The Enemy Is Labour

Workers Must Know Who Our Enemy Is In Order To Fight Them

As we approach 2024, the question of a general election looms ever larger before us.  The Conservative Party is in disarray, with a Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak) nominally in charge who most people couldn’t pick out of a police line-up, having gone through three leaders in three years and now recording relentlessly low poll numbers the Tories look set for defeat.

No working class person in this country who has lived through the last 13 years of the Conservative-Liberal coalition, followed by the relentless crisis that succeeded, can be in any doubt that the  Tories are their enemy. Wages have been suppressed, public services shredded, anti-strike laws taken to lengths that Thatcher and Blair could only have dreamed of and life in many areas of the country has got much tougher for workers with no end in sight to any of this. The average worker in Britain does not need to be told how bad the Tories are, he knows it already by the evidence in front of his very eyes, the evidence of his bank account, the state of his community and his fears for the future that await his children. 

There is no positive case that the Tories can make to even the middle class electorate now, only that Labour will (somehow) be worse and, by insisting upon this, they hope to scare as many of their disillusioned voting base into turning out for them as possible. The problem confronting the working class now though is that the (so called) opposition party is nothing of the kind. If you look beyond the generic slogans offered by Keir Starmer and the coterie of mediocrities on the Labour Party front bench, then you see that they are, fundamentally, committed to the same agenda as the Tories are.

Starmer says over and over again that he’s going to “protect” the NHS but we know from his shadow health secretary (Wes Streeting) that this isn’t true. They are committed to continuing the process of privatisation of the NHS that was so dramatically advanced under the Blair & Brown administrations. All the way through the pay disputes in the NHS, Starmer criticised the government but would never commit to having a Labour government meet the (entirely justified) wage demands of the nurses. All he would say was that he would “handle it better”. We should enquire exactly what he means by that, “handle it better in what way?” must be our question.

Here we must address the traditional role played by the Labour Party when it comes into government.  As the British capitalist class’s reserve team, the Labour Party’s job is to use its relationship with the trade union leaders in order to more effectively combat working class militancy. This was done very effectively in the 1970s when the Labour government of 1974-79 spent five years dividing and demoralising the working class in order to make the job of Thatcher much easier when the Tories did return to power.

This is the same task the ruling class are now setting for Sir Keir Starmer. They are demanding that he lean on the trade union leaders to suppress the struggles of the working class in this coming period. British capitalism is in a profound crisis now, and has been for at least fifteen years. The rates of growth have either been very low or non-existent since 2008 and the ruling class are desperately looking for a way out.  The way out for them is to try and restore domestic profitability by suppressing wages, further privatising and cutting public services as well as waging more imperialist wars overseas. On all of those counts, Sir Keir Starmer is the more reliable man in terms of his commitment to carrying out these tasks. The danger to the working class in Britain is that, when the capitalists up the ante in the class war, it will be waged by a government in alliance with the trade union leaders, who will relentlessly attack our class in a more dangerous way than the Tories will, because they will use our own union structures to demoralise us and destroy any resistance.

The fightback that will need to happen will first have to confront the fact that the leaders of the trade union movement have made themselves the enemy and that they will actively try to assist Starmer in the class war that he and the Labour Party will wage upon us.  This can be stopped though if the working class can break out of the control of the bureaucratic, Labour Party-dominated leadership. To do that though will take a clarity of vision, and the first step in obtaining that is to recognise the dangers posed by the Labour Party, it is not now, nor has it ever been, our party.

It is a deadly enemy to all workers and must be treated as such.