to distort the entire economy.
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Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.
(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.
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.
Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaigners stage a protest on College Green in Westminster, London, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivers her Budget in the Houses of Parliament, October 30, 2024
