It is no secret that the current government is a weak one. Commentariat left, right and centre have made much out of the personal failings and lack of political savvy of Starmer and Morgan McSweeney. These analyses are often lacking the class basis of why this government is weak.
The electoral coalition that elected Starmer is stretched from organised labour seeking less harsh bargaining conditions to business leaders wishing for stability in industrial relations, to finance capital wishing to escape Tory unpredictability under Truss. It is true that people across the board wanted change, however there was not a coherent vision that this coalition was on board with. It was a negative coalition and an inactive one at that. It was a coalition that supported Starmer at the ballot box because he wasn’t the other guy. Instead of the optimism of Tony Blair’s things can only get better, Starmer’s vision was surely things can’t get any worse. They did.
Starmer’s first actions were to provide the promised stability. He gave fairly generous pay deals to public sector workers, staving off strikes in his first year, and he tied himself and the government to mythical fiscal rules to appease finance capital.
However, following those initial steps it became clearer and clearer that it is impossible to appease both labour and large capital in the current era. The fiscal rules have led Starmer to launch attacks on working-class people through the cuts to Personal Independence Payments and winter fuel allowance. Petit-bourgeois elements have been spooked by regressive taxes which target small business owners such as the rise in national insurance and the recent refusal to rule out increasing tax on working people, instead of cutting military spending or taxing the rich. While Labour did not gain massively in most rural areas, any hope of this is out the window with the introduction of inheritance tax on family farms, meaning that farms will be sold off from socially useful food production to the likes of BlackRock to use to sell carbon credits. Organised labour is unhappy about the dilution of the Employment Rights Bill, while capital is unhappy that it’s on the table at all. The number of strike days is increasing again, however we have not yet entered the period where public sector pay negotiations will enter the strike period. The only section that the government has consistently sought to service is finance capital, and even they are experiencing a global shift to supporting more reactionary elements of the right such as Trump and Reform due to their commitments to privatise everything and anything.
These factors have now led to the Starmer government having no base left. For all the flaws of previous Labour governments, they have all had a fairly strong base. Harold Wilson’s being largely on organised labour which was strong at that point and Tony Blair’s on the post-Thatcher aspirational working class. Compare the Blair government to this one. Blair, with the exception of George Galloway, never had to resort to expulsions even when many MPs rebelled over the Iraq War, nor over consistent rebellions from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn. That’s because Blair’s government was stronger and had a base that Starmer’s government simply does not have. These attempts to look superficially strong must be set in the context of the markets being spooked by seeing a few tears from Rachel Reeves.
This fundamental weakness means that there’s an opportunity. Never before has the Labour Party destroyed its base in this way and this represents a fundamental shift which wasn’t the case even in the darkest days of the Blair government. Everything is in flux. With the weakness of the Tory Party, it is the likes of Reform UK who are benefiting from positioning themselves as an anti-establishment party, even if a scratch below the surface shows they’re a party of investment bankers and big business. Superficial attacks on Reform won’t stop their surge. Only rebuilding the working class as a cohesive, organised body will. This is our task in the Young Communist League.
New parties of the left will end up with a fundamental weakness if they resign themselves to Twitter gotchas and downwardly mobile graduates. Only through building the movement as a whole, organising the unorganised, and turning organisation into militancy can the working class become a cohesive force, culturally and politically.
Josh Morris is a member of the YCL’s Lanarkshire Branch
