Editorial: The same difference (2026)

Editorial from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, has won the Makerfield by-election and can now challenge Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party. If he wins, he will become the new Prime Minister. So what?

Marx famously pointed out that governments are ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. In Britain the Prime Minister is the chairperson of this committee which doesn’t have to be composed of actual capitalists. In Marx’s day most British Prime Ministers were not capitalists but landed aristocrats but this was acceptable as long as they managed things in the general interest of the capitalist class. In the course of the last century committee members and chairs came to be drawn from a pool of professional politicians who could come from any background. This, too, was acceptable and is the norm today.

All the governments there have been in Britain, whether Conservative or Labour or, earlier, Liberal, or a coalition of two or all three of them, have managed the common affairs of the owning class in the interests of that class. The first duty of any government is to guarantee and enforce the ownership rights of capitalists over the means of production. The second has been to ensure that priority is given to the making and accumulation of profits. These — class ownership and production for profit —are the basis of capitalism and no government has ever challenged them.

Governments have a free hand on narrowly political matters such as the structure of the state machine or what is a crime but, when it comes to the economy, its power is limited by the nature of the capitalist economy as one that runs on profits. If, in its taxation or trade or tariff or employment policies, it goes against this, then sooner or later it will provoke an economic downturn and the risk of the resulting popular discontent leading to it being voted out of office and a rival set of politicians taking over. This is enough to keep governments in line with the general capitalist interest. The Labour Party learned this the hard way while the Conservative and Liberals didn’t need to be taught it. The Green Party has yet to learn it.

If the government has to respect and apply the economic laws of capitalism then it is not all that important who is the chairperson of the board of directors of UK Capitalism PLC. It is true that there can a bad government from a capitalist point of view — one that doesn’t competently manage the common affairs of the capitalist class — and an incompetent chairperson, such as the over-confident Truss or the bumbling Starmer, can contribute to this. But that’s a problem for the capitalist class, not the workers.

Whether Starmer or Burnham is Prime Minister is not going to make the slightest difference to the workers’ subordinate position in society nor solve the problems this brings them.

SPGB Snippets: The merry-go-round (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

 

June 24, 2026 

So Keir Starmer has resigned and Andy Burnham is likely to take over. Will it make any difference? It probably will to Labour’s standing with the electorate. For most people, perception of a leader’s personality seems, unfortunately, to be the key element in what passes for political thinking.

But will a new leader be able to do anything different to resolve the problems of the crisis-ridden system we live under? The answer to this has to be a resounding no. There will only be any difference to speak of when we decide collectively to scrap that system and replace it with an entirely different one that uses the abundant resources that already exist to satisfy all our needs the world over.

SPGB Snippets: Starmer’s “on the side of working people” (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

May 13, 2026

. . . and he’s “fighting” for the millions of people on low pay and insecure jobs. “Millions of people who don’t get the dignity. The respect. The chance that they deserve, to go as far as their talent and effort should take them. Millions of people held back because the status quo in this country does not work for them.”

Yeah, but your figures and your scope are wrong, Starmer. Billions of people around the world are ensnared for life in wage labour, all being held back because capital must, and will, keep them permanently on the edge of destitution. How else could they be forced to provide the profits on which the capitalists depend?

Editorial: Labour sinks even lower (2025)

Editorial from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Somebody has said, ‘What Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after’. There is some evidence for this, going back to 1968, the year Enoch Powell delivered his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech. The Labour government of the day then brought in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to end the free entry into Britain of people from the old Empire. Extending the colour bar to Commonwealth citizens required careful drafting to avoid keeping out ‘white’ people. In the end Labour found a solution — that only those whose father or father’s father were born in Britain would have free entry.

It was in that same speech that Powell talked of the ‘existing population’ finding themselves ‘made strangers in their own country’. A refrain taken up by Starmer in his notorious ‘island of strangers’ speech last May, given in response to the rise of the latter-day Powellites of Reform UK. Now, in a bid to stop losing more votes, the Starmer government has decided to steal Reform UK’s clothes and introduce legislation making it even more difficult for refugees to obtain permanent residence; some are going to have to wait twenty years just to apply (instead of five as now) and during this period will be liable to be sent ‘back to where they came from’ at any time. This, in addition to previously announced measures to make it more difficult for ‘strangers’ to become a British citizen.

No capitalist state is going to allow free entry — and socialists are not so naive as to expect them to. States seek to control entry in accordance with the requirements of the labour market and so as to decide who can come in and who can’t. Most European states, as they have an ageing population, do currently need working-age immigrants to keep production and profits flowing.

They need immigrants, but who? That’s where choice — and prejudice — come in. As in 1968, the Labour government has chosen the path of prejudice.

The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has said it is her ‘moral responsibility’ to bring in the legislation. What sanctimonious humbuggery! The Labour leaders and most of their MPs are unprincipled careerists whose main concern is to stay in office or at least keep their seats. Dragging morality into it just makes them more despicable. And then there is the sheer vindictiveness of some of the proposed measures. Why keep individuals living for twenty years in fear of deportation?

It is true that, by clever propagandising and media help, many have become convinced that there is ‘mass immigration’ and that stopping ‘too many’ immigrants would lead to an improvement in their life. But it wouldn’t, because the problems they face over housing, health care, and education derive not from there being too many immigrants but from the fact that meeting these needs is not a priority under capitalism where the aim and driving force of the economy is to make a profit. Even if all immigration were stopped and all ‘illegal’ immigrants rounded up and deported these problems would remain.

How Labour changed (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Originally formed in 1906 as a trade union pressure group in parliament, in 1918 the Labour Party adopted as its long-term aim a nationalised economy. This, together with a redistribution of wealth to create a less unequal society, was to be achieved gradually by measures taken by a succession of Labour governments.

This strategy — Labourism — failed, and how! Instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually changed Labour. Learning from the experience of being in government, that the only way capitalism can run is as an economic system driven by profit-making and that this has to be given priority, Labour gradually evolved from an alleged labour party into an avowed capitalist party.

Here is how it happened.

1. 1906. 29 trade unionist MPs elected with Liberal support constitute themselves as the parliamentary Labour Party.
2. 1918. The party adopts a new constitution, Clause Four of which reads: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’.
3. 1929. An amendment added ‘distribution and exchange’, spelling out that nationalisation (state capitalism), not socialism, was what was envisaged. (Link)
4. 1935. ‘A Labour government, therefore, not only by the transference of industry from profit-making for the few to the service of the many, but also by taxation, will work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses’ (Clement Attlee, Will and the Way to Socialism, p. 42).
5. 1945. General election manifesto: ‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain.’
6. 1956. Labour intellectual Anthony Crosland published The Future of Socialism in which he argued that the aim of a more equal distribution of wealth did not require the nationalisation of industry.
7. 1959. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell proposes to abandon Clause Four but this is turned down by the Labour Party conference.
8. 1974. February general election manifesto: ‘It is indeed our intention to (a) bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’.
9. 1995. New Clause Four adopted: ‘A dynamic economy, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them’.
10. 2024. ‘Labour is the party of business’ (Starmer). ‘Be in no doubt, we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party.’ (Link )

Editorial: Starmer goes nativist (2025)

Editorial from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

ReformUK fought last year’s general election on a single issue. The same leaflet, distributed everywhere they were standing, declared that this was ‘the immigration election’ and that ‘only Reform UK will freeze immigration’. They won five seats, all from the Conservatives. Labour election strategists were pleased as the swing from Conservative to Reform helped them win in other seats Then, last month, Reform won a parliamentary by-election in a seat previously held by a large majority by Labour. Then, Labour realised that Farage’s party was as much a threat to them as to the Conservatives.

What to do? The decision was made to steal Reform’s clothes and on 12 May Starmer delivered his already notorious ‘island of strangers’ speech in which he claimed that if immigration wasn’t further curtailed native-born Britishers would become, as Enoch Powell had put it decades earlier, ‘strangers in their own country’. Neither Powell nor Starmer defined what they meant by ‘stranger’, leaving native-born people whose parents or grandparents came from the British colonial empire open to being victims of anti-immigration prejudice and attacks.

Starmer’s words was hard-core xenophobia, the language of nativist parties everywhere, as political theorists define parties that declare their aim to be ‘promoting or protecting the interests of native-born people over those of immigrants’. Many might see this as reasonable — why should people already there not get priority over newcomers? — but it is based on the premise that native-born workers and immigrant workers have different interests.

The nativist demagogues claim that the two groups compete not only for jobs but also for housing, hospital treatment and school places. This does appear to be the case but the limited supply of these is not caused by too many immigrants. It’s limited by the nature of the capitalist system under which workers are never going to be supplied, whether from their pay or from services provided by the state, with much more than enough to keep themselves in efficient working order. Keeping immigrants out won’t change this. It wouldn’t mean more or better for the ‘native-born’.

It is not clear why immigration should have become a big issue; probably a result of the media’s over-concentration on the desperate people crossing the channel in small boats. Immigration proper is a normal economic feature of capitalism and waxes and wanes as the economy expands or contracts. Capitalism needs workers because their work is the source of capitalist profits. When capitalism is expanding in some place due to the prospects of profit being good, more workers are needed there. Workers move to where the jobs are, sometimes recruited directly by employers. From a capitalist point of view, employing these migrating workers and providing housing and basic services for them to keep themselves fit to work is well worth it as the amount of profits they produce outweighs the cost.

Socialists say that workers, wherever they were born or whatever their language or state-imposed nationality or what religion they were brought up in, have a common interest in joining together, in the first instance, to face their employer. More widely, they have an interest in uniting to end the capitalist system and replace it with a world without borders based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Cooking the Books: Starmer gets it (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Our job is to work with businesses to create the best environment that allows them to thrive’. So wrote Starmer in an article in the Times (29 January). This describes perfectly one of the key roles of government under capitalism. Since businesses thrive by making profits and since business investment for profit drives the capitalist economy, the government has to do what it can to create and maintain good conditions for profit-making — and to avoid doing anything that might run counter to this.

Starmer understands that this is the logic of capitalism and, in office, is openly striving to apply it. It inevitably means putting profit-making first. Governments have to do this on pain of making things worse. Any party in office has to be the ‘party of business’ that the Labour Party said it was even before it was voted in.

Starmer’s understanding contrasts with the illusions of his left critics inside and increasingly outside the Labour Party. Here, for instance, is what Counterfire (an SWP breakaway) claimed in its January issue:

‘A genuine radical left government could make real changes now, by taking measures that both the centrist establishment and the hard right reject, such as taxing the super-rich, controlling rents and energy prices, and investing in infrastructure. The left can win the argument that society can, and should, do better’.

Of course society can do better, but not as capitalist society. The reference to the continued existence of the super-rich and rents and prices show that Counterfire is assuming that capitalism continues. So, it is in effect arguing that a government can make capitalist society better for workers. The left certainly has not won that argument. Left governments that have tried to do this — to put meeting people’s needs before maintaining the best environment for profit-making — have failed. In fact, they have tended to make things worse, and then be voted out of office.

Taxing just the ‘super-rich’ but not the profits of capitalist corporations, as essentially a tax on the consumption of the capitalist class, need not worsen the environment for profit-making. But if ‘taxing the rich’ extends beyond this to higher taxes on profits, the source of business investment that drives the economy, then the prospect of an economic downturn emerges. This is the point at which most left governments perform a U-turn. Otherwise they crash the economy.

Controlling the price of energy to consumers would bring some respite but, since governments don’t and can’t control the world price of energy, this could only be maintained through subsidies that would have to be paid for by increasing taxes. Whatever the government invests in infrastructure would have to come from taxation too, to repay any money borrowed and the interest on it. The higher taxes on, or passed onto, businesses would worsen the environment for profit-making.

Rent control might not crash the economy but it would create other problems. Businesses and individuals investing in letting houses and flats would invest less and spend less on maintaining their properties, with the longer-term consequence of fewer places to rent and deteriorating accommodation.

The lesson is clear. If you want better, better get rid of capitalism and not try to make it work in a way that it can’t.

Labour landslides: then and now (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was to no one’s surprise that a Labour government was elected in 2024. The Tory administration was falling apart, the opinion polls were deafening, and Labour presented itself as ready to take over. On the other hand, it was to everyone’s surprise that a Labour government was elected in 1945. Britain was one of the allied powers that had defeated Hitler with its highly popular Conservative prime minister ready to continue in office, there were no opinion polls to take into account, and the only experience the Labour Party had previously had of power was brief and bitter. And yet, in the July 1945 election, what happened would nowadays be called a landslide – for Labour. Can what happened to Labour then and in the years that followed be compared to what is happening to it now and may happen in the future?

Welfare state

It is often said that Labour’s triumph in 1945 shocked its leader, Clement Attlee, who claimed that he had seen reducing the Conservative majority as his best hope. But rather than depending on the views or hopes of political leaders, election results, as has often been demonstrated, hinge more on what has been called ‘a readiness for change’ among the electorate. And this is the likely explanation here. The report drawn up by the Liberal Party’s Sir William Beveridge in 1942 proposed what it called ‘social insurance’ for the British population, a plan for the state to provide social security (eg, sickness and unemployment pay, old-age pensions, free healthcare) for everyone. This was followed in 1944 by a government committee recommending the nationalisation of services such as gas and electricity.

The Labour Party was enthusiastic about the programme, calling it a new ‘welfare state’, while the Conservatives were lukewarm. And this may well have been the main driver of the electorate’s preference for Labour. The way George Orwell put it, in an article published in late 1945, was that Labour had seized an opportunity it did not create. At the same time Orwell expressed doubt that Labour would end up delivering on all of its manifesto, which proclaimed:

‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain—free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organized in the service of the British people.’

What then happened when Labour came to power is a matter of historical record. Coal, gas, electricity, iron and steel, railways, civil aviation, telecommunications and the Bank of England were nationalised with full compensation to their previous owners.

General state benefits for the unemployed, sick and aged were brought in. A National Health Service was established supplying health care free of charge with staff at hospitals becoming government employees. There is no doubt that these represented significantly beneficial change for the vast majority of British workers.

However, even though the Labour Party had proclaimed itself to be ‘a Socialist Party’, this was certainly not socialism in the sense we understand it as a society of free access to all goods and services. In fact Labour now in office made no attempt to challenge the existing social order of capitalism, whereby the vast majority of the wealth was owned by a tiny minority and production and distribution of the means of life took place on the basis of profit rather than need. What it sought to do in fact was to make that order more secure by suggesting to workers that, via nationalisation, they had more of a stake in it and that, with ‘social security’, protest and challenge to the existing system were unnecessary since, whatever their circumstances, they could rely on being looked after ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

Downhill

In reality the unspoken rationale of Labour’s ‘welfare state’ was to try to make production more efficient and more cost effective by the state having more control over it and to remove unnecessary hindrances to workers’ productivity by trying to create a more benign form of capitalism. Yet none of this could prevent the usual crises that beset the market system from presenting themselves. After an initial ‘honeymoon’ period, prices began to rise causing workers to press for wage increases and to industrial unrest. Labour’s response was a policy of ‘wage restraint’, which brought it into collision with striking workers, leading, for example, to the use of troops to replace dockers for unloading ships.

Later things went further downhill when there was a financial crisis and a run on the pound led to devaluation and further price rises. And, with the ‘free’ health service becoming unpredictably expensive, plans were made for charges to be brought in for prescriptions as well as for NHS dentures and spectacles. As it all unravelled, it became increasingly clear, if it had not been already, that no Party committed to running the buying and selling system of capitalism in any form could adjust it to work in the interests of the majority class in society, those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to survive. Yet this was evidently not clear enough to most members of that majority class – the working class – when in 1951, if with no great enthusiasm, they voted capitalism’s other team, the Tories, back into office. Never more than on that occasion did the words of the old socialist dictum ring true: ‘Governments are not elected, they are dismissed’.

Landslide to where?

That’s something that can also be said of the outcome of this year’s election. No one would claim that that there was any great love among the electorate for Keir Starmer and his Labour Party, yet this time too, as in 1945, Labour gained a landslide victory over the outgoing Tories. What this showed is that, as ever in capitalism, governments – in this case the Tories – do not control the system they are meant to manage. The system, or to be more specific, the market, which is its beating heart, has a mind of its own, an unpredictable one, and all governments can do is tinker at its edges and hope that somehow such tinkering will keep the pieces in place. If they try anything too drastic, it is very likely to make the situation worse, as Prime Minister Truss found to her – and her party’s – cost just a short time ago.

So how is Starmer who, like his Labour counterparts did in 1945, has called himself a socialist, planning to tinker? His election manifesto, ‘Our Plan to Change Britain’, held out such promises as ‘a rebuilding of our country, so that it once again serves the interests of working people’, ‘to drag my Party away from the dead end of gesture politics and return it once more to the service of working people’, and ‘to kickstart economic growth by reforming Britain’s economy’. It’s obviously quite unclear what all this means – if anything. But in stating that ‘the economy is about things like money, businesses and buying and selling things’, it is clear what kind of society he’s wedded to.

And what does another of his promises, to ‘focus on long-term strategy, not short-term distractions’, mean? How, in fact, in the hurly-burly of capitalist politics, can any party focus on much more than ‘short-term distractions’? After just a few weeks in power, in fact, Labour are already finding themselves having to face a whole cluster of ‘short-term distractions’ – race riots and a dearth of places for offenders in prisons already full to bursting, a potential ‘run on the pound’ leading them to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners who may already struggle to put the heating on, and cash-strapped universities on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re blaming the previous Tory administration for leaving ‘a black hole in the economy’, and they’re saying, despite all the fine rhetoric in their manifesto, that ‘things will get worse before they get better’ and that we must ’accept short-term pain for long-term good’. They are clearly not about to have the same ‘honeymoon’ period’ as their counterparts in the 1940s.

Alternative team

So how do the two Labour governments – the 1945 one and the 2024 one – compare? The earlier one came to office in the shadow of the 1930s’ economic depression and then six years of war, and so virtually any steps it took were perceived as representing more stability and security than Britain’s workers previously had. But after 3-4 years of what has been called ‘rebuilding space’, the reality of capitalism’s priorities set in and led to it losing the favour of the electorate and being dismissed from office in 1951. The current Labour government, as we have seen, seems to be running into trouble more quickly than its post-war predecessor, again under the pressures of needing to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. Yet it would be premature to predict that it will be less or more long-lived than the 1945 government, since we cannot foresee the precise effects that the twists and turns of the market system will have on the alternative team for managing British capitalism that is currently in office.

Howard Moss

What is socialism? (2024)

From the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of the election campaign Starmer was reported as saying that he considered himself a socialist. According to Chris Mason, the BBC’s Political Editor, ‘Starmer told me today he sees himself as a socialist. For those scared of that label, he said he saw it as putting “the country at the service of working people”’ (27 May 18.04).

Few can have believed that Starmer is in any sense a socialist, but it at least provoked the media into talking about ‘socialism’. In an ‘explainer’ article, the Guardian (28 May) even asked ‘What is Socialism?’ Their answer reflected dictionary definitions, which describe how a word is used rather than how it should be:

‘Like many political philosophies it means different things to different people. But broadly socialists believe all human beings are of equal worth and that society should be organised to reflect that. Fairness, equality, justice and the common good are the foundations of socialism. The wealth created by humans should be used to benefit everyone. Some socialists believe that key industries and sectors, such as utilities, transport and housing, should be owned by the state and run in the public interest rather than for private profit. Other socialists believe that all industries and sectors should be run this way’.

We have inherited a definition of socialism which we consider to be both logically and historically correct — a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living by and in the interest of the whole community. But we can go along with some of the things the Guardian says. For instance, that ‘all human beings are of equal worth and that society should be organised to reflect that’ and ‘that wealth created by humans should be used to benefit everyone’.

On the other hand, describing the foundation of socialism as fairness, equality, justice and the common good doesn’t tell us anything as different people have different opinions as to what is fair, just or in the common interest. Supporters of capitalism could — and in fact do — claim this for capitalism.

The question is: on what basis would society have to be organised to ensure everybody is of equal worth and wealth used to benefit everyone? In our view it could only be on the basis of the means of living (land, industry, transport, communications, etc) being the common property of the whole community. In other words, belonging to everybody but this is the same as belonging to nobody. A socialist society is one where no individual or group of individuals has ownership or controlling rights, in law or in fact, over the resources to produce what society needs to survive as this puts them in a privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of society.

A classless society means that everybody stands in the same relationship to the means of living as everybody else, each having the same opportunity to have a say in how society is run, through democratic procedures of one kind or another. Without the means of living being commonly owned and democratically controlled, the wealth that humans create cannot be used to benefit everyone. Only once freed from the constraints of sectional ownership and the economic forces set in motion when there is production for the market, can society be in a position to do this.

The Guardian (and dictionaries) attempt to grasp the idea of common ownership, which is indeed the basis of socialism, by equating this with ‘public/government ownership’ defined as ownership by the state. But the state is not the same as the community. The state is an institution standing above society controlled by and for a section only of the members of society. Under capitalism it is controlled by that section that owns and controls the means of living. The ‘public interest’ is their interest and ‘public ownership’ is ownership by them as a class. What government ownership amounts to is state capitalism.

Ever since our foundation in 1904 we have consistently argued that government ownership is not socialism. See, for instance, ‘Nationalisation not Socialism’, March 1908 and ‘Evolution and State Capitalism’, April 1910.

That state capitalism is the same as socialism is the most common misunderstanding as to what socialism means. It can even be described as the illusion of the epoch. It is only on the basis of this mistake that the Labour Party (at one time, a long time ago) and Russia when it was the USSR could be described as socialist.

What Starmer thought socialism is was not clear, but he did mention to Chris Mason that it meant ‘the country in the service of working people’. That’s not socialism either. In fact it’s how the Conservatives might describe conservatism and the Lib Dems liberalism. But at least it is something that a Starmer Labour government can be judged by.

The trouble for him is that a country with a capitalist economy simply cannot be made to serve the interest of ‘working people’, or the social class made up of people who, through being excluded from ownership and control of the means of living, are forced by economic necessity to sell their working skills to some employer. A society based on minority ownership and production for profit can never be made to work in their interest as making profits for capitalist enterprises ahead of satisfying people’s needs is built into it. Hence the problems that the working class face. As these arise from capitalism, they cannot be solved without getting rid of capitalism.

We confidently predict, therefore, that Starmer will fail in his endeavour to make capitalism serve the working class. Socialism, properly understood as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living, is the only framework in which people can be social equals and production re-oriented to serve people’s needs.

Adam Buick

The Party of Business (2024)

"My Red Flag is in the wash."

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago on 28 February 1974, there was a general election. The Labour Party’s election manifesto included a pledge to:

‘Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’.

During the election campaign, Denis Healey made his famous promise to squeeze (some of) the rich until the pips squeaked. It was only to be property speculators not all the rich but he did say that a future Labour government would increase income tax on those with the highest incomes.

Labour won that election and a second one in October the same year.

Alongside nationalisation, the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the working class was the Labour Party’s claimed path to a more equal society. That was how reformism was going to gradually bring about ‘socialism’.

The Labour Party was originally set up as the parliamentary wing of the trade union movement. Hence its name. It was supposed to be the party of labour, the party that was to press for legislation to improve the conditions of workers. In 1918 it did adopt a constitution which proclaimed full-scale nationalisation, which it called socialism (but was actually state capitalism) as its long-term aim, but in practice it sought working- class support on the basis of promising to improve things for workers within the capitalist system.

When in office the Labour Party has always had to govern in the interest of business. That capitalism is an economic system that runs on profits made by businesses is an economic reality which all governments have to recognise on pain of causing an economic slowdown or even downturn. Whatever they might have promised so as to get elected or might have wanted, all Labour governments ended up recognising this and accepting the need for profits to be allowed to be made. Labour MP Harold (later Lord) Lever put it very clearly shortly after Labour won the 1966 General Election in terms as relevant today as they were then:

‘Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of a profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership knows as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel. So, though profits may be squeezed temporarily by taxation and Government price policy, they must and will, over a longer period, increase significantly even if not proportionately to increased production’ (Observer, 3 April 1966).

Labour openly embraces capitalism

In 1995 Tony Blair got the party, in opposition since 1979, to drop Clause 4 of its constitution with its socialist-sounding wording. In 1998, Peter Mandelson, a cabinet minister in the Labour government that had come into office the previous year, famously stated the government was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes’.

This was the ‘New Labour’ that replaced Old Reformist Labour. Starmer is in the same tradition, only he has gone further by declaring Labour to be ‘the Party of Business’. Not only that, he accepts that this involves pursuing, when in office, a policy of ‘fiscal conservatism’ (tinyurl.com/58xynpda):

‘It was “a big mistake” for the left to equate spending money with radicalism as he insisted that fiscal discipline was fundamental to winning power’ (Times, 19 July).

He told last year’s Labour Conference that a Labour government would not be ‘a cheque-book state’ and in a speech last December declared that ‘anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps is going to be disappointed’ (tinyurl.com/bddbhuxu ).

Starmer and his would-be Chancellor Rachel Reeves began 2024, the year they both hope to move into Downing Street, by stepping up their appeal to business leaders. Reeves went to Davos to meet the world’s political and business elite at their annual jamboree in Switzerland. She said she was going there to try to convince them that Labour not the Tories ‘are now the pro-business party’ (Times, 18 January).

A couple of weeks later the Labour Party organised its own meeting for business leaders, sponsored by HSBC. The headlines in the business press reporting what went on tell it all:

‘Labour Is The Party Of Business,’ UK’s Starmer Tells Corporate Bigwigs (Barrons, the American business weekly).

Labour is now ‘pro-business’, vows Rachel Reeves (Financial Times).

Reeves unambiguously committed the Labour Party to supporting capitalism:

‘This Labour Party sees profit not as something to be disdained but as a mark of business succeeding’.

‘Be in no doubt, we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party’ (tinyurl.com/bdubeuak).

So, what has the New Business Party been offering Business?

‘We will cap the headline rate of corporation tax at its current rate of 25 per cent for the next parliament.’

‘The shadow chancellor has told the BBC Labour would not reinstate a bankers’ bonus cap that was scrapped last year by the Conservative government’ (tinyurl.com/dsymw2zn).

‘Labour rules out wealth tax if party wins next election. Ms Reeves confirmed Labour would not target expensive houses, increase capital gains tax or put up the top rate of income tax’ (tinyurl.com/eyftrjdu).

‘Party amends plan to bolster protections for gig economy as it boasts of ‘pro-business’ credentials’ (tinyurl.com/ypxfaz48).

In her speech to the business leaders, Reeves declared that, whatever happens, ‘I will not waiver from iron-clad fiscal rules’. Labour is banking on being able to conjure up growth, but what if this doesn’t happen, as it might well not as governments don’t have the power to bring about growth?

No or slow growth would mean less tax revenue. Under its ‘iron-clad’ rules and given its promise not to increase corporation or other taxes on business, the Labour government would have to cut back on its spending and impose austerity, putting the defence of profits and profit-making first, before social spending and before public sector wages. It would, as Reeves put it, ‘govern as a pro-business party’. All governments always end up having to do this anyway but never has a party announced so clearly in advance that this is what they will do.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Entrepreneurialism (2024)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph (2 December) appealing for Tories to vote Labour, subtitled ‘My party extends the hand of friendship to those who voted for the Tories but feel let down by their failure to act’, Sir Keir Starmer praised Thatcher for having ‘set loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. Entrepreneurialism, what’s that?

One dictionary defines it as ‘the ability to start new businesses, especially when this involves seeing new opportunities to make money’. This is not what most people remember the Thatcher government of the 1980s for. Selling off nationalised industries and council houses, cutting social benefits, mass unemployment and hammering the miners come more readily to mind.

Thatcher is on record as declaring:

‘I set out to destroy socialism because I felt it was at odds with the character of the people. We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism, then roll forward the frontiers of freedom’ (tinyurl.com/mus4fr9v).

By ‘socialism’ she meant of course the sort of restrictions on the workings of private capitalist enterprises that the Labour Party used to preach. Private capitalist enterprises supported her because they wanted more ‘freedom’ to choose how to make profits. In writing of ‘our natural’ entrepreneurialism Starmer even agrees with her ridiculous claim that this accords with ‘the character of the people’.

Entrepreneurs are people who invest money in producing something or providing some service with a view to making more money in the form of profit. This is not necessarily their own money but is frequently money borrowed from a bank or some venture capitalists or even the state who reckon that the entrepreneur has identified a potential way to make more money in which they can share.

In chapter 23 of Volume 3 of Capital on ‘Interest and Profit Enterprise’, Marx discusses how this extra money is divided between the lender of capital and the entrepreneur who actually uses it:

‘The functioning capitalist is here assumed as a non-owner of capital. Ownership of the capital is represented in relation to him by the money-capitalist, the lender. The interest he pays to the latter thus appears as that portion of gross profit which is due to the ownership of capital as such. As distinct from this, that portion of profit which falls to the active capitalist appears now as profit of enterprise, deriving solely from the operations, or functions, which he performs with the capital in the process of reproduction, hence particularly those functions which he performs as entrepreneur in industry or commerce. (…) [P]rofit of enterprise appears to him as the exclusive fruit of the functions which he performs with the capital, as the fruit of the movement and performance of capital, of a performance which appears to him as his own activity.’

Entrepreneurs, especially those who succeed in making lots of profit, have a high opinion of themselves. They see themselves as ‘wealth creators’. They are certainly more involved in this than the mere owner of capital but only because they identify some new way of making money by organising workers to produce wealth.

Entrepreneurs are obviously more useful from a general capitalist point of view than mere coupon-clippers living off dividends or interest as they are an active section of the capitalist class identifying new ways of making profits, the driving force of capitalism. Which is why governments, as the guardians of the overall general capitalist interest in a particular country, seek to encourage them. It is part of their remit. Thatcher recognised this. So does Starmer. Labour is now more than ever an avowedly capitalist party and is openly saying it will govern as such.

‘Take me to your leader’ (2023)

From the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

These five words became the supposed, and somewhat clichéd, request made by any alien stepping from their flying saucer. This brief statement makes a huge supposition; that a society so much more advanced than ours that it can traverse light-years of space still has leaders.

Not so different to humanity at present then. The implication is that leaders will always be a necessary feature of any society. So, no possibility of socialism anywhere in the cosmos, never mind on Earth.

Fiction is often either reflective of what is, or speculative of what might be. Whilst science fiction has an honourable tradition of posing questions as to possible things to come, in this case, the alien(s) represent the world landed in, not some distant galaxy far, far away.

The role of leader in human society has taken a variety of forms, the monarchs of feudal times eventually giving way to presidential heads of state as capitalism developed. Even if, as in Britain, when there is nominally still a crowned head, the king or queen fulfils the role of president. The only difference is the method of selection, by ballot or birth.

It is not only states that have leaders of course. Industries have CEOs, with boards of directors and their chairmen/women.

The Socialist Party is an unusual political organisation in that it does not have leaders. Parties of the openly capitalist sort, usually locating themselves on the right wing, very much favour strong leadership. Those that would identify themselves as left, even those claiming to be socialist, also have prominent roles for leaders.

An ever-present problem for all leaders is that while they occupy the top spot, there are members of their own parties continually plotting their downfall to further personal ambitions. Even those who have no realistic chance of ever achieving exalted prominence will eagerly conspire against their leader if they feel their immediate interests are served. Never allow principles to intrude on personal advantage.

The recent example of Jeremy Corbyn’s brief flirtation with high office is such a case. As Labour Party leader and, therefore, potential future prime minister, he did not exhibit unequivocal loyalty to the British state or its allies.

A toxic mix of media vitriol and Israeli self-interest was unleashed with the added force of his own MPs, fearing for their seats, becoming willing accomplices in his political assassination. The anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism campaign proved, despite its absurdity in the main, a potent force.

However, as is usually the way with a poisoned chalice, it remains toxic for whoever next sups from it. Keir Starmer, proving his overwhelming loyalty to his own ambition, used the anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism weapon to quell and remove any lingering Corbynites, even expelling the man himself from the party he’d led.

However, what Starmer didn’t foresee was the 7 October Hamas atrocities in Israel followed by the savagery of the Israeli response. As the number of dead in Gaza rose beyond 10,000 Starmer found himself politically hobbled by the very weapon that brought him the leadership.

Unable to denounce Israeli military actions or even call for a ceasefire without giving rise to accusations of, by his own use of the term, anti-semitism, his leadership was undermined. Labour politicians at local and parliamentary levels must either resign and undermine him, or deny their own consciences.

Leadership implies control and elevated insight when situations arise. The Boris Johnson Tory administration very quickly began to unravel when his government, based on charismatic populism but with little substance even in terms of its own politics, was confronted by the public health crisis of Covid.

The present inquiry into the handling of that epidemic has revealed self-interested factions vying for influence, but with nothing other than invective to say to each other. At the pinnacle of this maladministration teetered the former Prime Minister who less than a year previously had been lauded for his leadership in turning the ‘red wall’ blue. An appropriate colour considering the language of choice, or the choice language, of his ‘team’.

It has been said that anyone wanting to become a leader must possess a personality that should debar them from becoming one. It is a role for a human demiurge to create a political world in his or her own image for which the required infallibility is always lacking.

Even a cursory scan of history in the capitalist era demonstrates how misguided it is to place human hopes and aspirations in the hands of leaders no matter what qualities they claim to have to navigate ‘their’ people to a better future.

The Russian revolution, whatever the claims of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, did not, and could not, lead to human emancipation and socialism. A Führer only leads to barbarity via the rhetoric of lebensraum and a Third Reich. The ‘Great Helmsman’ steered his state vessel onto the rocks of the Cultural Revolution.

Following a leader amounts to an abnegation of responsibility. It is people wanting an individual to deliver a better way of living for them. There is a better way for humanity to live, but it will never come about at the behest of some enlightened leader.

That better way – beyond capitalism and its attendant problems of exploitation, poverty, nationalism and war – is socialism. A moneyless worldwide commonwealth to which people will contribute in the very best way they can and have their needs met. A truly democratic society without need of, or any role for, leaders.

Should a flying saucer or otherwise unimagined vehicle traverse the cosmos and land on Earth, when the being steps from the craft a universal translator may allow a question to be clearly posed: ‘You want to take me to your leader? Why are you still inhibiting human progress with leaders?’

Dave Alton

Cooking the Books: No magic wand (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

At last month’s Labour Party Conference Starmer’s rhetoric went so far as to promise that a future Labour government would be ‘totally focussed on the interests of working people’. A Labour government, he said, would remove what ‘the age of insecurity [had] loaded onto the backs of working people’ but that it was going to take ten years to do this as ‘there’s no magic wand here’.

How would Labour do this? Certainly not by any direct payments to ‘working people’ as he also said that under Labour there would not be ‘a cheque-book state’ and that ‘fiscal responsibility is non-negotiable’.

So how? By increasing investment: ‘We’ll set up a National Wealth Fund. Work hand in glove with the private sector to rebuild this country’. The day before, the would-be next Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, declared:

‘Labour will aim to restore investment as a share of GDP to the level it was under the last Labour government, to bring us in line with our peers. Adding an additional £50 billion to our GDP every single year. Worth £1,700 for every household in Britain’.

So we are all going to get an extra £1,700 a year over the next years, are we? Not exactly. This is just a statistic calculated by dividing £50 billion by the number of households in the UK (28.2 million in 2002). It doesn’t mean that each household would receive that amount of cash. In any event, since it would be investment it would by definition be spent on buying producer goods and so not available to improve individual consumption. As someone once said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

It is not clear either where the figure of £50 billion comes from. It seems to be the money the government will borrow to put into the National Wealth Fund plus the amount that it is anticipated private capitalist enterprises will invest in its projects.

Reeves talked about ‘catalytic investment’ by which she meant government investment designed to attract additional private investment for some project. ‘For every pound of investment we put in,’ she said, ‘we will leverage in three times as much private investment’. In other words, a project would not go ahead unless, for every £1 the government puts up, the private sector puts up a further £3. But there is no guarantee that this will always happen. Whether or not it does will depend on how capitalist enterprises judge the prospect of making a profit at the going rate or more from doing so. If they won’t get a sufficiently high return they won’t put up the money.

A future Labour government is going to be completely dependent on the investment plans of profit-seeking private capital. Starmer said as much when he stated that Labour understood that ‘private enterprise is the only way this country pays its way in the world’. This contradicts his earlier rhetoric about a future Labour government being ‘totally focussed on the interests of working people’. It means that it would have to be ‘totally focussed’ on those of private capital.

True, growth (as measured by an increase in GDP) is driven by investment but private enterprises only invest if there’s a prospect of making profits, and the government – without raising taxes – can only invest money that it borrows. So the growth that Labour (and the Tories and the LibDems) are promising depends on the prospects for private profit-making. Such prospects, however, are not something any government can control; they depend on which stage of the business cycle the capitalist economy is going through.

Labour will find that there is no magic wand either to conjure up business investment.

The royal ceiling (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Labour Party is currently promising to ‘smash the class ceiling’ (although, with the way things are going, they may have quietly dropped this slogan by the time this article sees press). This is part of their ‘5 missions’: ‘These missions will only be achieved through relentless focus. They require government departments working together. Business working with unions. The private sector working with the public sector. And a common partnership between national and local government’ (tinyurl.com/y7z84czd). So they are committed to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity for every child, at every stage and shatter the class ceiling’.

The strange thing, though, is that they continue to support the existence of the monarchy. After all, if a kid from Bradford dreams of one day being head of state, there is absolutely no opportunity for them to do so precisely because of the sort of ‘entrenched class system with low socio-economic mobility and opportunities to develop skills available to just some’ that they are objecting to.

With the identities of the UK head of state being known for the next, possibly, hundred years, with a whole host of jobs and roles at their discretion to appoint, you’d think that it would definitely be in line for smashing as part of the class ceiling. Starmer himself has been confronted by historic comments about supporting the abolition of the monarchy, but the current Labour Party strategy is to continue to support the crown as part of winning over the Red Wall seats, where support for the monarchy is presumed to be strong.

The process of crowning a new king demonstrated in part how that majority of support is aggressively built: wall-to-wall propaganda for the monarchy filled the airways, backed up by physical force of the police. The campaign group Republic found that out as they got arrested for trying to organise a protest against the coronation (later found to be baseless arrests: even though the organisers had been working with the police to arrange their protest, they were still picked up).

The police have form on this, they had previously lawlessly arrested a group called Movement against the Monarchy (made up of avowed anarchists) to stop them potentially disrupting the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II (they were compensated for unlawful arrest, but the police clearly felt it was worth the cost to protect the image of the Jubilee celebration).

But the Republic protest group is a nice liberal campaign group, so its members were probably surprised to find themselves on the receiving end of state repression. If their republicanism is about making the idea of a liberal democracy real, the reality of Labour’s smashing the class ceiling is to make inequality real. The content of their detailed document on their mission makes clear that ‘Smash the class ceiling’ is just ‘education, education, education’ striking back undead from the tomb we all hoped it was imprisoned in forever. Skills and training to give people opportunity: Starmer wants to leave the social edifice intact, complete with inequality, but simply give the impression of a fair chance at the starting gate.

Just as with the obsession that economic growth can deliver fairness without having to make any difficult choices about changing social structures, so the idea is that handing out better education will give people better chances of higher paying jobs (but someone will still have to do the unskilled manual and clerical work, and as we saw during the last Labour government, their share of the national wealth stayed static even as the economy grew).

We, of course, don’t want to smash the class ceiling, we want to dismantle the class tower, to sweep away aristocratic and plutocratic privilege and live in a society where everyone is comfortable and has an equal say in how their community should be organised. We stand against Kings and Presidents alike.

Pik Smeet

Editorial: Neither Starmer nor Old Labour (2023)

Editorial from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Keir Starmer had said in an interview with the BBC on 16 July that he didn’t object to being called a ‘fiscal conservative’ (presumably with a small ‘c’), Mick Lynch of the RMT commented on Sky News that ‘at the minute many people can’t spot the difference’ between Labour and the Conservatives’, but spoilt it by adding ‘and that’s a shame for somebody who’s probably as talented as Keir Starmer is’ and calling on him to ‘show that he’s on the side of working people.’ That would be difficult because he’s not on our side.

Lynch went on:

‘He should be saying something about workers’ rights. He should say stuff about the NHS, looking after people who are struggling in the housing market, council houses for the masses, controlling rents, addressing all sorts of stuff about what’s going to happen in the imbalance in our society. He’s not saying any of that. He won’t dare mention the word socialism’ (tinyurl.com/463ranbn).

Who does he think Starmer is? Jeremy Corbyn, the man Starmer stabbed in the back? Lynch is nostalgic for the Labour Party of yore – workers’ rights, council houses, rent control – but it’s a couple of generations since Labour advocated that sort of thing. That workers should want better conditions is normal but this was never going to come through the Labour Party; a little through trade unions perhaps but dependent on labour market conditions. The ‘imbalance’ between those who own and those who work is built into ‘our society’ and nothing can be done to reduce it. The whole basis of society needs to be changed from class to common ownership before production can be geared to meeting people’s needs properly.

The present ‘labour unrest’ is a reaction to rapidly rising prices putting pressure on workers’ living standards and so is essentially defensive, running fast to try to stand still. If it leads to a revival of a bit of class consciousness in some workers that can’t be bad, but defensive, trade union consciousness is not enough. What is required is the socialist consciousness that there is no solution under capitalism but only through socialism.

Lynch chides Starmer for not daring to mention the word socialism. It’s a good thing he doesn’t. We don’t want Labour leaders claiming to be socialist. The Labour Party doesn’t stand for socialism — everyone can see that now — but never did. It’s just another capitalist party and always has been, even in the pre-Blair days when it had a paper commitment to full-scale state capitalism (nationalisation). Which is probably Lynch’s idea of what socialism is.

The alternative to Starmer is not to go back to Old Labour and its reforms that didn’t work but forward to socialism where productive resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled so that they can be used to turn out what people want and need, instead of as now (and under Labour governments) to make profits for the few.

Starmer versus the logic of the market (2023)

From the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir Keir Starmer has announced that the Labour Party (looking increasingly likely to form the next government) will set a target rate of 70 percent of all UK households being in owner- occupied homes. This sounds ambitious, but the current rate of 68 percent means that in fact only half a million new owner occupiers would be needed to meet this target.

What it does though, is send a signal about the priorities of Sir Keir and his party, that they will be on the side of property owners. It is as much an ideological expression as it is a practical policy. As Sir Keir said in a tweet: ‘Owning your home is not just about having a place to live, it’s about having pride and security’. Presumably renters cannot have pride and security.

This is balanced by the claim that ‘Labour will introduce a Renters’ Charter to give new rights and protections for renters. We will build more high-quality, affordable homes and restore the dream of home ownership’. Quite why having a place to live should be a dream is a strange thing: it’s only a ‘dream’ because it is so unobtainable at present.

As the Office for National Statistics notes: ‘Over the last 25 years, housing affordability has worsened in every [Local Authority area], especially in London or surrounding areas’ and ‘In 1997, 89% of LAs had an affordability ratio of less than five times workers’ earnings, whereas only 7% had this level of affordability in 2022’ (tinyurl.com/bdfbmmjw).

Part of the problem is that whilst everyone could be housed by simply building more houses, the financial model of home ownership requires constantly rising house prices. To make buying worthwhile, prices need to rise by more than inflation and interest rates, else effectively, the owner is just renting from the bank (alongside shouldering all the liabilities for maintenance and structure). For many people, their house is a financial instrument for when they plan to downsize and retire on part of the difference between house prices (or rent the house out, as a form of pension income).

So, Labour’s plans to increase home ownership cannot come at the price of threatening the asset value of those who already own a home, much less those who make their income from letting out houses (which includes a great number of MPs of both parties).

Further to that, any widespread house-building programme will almost inevitably be met with fierce opposition from local home owners who will see a threat to their amenities (as well as the value of their properties from the increase of supply). Even in such cities as Bristol, where the house prices are overheated and there is massive demand for new housing, every option to build new is met with a storm of protest from NIMBYs.

Land monopolists

Even then, widening the pool of home owners doesn’t change the effect of private property in land on the general economy. As Marx notes in Volume 3 of Capital:

‘Wherever natural forces can be monopolised and guarantee a surplus-profit to the industrial capitalist using them, be it waterfalls, rich mines, waters teeming with fish, or a favourably located building site, there the person who by virtue of title to a portion of the globe has become the proprietor of these natural objects will wrest this surplus-profit from functioning capital in the form of rent’ (Chapter 46, tinyurl.com/4fnpkk4j).

The value of houses derives, in large part, from the general growth of the economy, and the expansion of demand of land:

‘One part of society thus exacts tribute from another for the permission to inhabit the earth, as landed property in general assigns the landlord the privilege of exploiting the terrestrial body, the bowels of the earth, the air, and thereby the maintenance and development of life. Not only the population increase and with it the growing demand for shelter, but also the development of fixed capital, which is either incorporated in land, or takes root in it and is based upon it, such as all industrial buildings, railways, warehouses, factory buildings, docks, etc., necessarily increase the building rent.’

Merely by holding onto land in the form of property draws a share of the surplus value generated (either through rent on homes or through windfall sales, both of which feed into raising the cost of wages to the industrial capitalist, without increasing the mass of use values the workers can purchase).

‘The mere legal ownership of land does not create any ground-rent for the owner. But it does, indeed, give him the power to withdraw his land from exploitation until economic conditions permit him to utilise it in such a manner as to yield him a surplus, be it used for actual agricultural or other production purposes, such as buildings, etc’ (Chapter 45, tinyurl.com/5b8jsz96 ).

This means that any attempt to regulate landowners could be met with stock being withdrawn from the market to protect their margins: it is the right of ownership that gives them the ability to extract tribute, nothing inherent in the land or the house itself. It’s worth noting that in 2021/22 the UK government paid tribute of £30 billion, about 2.5 percent of government expenditure (tinyurl.com/6wj5hh9h). This was in part reduced by the government pressuring social landlords to hold their rent down, which might explain why Sir Keir’s plans do include an element of expanding social housing as well.

His plans, though, also run up against another part of the logic of a market society. As empirical research by Warwick University showed, back in the 90s, ‘every additional 10 percentage points on home ownership puts 2 percentage points on the unemployment rate’ (tinyurl.com/yc76fj8m). Reducing the mobility of labour seems to cause more rigidity in labour markets.

Sir Keir may think he has come up with a low-cost way to win over natural Tory voters, but it is not without risks. The problems do not stem from any technical difficulty in providing suitable housing for all households, but from the nature of property.

Pik Smeet

Editorial: All fiscal conservatives now (2023)

Editorial from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Starmer says he doesn’t object to being called a ‘fiscal conservative’ (BBC interview, 16 July).

The Labour Party used to seek support on the basis of providing social reforms that would benefit workers. That in fact was said to be their reason for existence and why trade unions supported them. Not any more. Starmer could not have been more specific when two days later he declared that ‘it was “a big mistake” for the left to equate spending money with radicalism’ (Times, 19 July).

Quite apart from the fact that this is a betrayal of the views he feigned to hold when seeking election as Corbyn’s successor, the economic policy he now espouses is basically the same as Truss’s — which both described in the same terms as ‘Growth, Growth, Growth’. In other words, to try to force the capitalist economy to expand more. Since governments produce no wealth of their own, the only ways they can get money to fund their activities are taxes or borrowing.

The Truss government tried to encourage growth by cutting taxation on capitalist enterprises while leaving government spending more or less unchanged; which meant the shortfall would have to be paid for by increased borrowing. The international speculators who lend money to governments were not prepared to play ball and a financial crisis ensued which led to the fall of the government.

Starmer and the Labour leadership realise they have to avoid this. As Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, put it:

‘We saw what happened with Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget. They ended up promising huge tax cuts for the rich. None of it was funded and they ended up crashing the economy’ (Times, 18 July).

So as not to spook the international speculators they are not even prepared to offer minor reforms for the workers such as lifting the ban on parents on Universal Credit claiming benefits for more than two children. No, they are assuring the markets that they will be ‘fiscally conservative’.

Labour’s promise to make capitalism grow is a gamble as experience has shown that governments cannot do this. The most they can do is sustain conditions that might encourage profit-making but the final decision as to whether or not to expand production — to grow — rests with individual capitalist enterprises and their estimation of whether or not doing so would be profitable. Sometimes it will be; sometimes it won’t, but no period of growth is ever permanent.

Unless it is very lucky in that world market conditions bring it about, a Labour government will not see capitalism grow as much as they are promising. When growth stalls they will have to continue to be ‘fiscal conservatives’ and cut payments to workers, including the poorest, just as all previous governments, Labour as well as Conservative, have done.

Starmer is in effect admitting that reformism has failed (as we always said it would). His conclusion is to abandon reformism and embrace capitalism and its logic. Ours is to go for socialism, the common instead of class ownership of resources and production directly to satisfy people’s needs not for profit. The choice is what it always was — capitalism or socialism?

Labour Party woes (2023)

Uxbridge by-election

From the SPGB Discussion Forum

"I can’t see how Labour can be content with the results of the 3 by-elections.

They won in that rural seat in Yorkshire but can expect to lose it at the general election when Tory abstainers return to the fold. They should have won Uxbridge in west London but didn’t. They are pleading that there was a local issue there that sunk them (extension to the area of a charge for using old cars and vans) but, besides being a bread and butter issue, this concerns all the outer London boroughs.

It is clear too that, in seeking to please the international speculators who lend governments money, they are alienating the more radical-minded of their voters sone of whom are deserting to the Greens. In fact, they lost by much less votes in Uxbridge than the Greens got. Starmer may be regretting his outburst about hating tree-huggers.

They weren’t trying in the West Country but what happened to their vote there is also relevant. An “independent socialist” picked up 635 votes compared to their candidate’s 1009. They lost winning the London by-election by less than 635. In other words, Left-of-Labour candidates in other constituencies in a general election could prevent them winning some marginal seats and might even result in a hung Parliament with the LibDems and the Scots Nats holding the balance of power.

Serve them right, some might be inclined to think. That’ll teach them to behave like a government in waiting whereas they might just be a minority government in waiting. On the other hand, that would provide them with the same alibi they used to try to get out of the failure of the 1924 and 1929 Labour governments that “we were in office, not in power”.

Actually, of course, all governments are just in office as no government has the power to overcome the economics laws of capitalism and make the system serve the interest of the majority."

Editorial: Labour, Tory, same old story (2023)

Editorial from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British regime which came to power on the back of Brexit is arguably one of the most corrupt, incompetent and invidious in recent British history. Since 2019 they, and the scam that was Brexit, have both failed abysmally to do anything except increase poverty and class division even more acutely. Brexit’s purpose was simply to remove certain limits on rapacious exploitation. Increasingly reflecting the Victorian capitalist fantasy of the Tufton Street ‘think tanks’ and of the ERG, this government has also proved repeatedly incompetent, stirring vast discontent and fury amongst much of the population.

But what is ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ doing about this electoral own-goal scored by the Tories? The Labour Party also pursues nationalist populism, lowest common denominator politics, and is seeking power purely for the sake of power, regardless of which policies they have to adopt in order to attract ignorant and bigoted voters. They have long given up on engaging with what politics was about throughout most of modern history: persuading people to change their views, winning hearts and minds, engaging in genuine public debate about real ideas on how to run society.

This degeneration of the Labour Party from Keir Hardie’s radical, grass roots, pro-worker party of 1906 to Keir Starmer’s slick band of hypocrites and liars, desperately aping the Tories to garner votes, without a vestige of vision or principle, was always an inevitable process, in which these major parties would become increasingly indistinguishable. The reason it was always highly predictable is that, at their core, they stand for the same thing, and always have done – including the Corbynite version of the Labour Party, the Lib-Dems and the Green Party too. What they all stand for is running the capitalist system of society (even if they have different hopes for how they would like to try to make it run).

What all of these parties fail to fully grasp is that the social system of capitalism, which exists throughout the world today, is unmanageable in any way other than by maximising the profits which are its life-blood. That profit is extracted from working people of all kinds, and makes its way to those who own and control the productive resources. Power and wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

It is unfashionable to talk in terms of a ‘social system’ operating hermetically throughout the world, but it is very clearly a fact. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, human society functions in broadly the same (now outdated) way. All the key productive resources are owned and controlled by a tiny minority, who allow the production of useful products and services only on their terms: that to do so would add to their already vast wealth and power, through those products being sold on the market to realise a profit, a surplus beyond the actual costs. And the British Labour Party supports the retention of this irrational, exploitative and dangerous system whole-heartedly. So when Sir Keir Starmer recently publicly stated that Labour ‘are the real conservatives’ and promised to protect ‘our way of life’ it came as no surprise.

How contemptible it is for a so-called Opposition to watch this vicious and criminal regime spout the rhetoric of racism, crush the freedom to protest, and seek to reverse centuries of progress on democracy and trade unionism, but then to ask us to give them power instead…for them to do likewise! Labour, in effect, insists it will be at least as brutal in enforcing the warped priorities of capitalism as the Conservatives have been. Starmer fails signally to speak out properly against any of the miseries caused by the capitalist social system. A plague on both their houses!