By Ben Chacko
LONDON: Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not Tony Blair’s. The lessons from its troubled conference last week demonstrate this in multiple ways. Some mark positive differences from the last Labour government. Then TUC leader John Monks said unions were treated as “embarrassing elderly relatives” by Blair; now they are clearly influential actors within Labour, helping to shape legislation — most obviously in the case of the New Deal for Workers employment rights package.
Corporate lobbyists are still working on watering this down, but there is no attempt by ministers to distance themselves from it. Both Starmer and Angela Rayner made a point of celebrating the planned Bill as law drafted and campaigned for by the trade union movement when addressing a Labour Unions rally on the opening night of conference.
There are nods to union concerns in talk of an industrial strategy too, though here the waters are murkier. Starmer criticised the Tories as the party of the “unfettered market” in his keynote speech — not language we would associate with the market-worshipping Blair government. This may be a sign of the times — the 1990s were a decade of liberal triumphalism, the “end of history” signified by the disappearance of Soviet socialism.
The 2020s are not, with advanced capitalist countries led by the United States promoting greater state intervention in the economy, partly because of fear that China’s approach to state planning is giving it a growing economic and technological edge.
Labour in opposition removed most of the substance from its industrial strategy, reducing planned investment in a green transition and promoting schemes to attract private-sector investment in public infrastructure, though the private finance initiative deals of the Blair years have proved a costly rip-off.
Unions have stressed the need for serious increases in public investment if Britain is serious about becoming a “clean energy superpower” or resolving the crises in healthcare, education and local government.
This will prove the greatest domestic challenge the labour movement faces: preventing continued austerity. There are signs union pressure is already having an effect: Chancellor Rachel Reeves has hinted at changing the way the government calculates debt so state-owned investment is not included in debt metrics, which would give more leeway when it comes to borrowing to invest.
This is no substitute, though, for targeting the super-profits of the banks and big corporations, or taxing wealth. Unite delegates rallied before today’s winter fuel vote — which the union’s general secretary Sharon Graham is to be congratulated on forcing to the conference floor in the teeth of opposition from party fixers — to chant “wealth tax now,” while TUC president Matt Wrack also savaged the obscene wealth of the richest in his address.
Thanks to union efforts Labour conference has now formally condemned the Labour government’s attack on pensioners. This underlines the point made by National Education Union leader Daniel Kebede at a fringe event: the destruction of Labour’s internal democracy leaves it to unions to provide a real opposition.
That fringe event was itself huge, with delegates cramming every corner of the room and overflowing well down the corridor to listen to union leaders and left MPs — including suspended ones — calling for an alternative economic and political strategy.
Like the left slate’s good performance in recent elections to its national executive, this shows that Labour, despite Starmer’s best efforts, is still “a party with socialists in it,” to quote Tony Benn — and there are lots of them.
Since the defeat of Corbynism the left has lacked coherence or a strategy, but it is still numerous, and could again be effective if trade union organisation and leadership is directed to a plan to change government policy.
The confrontational approach of the affiliated Unite, CWU and FBU unions at conference is paying off: its success in shifting the narrative in Liverpool this week should be heeded as we consider our next steps. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Morning Star
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