Two months into his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer delivered a much-publicised keynote speech to a select audience of ‘ordinary people’ and journalists in the gardens of his new prime ministerial residence at 10 Downing Street.
In the preamble (or should that be pre-ramble?) to this address, which was nauseatingly faithful to Tony Blair’s so-called ‘third way’ and was broadcast under the title “This is our country, let’s fix it together”, he made the bold central assertion that his government is going to “fix Britain”.
So at least we can agree on one thing: Britain is broken. Here ends our agreement. Having called out members of his audience and thanked them woodenly for their service, Starmer was at pains to assert that his administration is going to be starkly different to the “self-serving” Covid kleptocracy of Boris Johnson (does anyone remember Boris?) and Rishi Sunak.
My Labour government, he said, will “serve the people”. (Yes, he actually paraphrased Mao Zedong!) But before outlining his government’s plan to “fix” Britian, he brought his audience down to earth with a bang. Unfortunately, he said, his government will have “no choice” but to break all its election promises because of an “unexpected £22bn hole” in the public finances, bequeathed, of course, by the hated and irresponsible Tories.
With deep regret, he opined, the new government must now attack the poor to balance the books. But don’t worry: a short period of shared belt-tightening will see us through. After all, we’re all “in it together”: the rich man in his castle – the poor man at his gate!
This is classic theatre to fool the masses. All part of the bipartisan political charade enacted to distract us from what is actually going on and why. A look at the actions of the new Starmer government gives us far more insight into its true intentions and priorities, and strikingly confirms our party’s analysis both of the Labour party’s history and of its current role as an integral pillar of the dictatorship of monopoly capital.
‘Fixing’ of the ‘party of the working class’ – to ensure workers have no say
Despite the backing of the billionaire elite, despite the resurrection of Nigel Farage to split the Tory vote, and despite the Tory party’s falling on its own sword in order to further ruling-class aims of achieving a ‘smooth handover of power’, Starmer’s ‘Labour’ party secured the ‘support’ (vote) of a mere 18 percent of the UK’s voting-age population during the election in July.
Behind the headlines about a ‘Labour landslide’ stands a deeply unpopular and mistrusted government headed by a deeply unpopular and mistrusted leader.
Having secured total domination of the party (via the antisemitism witch hunt) and an ‘electoral mandate’ (with an exceptionally low electoral turnout), Starmer and the Labour establishment are about to rewrite the rules of their party to make sure its members never again come close to influencing decisions about its leadership or policies.
Clearly, the shadow of the mildly social-democratic Corbyn debacle looms large in the minds of the ruling class. The party leaders have labelled this attack on their own members the ‘Liz Truss lock’, but in honesty it should be labelled the ‘Jeremy Corbyn lock’.
‘Fixing’ to wage war, war and more war
From his first moments in office, just as when he was in opposition, Starmer reiterated his support for Nato militarism and the imperialist war drive.
The new Labour regime is thus ‘fixing’ to send billions of pounds to the armaments manufacturers, to Nato, and to the speculators and swindlers who are using Ukronazi puppets to wage war against Russia. Although this has no real support amongst the British people and will certainly do nothing to help them out of their spiral into poverty.
We know, too, that Labour is ‘fixing’ to send billions of pounds to the same arms manufacturers, the same Nato, goons, and the same speculators and swindlers who are using zionazi puppets to wage war against the people of the middle east in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.
And Starmer and co are ‘fixing’ to send even more billions to those same arms companies, that same Nato, and those same speculators and swindlers who are using islamofascist puppets to wage war on the recently freed revolutionary peoples of Africa’s Sahel region.
Ker Starmer’s Labour government is ultimately driving, by these intermediate steps, toward the terrors of a new world war with Russia and the People’s Republic of China, aiming at the same time to destroy the rising Brics nations and thus block the inexorable rise of the non-imperialist world.
This supposedly ‘Labour’ party is committed to doing anything and everything, in fact, to help Anglo-American imperialism maintain its grip on middle-eastern resources – in particular the region’s oil.
It is committed to helping the imperialists gain control of Russian and Ukrainian resources by balkanising and colonising Russia and destroying its independence – as they have already colonised and destroyed Ukraine.
It is committed to helping the imperialists retain control of African resources – gold, diamonds, coltan, oil, uranium and more – and to helping keep the continent underdeveloped, disunited and subject.
And this self-same ‘Labour’ party is, in accordance with the bidding of its City of London billionaire masters, ready to do whatever it takes to ‘stop China’: to remove its socialist government, to destroy its territorial unity, to break it apart and loot its huge natural and industrial wealth, to remove its ability to catch up with and overtake western technological dominance, and to superexploit its people.
Never mind the fact that in every case this quest is doomed to failure. Never mind the fact that this maniacal mission is pursued over the carcasses of hundreds of thousands (and, over time, of millions) of human beings. Never mind the fact that workers at home are being asked to ‘tighten their belts’ (go without fuel, food, pensions, housing, hospital treatment and education) in order that their exploiters can fund the financiers’ delirious drive for global destruction and domination.
This is what the imperialists’ global economic crisis demands, and this is what the ‘Labour’ government is determined to deliver.
We should note that there is nothing new in this servile loyalty to the financier elite. After all, this particular ‘fix’ is a direct continuation of the Tony Blair regime’s aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, of the David Cameron regime’s aggression against Libya and Syria, and of the Boris Johnson regime’s aggression against Ukraine. All of which were also carried out without the support of – indeed, against the expressed wishes of – the British people.
‘Fixing’ the economy with austerity and misery at home
Meanwhile, Labour has already begun ‘fixing’ the benefits system by retaining the two-child benefit cap it had promised to scrap, and which has been documented as forcing children into poverty and penalising society’s poorest to save a few paltry millions.
This is in keeping with the capitalists’ Malthusian narrative that poverty is the result of working-class profligacy rather than of capitalist economics.
Starmer’s regime has announced a further ‘fix’ to the benefits system in the shape of means-testing the winter fuel allowance paid to pensioners, itself a totally inadequate response to the extortionate price of fuel in Britain.
Age UK estimates this will leave at least two million elderly Britons in serious health and/or financial trouble this winter, prey to a fuel crisis that has to a great extent been created and exacerbated by Britain’s proxy war on Russia.
Starmer wants to ‘fix Britain’, in other words, by putting the boot into the poorest and most vulnerable British workers, thus ‘saving’ the superprofits of the warmongering billionaire elite.
This is the first instinct of Britain’s ‘Labour’ party and its leader, precisely because both are the faithful instruments of British imperialism. That the self-identifying fake-left in Britain still overwhelmingly insist on promoting Labour as the ‘party of the working class’ merely demonstrates their total bankruptcy.
‘Fixing’ the ‘revolting racists’
Starmer expressed disgust at the recent anti-immigrant riots, and asserted that rampaging racists had highlighted the need to “totally overhaul the British legal system”.
Yet not only were the riots far smaller than was portrayed by the media, they were actually led by state-connected ringleaders such as ‘Tommy Robinson’ (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). There are more than enough existing laws to deal with these louts, if that were our new prime minister’s genuine concern. It is, after all, already a crime to commit arson or to attempt murder.
It is, moreover, glaringly apparent that anti-immigrant sentiment is relentlessly stoked by the entire capitalist establishment, not least by Britain’s corporate media and mainstream political parties – Conservative, LibDem and Labour alike.
Ignoring this, Stammer’s Britannic Imperial Labour party is proposing to ‘fix’ the legal system by ensuring maximum repression of dissenting speech and of organised anti-imperialist political resistance by the working class.
It is clear that the target of this planned assault on free speech and the right to protest is not the “swastika-tattooed racists” (with whom the vast majority of Britons have no sympathy at all) but the growing ranks of the anti-genocide, anti-racist and anti-imperialist activists of the Palestine solidarity movement (with whom increasing numbers of British workers are in full sympathy and accord).
It is this phenomenon that led to Tory PM Rishi Sunak’s frenzied denunciation of George Galloway’s sensational Rochdale by-election victory, and indeed to the precipitous calling of the general election in July, during which the Tories fell on their sword in order to assure a smooth handover of British capitalist ‘democracy’ – that very best shell in which to clothe the dictatorship of British capital.
We can expect Labour to continue to attempt to ‘fix capitalism’ by drumming up pogroms that set workers against one another, and to use the ensuing outrage to try to ‘fix’ (suppress) the genuine and growing opposition of the working class.
But oppression itself breeds resistance, and Keir Starmer’s Labour government is presiding over a regime of decaying imperialism; over an era very much akin to the last days of Rome …
In reality, there is only one way out of Britain’s dystopian downward spiral into poverty, decay, parasitism, discontent and war. That way out is socialism: a planned economy and a workers’ government (a dictatorship not of the capitalist class over the workers, but of the working class over the exploiters); a new society in which political power and real economic wealth and decision-making are in the hands of the working class.
Anyone who tells you that Starmer, the Labour party, or any of its supposedly ‘left’ MPs (don’t laugh!) can in any way ‘fix’ capitalism, or ‘bring socialism’ (“Forward to the united front!”) are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
We are the real opposition. Join us.
