Left Unity will fight for the poor if Labour won’t
Salman Shaheen
Salman Shaheen brings the debate about Left Unity to the Huffington Post. Please contribute to the debate on the original post at that site.
The storm has blown away the last of the summer. Winter is on its way. And for Britain’s poorest families, forced by a soaring cost of living and the government’s austerity onslaught to choose between heating and eating, it promises to be a winter of discontent.
George Osborne may be cheering the country’s return to growth, but the hundreds of thousands forced to rely on food banks – some unable even to afford to cook the food they’ve been given – there is little to cheer. Austerity wrecked the economy, stifling the recovery Britain desperately needed three years ago, but worst of all, it wrecked lives.
For three years, we waited for Ed Miliband to find his voice, hoping Labour might rediscover the meaning of opposition. For three years we saw our hopes dashed as Labour signed up to match Conservative spending plans, abstained on workfare and retreated on the universality of the welfare state.
Hats off to Miliband now for finally coming up with some decent policies.
Repealing the poisonous bedroom tax is a vital first step to redressing some of the deep iniquities of a heartless Tory Britain. And given the exorbitant price hikes from four of the Big Six energy companies in recent weeks, Miliband’s call to temporarily freeze prices was both prescient and necessary.
But Labour’s moves, quite apart from being too late, have been too little.
We need a party that will not just call for energy companies to play a bit fairer, tinkering around the edges of a problem that began with privatisation, but will campaign to bring them back into public ownership.
Labour has bought too fully into the myth that the market automatically equals a better deal for consumers. Letting natural monopolies like utilities and the railways fall into private hands only means rocketing prices where businesses are run for ever increasing profits, but customers are unable to relocate to the competition because it doesn’t exist. Bringing these industries back into public ownership would be progressive, but also popular.
We need a party that will put workers first, rather than the interests of big business.
Labour, like the Tories, is too tied to the City. It refuses to contemplate introducing a tiny tax on financial transactions that would constrain the kinds of risky trades that caused the economic crisis while making banks pay for the cost of it. And it offers little to rein back the government’s continual corporate tax cuts as the Tories attempt to turn Britain into a tax haven. Miliband’s offer of a voluntary living wage is all very fluffy and lovely. But how many big multinational companies will voluntarily stop exploiting people?
We need a party that will stand by trade unions, not cut them adrift as they face yet another damaging setback for workers’ rights at Grangemouth.
We need a socialist party, a party that will fight as vigorously to defend the rights of the oppressed as the Tories do to defend the pockets of the privileged.
Labour used to be these things, but no more. And politics abhors a vacuum.
When Ken Loach put out an appeal in March to found a new party to the left of Labour, over 10,000 people signed up to the Left Unity initiative and 100 local groups were established across the country.
In one month, Left Unity will become Britain’s newest political party.
Whether it flies or falters is up to you. So if you want to see a genuine alternative to austerity, if you want to help build a vibrant party of the left that will stand up for the NHS, the welfare state, and the environment, and stand opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia, ablism and all other forms of prejudice, then join us at our founding conference on November 30.
If Labour won’t fight for the poor, the shivering and the hungry in this winter of discontent, Left Unity will.
6 comments
6 responses to “Left Unity will fight for the poor if Labour won’t”
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The neo-liberal consensus is fracturing.
Even elements of the capitalist class are questioning the real value added by the City.
Miliband’s ‘One Nation’ is two-faced though. He wants the votes of the working class but still supports the capitalist system that allows the few to own the means of production & for the rest of us to only have our labour power to sell to them. Labour don’t offer socialism. Hopefully LU will.
I’ve always been quite surprised that the still large manufacturing based section of the UK capitalist class haven’t lobbied more forcefully , (via the CBI for instance) for a more pro manufacturing government strategy – under Labour as much as the Tories. No sign of this happening under either Labour or the Coalition though – despite all the periodic “rebalancing the economy” windy rhetoric — so blatantly individually and organisationally bribed and suborned via cushy directorships and party contributions are the political class by the bloated monster of the UK’s financial sector nowadays. The manufacturing sector just doesn’t have that sort of spare cash – and is often integrated with the financial sector anyway through a myriad of overlapping share ownerships.
In reality, as opposed to the appearance of past “socialistic” rhetoric, the Labour Party has always been a “One Nation” – party of complete collaboration and identification with the interests of the UK capitalist class. Even the much vaunted “Spirit of 45” , “radical” phase of Labourism after WW2, in its creation of the Welfare State, and all that nationalisation of key industries, was born out of a need to offer an apparent “reformed capitalism” alternative to the glossy propaganda image presented as an alternative to bourgeois capitalism by the Soviet Union , not from any genuine desire by the Labour leaders to actually seriously attack the fundamentals of the capitalist system.
Today globalised capitalism objectively presents us with a fundamentally new international capitalist structure. There is nowadays no genuinely “UK” national Big Bourgeoisie. This class, the superrich , have now long outgrown the petty national boundaries of the nation state – and through interwoven globalised share ownerships , present an ever increasingly globalised capitalist ruling class. “Nationalism” – in terms of pursuing the supposed national interests of a particular geographically distinct nation state, is now objectively the sentimental leftover redundant belief system for petty capitalists , sections of the middle classes (like the consultants, lawyers, and media types who compose the SNP leadership) , and the unorganised lumpen working class.
Of course the globalised Big Bourgeoisie are still happy to promote petty local nationalisms via their press and media interests in each component of their globalised media empires (the Murdoch empire being a prime example)- as it keeps the workers in each petty state divided and hostile to workers in other states- and hence less able to jointly combat the globalised “Austerity Offensive” of a capitalism in a global, systemic, crisis of profitability.
Hence, for instance , the Murdoch media empire strongly supports the SNP and the “independent Scotland” project – entirely motivated by the opportunity to gain a broadcasting monopoly in an “independent” Scotland. Indeed ,the Murdoch media plays the rabid “nationalism” card in every state in which it owns media interests. Yet of course the Murdoch empire itself has no time at all for any petty nationalist interests – other than as a “divide and rule” tactic.
Left Unity will have to be careful not to fall into the petty nationalist illusions trap vis a vis Scottish and Welsh “independence” , that many on the Left have done – “tailing” the petty bourgeois delusional sentimental petty nationalism of Plaid and the SNP. For us Internationalism has to be the watchword. the only way we can fight the immense power of globalised capitalism is through building unity in action amongst the entire UK working class – through a mas party straddling all regional and petty national boundaries – and building ever wider fighting links with the wider European working class radical Left parties too.
Left Unity has no pensioner section but I see it has a disabled one at least, as a start.
No political party offers pensioner anything but a threat to their day to day survival, from the attacks by the Pension Bill and the huge losses to women of the 1950s Baby Boomer generation coming with the Flat Rate Pension in 2016/17 that Labour entirely agree with as do The Greens.
I hope, Mr Salman Shaheen, that this new party can break free from the current establishment and end all Austerity and Welfare Reform, that caused the deficit in the first place, not the recession. Iceland had 800% debt and no banks and got out of economic trouble without Austerity.
It is my sole hope and that of many of the 2.6 million women who lost their state pension at 60, for that rightful payout of around £6,300 pa, instead of the £7000 pay rise for all MPs coming in general election year 2015. Rightful state pension payout at 60 for women and 65 for men (back-dated) is not about retirement age, which is up to the individual.
The payout is a fiscal stimulus by being given to those who retire or stay in work regardless. As a London pensioner in 2013 needs survival funding of £12,299, by 2015 pensioners will need a age related tax allowance from 60 of £5000 above the basic. So can eat and heat.
Otherwise, Left Unity runs the risk of becoming part of the problem and not the solution that is being investigated by the UN in the preventable deaths and suicides being caused by UK’s Welfare Reform.
I am a (currently) survivor as my illness is caused by stress that is a direct result of worrying about money, as no job, disabled, chronic sick (caused by welfare reform), am 60 in 2014 but no state pension, and no state pension ever as Flat Rate Pension rises NI contributions from 30 to 35 years, early retired to look after elderly parents now passed over as thought had enough NI for state pension, and when tried to put in for benefit found my basic tax allowance reduced to £4999 as benefit is taxed by each pound and tried to tax even my small works pension.
I am not alone in this predicament and many women are unaware of this fact, or about what the Flat Rate Pension is doing to women pensioners (and by that their partners, who themselves might have lost private works pension when company went bust or lost state pension beyond 65).
Monsieur Hollande in France immediately on election gave unemployed/disabled/sick men at 60 their state pension and this might be an interim thing to do when Left Unity get into government in 2015, as well as back-dating and granting state pension at 65 to men, until law can change for men to get state pension at 60 as well.
This will pour fiscal stimulus into town centre high streets.
I made up a make-believe party as a therapy, to deal with my stress injury chronic illness. It cannot fly as I’ve not got a pot to piss in and too ill to boot. But it could be a cunning plan in strategic voting to deny the right wing the current political class and have a sympathetic party in opposition across the House of Commons? If it helps, you can make it a reality.
But Left Unity is my and millions like me, one chance to have even a basic little life. As they say Insh ‘Allah but tie up your camel. Half the population of UK might have an interest in Left Unity as no political party today offers them anything at all. Nothing whatsoever.
Left Unity needs to ditch the ideas of green austerity/ sustainability if it is to be taken seriouy by the mass of working class people
Why not just make a coalition of the splitter parties for higher vote share?
Works for Syriza.