Critical Juncture

Jeremy Corbyn writes:

In a last-ditch attempt to save his dying leadership, Keir Starmer had a message for millions of people who are sick and tired of soaring rents, rising bills and endless war: it’s not that bad. ‘Like every government, we’ve made mistakes’, he said, ‘but we got the big political choices right.’ In the wake of Labour’s disastrous local election results, pressure has mounted for the Prime Minister to resign, and lobby journalists have been lining up to ask Starmer how he intends to cling onto power. I would have asked him a different question: why have you failed to use this power to improve ordinary people’s lives?

If the establishment media won’t scrutinise Starmer’s claim that he has got the big political choices right, then we will. Cutting winter fuel. Slashing disability benefits. Refusing to scrap the cruel and immoral two-child benefit cap. After fourteen years of Conservative rule, you’d think that a Labour government would be bursting with impatience to deliver policies to benefit working people. This Labour government couldn’t wait to impoverish them.

Eventually, twenty months into office, following speech after speech in which the government told us they simply did not have the money to lift children out of poverty, they were finally forced to scrap the two-child benefit cap. In doing so, they admitted they had been keeping children in poverty for no reason whatsoever. At the same time, the Labour leadership boasted about record increases in military spending. Austerity for the poor. Profits for war. From the moment this government was elected, it has decided there isn’t any money to feed, house or care for people — but there is always money to bomb, kill and injure them.

Another of Starmer’s ‘big political choices’ was to allow failing water companies to rip us off. Soaring profits. Sewage in our rivers and seas. This is the consequence of our government’s dogmatic refusal to do the common-sense thing: bring water into public ownership. It could have ended the failure of privatisation. Instead, it decided that ordinary people should pay the price for corporate negligence and greed.

This government chose not to bring in wealth taxes, not to implement rent controls, not to make the kind of public investment in council-housing that is needed to tackle the housing crisis, and chose not to redistribute resources from those who wield it to those who need it. It chose to give a top political job to a man with an established relationship to a convicted sex offender — a man who just so happened to pride himself on his opposition to our mass movement for social justice and peace.

Rather than rewriting the rigged rules of corporate Britain, the government also chose to blame a different group of people for the problems in our society: migrants and refugees. It went after the rights of migrants who have contributed so much to this country and demonised human beings seeking asylum. It mimicked the politics of Reform UK and rolled out the red carpet for Nigel Farage.

There is perhaps one political decision that will leave the greatest stain of all. As Israel embarked on the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, this government could have defended international law and called for peace. Yet it chose to facilitate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. And it chose to launch a systematic assault on the civil liberties of those who protested against the government’s complicity (alongside its outrageous decision to erode jury trials, the cornerstone of our justice system). This government’s enduring legacy will be its complicity and participation in the greatest crime of our age. And we will never, ever forget.

These decisions are the root cause of the chaos that Starmer is now trying to temper — and unless these root causes are addressed, we will continue to lurch from one political crisis to the next. It’s not enough for Starmer to go. What needs booting out is the politics he represents: corporate greed, anti-migrant policies and endless war.

For much of our media, the past few weeks and months have been a golden opportunity to indulge the endless psychodrama of Westminster and speculate about Starmer’s successor. For millions of ordinary people, they have been a depressing reminder of how yet another government has refused to implement policies that can improve their lives. I support calls for the Prime Minister to resign for the same reason I refuse to get excited about any of his possible replacements: our political class is unwilling to bring about the transformative change this country needs. I haven’t heard anything from his main contenders about the need to end corporate greed, the need for rent controls, or the need for a mass redistribution of wealth and power. I certainly haven’t heard any calls for an investigation into British complicity in genocide — presumably because that investigation would implicate them as well.

In his speech yesterday, Keir Starmer broke the record for the most number of cliches in half an hour. Yet he managed to hide the real record beneath his rhetoric: child poverty, inequality and genocide. Those are the government’s big decisions. And that is how this government will be remembered.

If we want real change, then we need to mobilise in our hundreds and thousands for the kind of policies Starmer could — and should — have implemented from the start: rent controls, caps on energy prices, controls on basic food prices, public ownership, a National Care Service, an uplift in child and disability benefit, a defence of our civil liberties; and a redistribution of resources away from weapons and war, toward education, housing and our NHS.

We are at a critical juncture in British politics — but we have hope on our side. During last week’s elections, we saw Your Party-backed independents, Green Party candidates and others fighting back against austerity, privatisation and fear. They proved what can happen when grassroots campaigns stand up for all communities, defend the humanity of Palestinians, and vow to make life affordable for all. Alone, there is only so much we can achieve. Together, we can change British politics forever. And we can bring about a new kind of society built on a radical idea: that everyone deserves to live in dignity.