This article was included in our trade union free sheet for Summer 2025. Download the mini paper as a pdf.
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Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party came to office in July 2024 with a ‘landslide’ of just 18 percent of the voting-age population’s votes. He picked up the baton of capitalist rule seamlessly from Rishi Sunak and proceeded to batter the people of Palestine to death with it. Along with the peoples of Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Congo and Iran.
And now, to try to save this dying system from the scrapheap of history, Labour is increasingly turning the state’s full force against British workers. Labour is a party of the monopolists and bankers – a party of capitalism.
Inequality: robbery of the poor by the rich
We are in the midst of a terrible poverty epidemic in Britain today – a crisis of capitalism that is forcing ever more of the working people into misery, privation and destitution. Real unemployment (so-called ‘economic inactivity’) is around 26 percent – one in four of the working-age population. And this at a time when the ‘cost of living crisis’ (ie, inflation) is undermining the purchasing power of wages at a rate unseen in recent decades.
The British ruling class has been printing and borrowing money for decades in order to wage endless wars and to subsidise and bail out banks and corporations it considers ‘too big to fail’. Workers are paying the price through crippling tax hikes and inflation, which have been exacerbated by the boomerang effect of economic sanctions against Russia in particular (Europe’s main provider of cheap energy).
Britain’s energy cartel has not been slow to take advantage of this situation to raise prices still further – to the great glee of shareholders, who are raking in record bonanzas as Britons freeze.
Today, the poorest 10 percent of British people (6.7 million) must try and live on £12,500 a year, while the poorest 1 percent (670,000 workers) receive a mere £7,000-£8,000.
Approximately 18 percent of the population live in relative poverty and a further 8 percent in absolute poverty. Thirty-one percent of Britain’s children are living in poverty, many of them arriving hungry at school. Around one million of those are excluded from the free school meals programme thanks to draconian regulations.
Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent of the UK population (67,000 people) are luxuriating in an income of £700,000-£1,000,000 a year, and the 55 richest billionaires in Britain increased their wealth by £35m per day in 2024 – over £600,000 a day each! Yet the corporations these billionaires obtain their wealth from pay less than 10 percent of the government’s tax revenues.
What with the tax avoidance of the super-rich, a big uptick in military spending and a ballooning debt to be serviced, the Labour government is in trouble with its finances, despite 15 years of brutal austerity that was supposed to ‘balance the books’ (by quite literally killing the poor). Chancellor Rachel Reeves declares there is only one way out of trouble – to squeeze more out of the pockets of those who are already poor or those who are modestly comfortable.
It is in this situation that Labour MPs voted through Starmer’s (slightly modified) welfare bill, whose purpose is to slash welfare support even more, forcing the impoverished and the sick into the lowest-paid ‘workfare’ jobs, and preserving the two-child benefit cap that is pushing millions of children into abject poverty. The legislation will perpetuate and worsen the poverty of the most vulnerable, and ruin the future of millions.
It should be perfectly clear by now that Labour politicians will commit any crime to keep their well-paid careers, feathering their own nests while facilitating the continued global plunder and domination of the billionaire elite. Ex-PM Tony Blair is estimated to have amassed a fortune of £400m, secured as a reward for his oversight of genocide in Iraq, and his son Leo is well on the way to becoming a billionaire.
Labour serves the rich, not the working class, and its leading lights are extremely well paid for doing so.
Labour’s ‘plan’ for the NHS is to bleed it
Labour health minster Wes Streeting is keeping waiting lists deliberately high (seven million) while hospitals are facing relentless and swingeing cuts, which further reduce their ability to meet patients’ needs. And they are now being told to sack thousands of doctors and nurses – not in the interests of health provision but in the interests of privatisation.
Streeting’s ‘radical reform’ of what remains of Britain’s health service is being used to push two million more appointments – about eight million in total – into the private sector. We are not being given ‘special treatment’ when this happens; we are being robbed in broad daylight.
We will pay through the nose twice. First for the full and comprehensive NHS service we waited for but didn’t get, and then for the private service that will not look after most of the conditions many of us face (since they are not profitable enough to treat). Increasingly, British workers are being forced to pay for the urgent care they need from their own pocket, via insurance (nine million of us!) or in cash that they can ill afford – or get no help at all.
Wes Streeting is not only funded by the zionist lobby, but by private health corporations. John Armitage, one of his key backers, is a billionaire who ranked number 138 on the 2021 Times ‘rich list’, co-founder and director of the Egerton Capital hedge fund. Among its almost £19bn of investments, Armitage’s fund owns shares worth almost £834m in United Health (UH), a vast US private health corporation that is at the heart of introducing a private Medicare-style system to Britain in place of the NHS.
Waging World War 3 to save our slavery?
David Lammy recently spoke of wanting a “strong friendship with Israel based on shared values”. The ‘shared values’ of which Lammy speaks are genocide and regional war to despoil and plunder the whole middle east. They mean sending war planes in support of the illegal aggressive war that the USA and Israel are waging against Iran (as well as active military and financial support for genocidal wars against Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and anyone else who stands up to the imperialist hyenas).
They mean constantly escalating war with Russia in Ukraine – to the last Ukrainian! – and driving relentlessly toward war with China. Ultimately, they mean full commitment to a third world war of global proportions, quite possibly fought with nuclear weapons and risking the destruction of human life on planet Earth.
All for the preservation of the flagging superprofits of a monopoly-capitalist system of wage-slavery that is facing a systemic and existential crisis, and whose continued existence means only deepening poverty and ever more war for the mass of the population.
Labour’s pledge to Nato warmongers: austerity and war!
When the June 2025 Nato summit took place in The Hague, it did not escape the attention of thinking workers across the planet that the ‘world leaders’ in attendance should have been arraigned to face charges for war crimes in Ukraine and the middle east.
This will not happen, of course, because the Hague-based ‘International Criminal Court’ is a tool of Nato and does not prosecute the real criminals, who continue to be rewarded rather than punished for their crimes. At the summit, Keir Starmer pledged to raise Britain’s arms spending from 2.3 percent to 5 percent of GDP by 2035 – that is £130bn per year in today’s money, bringing it close to current spending on the NHS.
We recently found out when Palestine Action activists sprayed red paint onto fighter jets at RAF Brize Norton that the planes are actually owned by a hedge fund that leases them to the RAF. So genocide and war, like our crumbling health and social care services, are just more ‘PFI’ tools through which the billionaire elite loot the state twice over (and which are paid for by taxing the workers) – just as the middle-east war is also a tool for robbing the vast oil wealth of the peoples of west Asia.
Truly the capitalists – and their ‘Labour party’ governmental servants – are our implacable enemies! Their joy is built upon our misery. Their wealth upon our poverty!
It should be clear by now that a union movement chained hand and foot to the Labour party is no use to workers struggling for survival.
We need to break every organisational and political link with the Labour party and force our unions to start acting on behalf of the working class – to collectively and meaningfully organise to resist austerity, resist repression and resist militarisation. And to refuse en masse to cooperate in any way with the criminal imperialist war machine!
