By Richie Venton, SSP National Trade Union Organiser
Richie’s latest column for The National was written the morning of Monday 20 July, before Andy Burnham had returned from meeting the King to speak outside 10 Downing Street and announce his new Cabinet.
As I write this, you are kissing the King’s hand to be anointed as the seventh UK Prime Minister in 10 years.
The downfall of Sir Keir Starmer has been welcomed by most working-class people, after his horrendous austerity cuts to pensioners, children and disabled people; Labour’s betrayal of hopes of compensation for WASPI women, outright abolition of zero-hours contracts, repeal of all the most repressive anti-union laws in the western world, or meaningful climate action.
But what is on offer from an Andy Burnham government?
Certainly, you’ve dished out a whole lexicon of warm words about offering people “hope in their hearts”, “a redistribution of power”, “rewiring Britain” (whatever that means!), under your self-declared notion of “business-friendly socialism”.
Warm words don’t pay the heating bills, now at least £600 higher than promised by Labour in 2024 – nor tackle the catastrophe of an overheated planet, epitomised by wildfires in the Cairngorms and Arthur’s Seat, and the cruel deaths of nearly 3,000 people in England and Wales during the June and July heatwaves.
More mature readers can be forgiven for thinking we’ve heard it all before. Starmer promised “change”, “hope”, “fairness”, and as far back as 1963 Harold Wilson wowed the Labour Party conference with promises of “the white heat of the technological revolution”, which sounds a lot like your talk of rewiring Britain.
But the profound hopes in Wilson’s 1960s Labour government were dashed on the rocks of capitalist opposition to extremely mild reforms, and Labour’s utter failure to mobilise the population to expose and overcome the obstructions by captains of industry, who blackmailed Wilson with a strike of investment.
Only someone incapable of learning from that could peddle the myth of “business-friendly socialism”.
You can accept the dictatorship of the market, the rule of profiteering big capitalism, or begin to construct a socialist society based on democratic public ownership of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, with democratic planning for public need, not private greed. But you can’t have both!
At time of writing, virtually nothing is known of what concrete measures you plan to implement. But your political history should sound alarm bells to those trade union leaders currently fawning at your feet, and the millions of working-class people who (at least temporarily) hope against hope that something just has to get better after Starmer’s demise.
You say you joined Labour under the inspiration of Neil Kinnock’s leadership and his drive to expel socialists (including myself) in the 1980s. If Kinnock is your mentor, given that ermined windbag’s record of betraying the miners and paving the way for Tony Blair’s overthrow of Labour’s declared socialist objectives – turning it into an openly capitalist party – that bodes ill for your government.
On first being elected an MP under Tony Blair, you voted in favour of the illegal war for oil in Iraq; at least twice opposed a public inquiry into that bloodstained imperialist adventure; joined Labour Friends of Israel; abstained on brutal Tory government welfare cuts; implemented the socially destructive Private Finance Initiative in our hospitals as Labour Health Minister.
The fact Josh Simons – former director of Labour Together, the right-wing machine of Peter Mandelson and Keir Starmer – stood down as MP for Makerfield to clear your path to10 Downing Street, hardly suggests you’re a genuine socialist.
Whilst refusing to suspend our critical faculties, or suffer a bout of historical amnesia, I challenge you to implement a package of measures that could genuinely begin to fill people’s hearts with hope, redistribute power, and begin to reverse 40 years of brutal capitalist offensives against the working-class majority and the planet we live on.
· The cost-of-living crisis has never gone away and starts with people’s pay. As part of an emergency cost-of-living budget, introduce an immediate £15-an-hour minimum wage, rising with inflation, for everyone age 16-plus, scrapping age wage discrimination.
· Cancel all PFI contracts in hospitals, schools and other public services. In Scotland that would release £1.25billion for investment in jobs and services this financial year, and liberate £27billion of remaining PFI debts, to be redirected into the postcodes and public services of people suffering horrendous shortages.
· Instead of boasting that you “will not be squeamish about cutting welfare” to invest more in warfare and the profiteering arms industry, increase the benefits and pensions of millions to afford them a life of dignity, to really fill their hearts with hope.
· Scrap Trident nuclear weapons and redeploy the skills of the workforce – in collaboration with their trade unions – into peaceful, socially useful production, which numerous studies by SCND and others have proven could not just defend but vastly expand the number of jobs available.
· Renationalise our shipyards to produce ferries not frigates; production for peace not war, Including marine engineering equipment for a vast expansion of renewable energy production and distribution. This is not a new idea but it’s a perfectly rational one – if you’re prepared to confront the military-industrial complex. A decade ago, industry experts calculated building ferries instead of aircraft carriers would create ten times as many jobs in Scotland’s shipyards!
· You’ve spoken much of devolution and redistribution of power to people in local places. If that is to become more than rhetorical candyfloss, how’s about reinvigorating local councils, allowing them to become local government instead of local administrators of central government austerity?
We don’t need mayors; we need money for local jobs and community services.
An immediate, concrete, radical measure to achieve that would be immediate abolition of the regressive Council Tax and its replacement with a Service Tax based on income, on ability to pay. The SSP’s research for a Scottish Service Tax proves 8 out of 10 people would pay less but get more services by doubling the funds through taxation of the rich, from £2.7 billion in Council Tax to £5.3 billion from the Scottish Service Tax, in last year’s figures.
That’s a ready-made alternative, devised by the SSP, already officially supported by several trade unions, which would devolve the power to improve communities and redistribute wealth in one fell swoop.
Your talk of building council houses needs to be urgently turned into action and ties up with the proposals to vastly enhance the incomes of local councils. A combination of a public construction industry and revival of council Direct Labour Organisations, employing thousands to build new council houses and retrofit existing stock, could tackle the housing emergency, provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, and guarantee quality, eco-friendly homes at affordable rent.
One of the few concrete policies already emerging is your intention to expand drilling in the North Sea. In the words of the not very radical Ed Miliband, that would be “climate vandalism”.
Scientists have long since concluded we need to stop fossil fuel production or face an irreversible climate catastrophe; the planet is already on fire.
Nor would increased drilling in Rosebank, Jackdaw or other oilfields produce stable jobs, or cut household heating bills. Everyone knows it would take years to bring increased supplies online, and scientific researchers at Oxford University recently produced a report concluding the idea it would cut fuel bills is “arrant nonsense”.
The only class of people to gain would be the giant multinational fossil fuel companies, who already banked more than $30 million every hour in additional profit in the first month of Trump-Netanyahu’s war on Iran.
Forecasts are that the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies will make $234billion windfall profits from this war by Christmas, and that’s on top of the mind-boggling profits they already harvest.
These fossil capitalists have made an average of $1 trillion-a-year in pure profit every year for the last half century – and much more in years of war crises. And the International Monetary Fund reckon they benefited from explicit subsidies of $1.3 trillion in 2022.
But what did energy workers enjoy from such legalised daylight robbery? The abolition of hundreds of thousands of North Sea jobs, and closure of Scotland’s only oil refinery.
That’s capitalism, and it’s certainly not a “socialism-friendly business”!
Instead of trying to square the circle, remaining in hock to the fossil capitalists, bond markets, and big business in general, you should introduce real change by bringing the entire energy industry into public ownership, with workers’ control, to effect a rapid transition (with appropriate investment) towards clean, green, renewable energy.
The SSP certainly has no desire nor intention to chuck fossil fuel workers on the scrapheap. But that’s precisely what the oil and gas giants are doing.
Instead, the overwhelming eagerness of oil and gas workers to be redeployed to offshore windfarms and other renewable energy production should be tapped into. But without public ownership and democratic planning, that will never create the green jobs required – whereas with
a worker-led transition, numerous bodies of research demonstrate at least three jobs could be created for every one job at risk in the North Sea.
Such a bold plan could genuinely offer hope, with investments in apprenticeships, training and re-skilling in Further Education colleges and Research and Development in green production techniques at our universities.
Instead of presenting your utterly false dichotomy of skilled jobs or clean air, the SSP advocates a Socialist Green New Deal based on public ownership; investment in a green re-industrialization of society, producing skilled, secure, trade unionised jobs and apprenticeships – simultaneously tackling the existential threat of climate catastrophe, fuelled by fossil capitalism.
I offer this as the bare bones of some “people-friendly socialism”.
Will you wield the power of being Prime Minister to begin this transformation of lives, tackling the cost-of-living crisis and climate catastrophe together, filling people’s hearts with hope?”