By Richie Venton, SSP Workplace Organiser
AFTER the hottest July in human history, Rishi Sunak’s away day to North East Scotland – cloaking a massive increase in licenses to Big Oil to plunder and pollute with a carbon capture smokescreen – is the latest proof we cannot rely on either of the big Westminster parties for climate crisis action.
Labour’s Keir Starmer is wringing his hands at the 100 new oil licences, but has made it clear he won’t block them if Labour comes to power. As they’ve previously put it, “existing licences will continue and are baked into our plans”.
And they’ve abandoned previous promises to invest £28 billion a year on green energy, thereby blocking the transition to green jobs which an absolute majority of fossil industry workers favour.
Both parties support business as usual, putting multi-national fossil capitalists’ profit before the urgent needs of people and planet.
The brutal truth is that only democratic public ownership of all forms of energy, and an urgent transition to green energy production led by fossil fuel workers themselves, can plan how to deal with the crisis burning Europe and flooding the global south.
Young people – and those of all generations – convinced that fundamental system change is required to tackle the burning, boiling climate crisis, gaze in dismay at the “alternatives” on offer from the “mainstream” political parties.
And they’re not alone.
After 13 years of Tory brutality against living conditions, public services, and democratic rights, millions cry out for radical change.
Workers engaged in the biggest upsurge in collective resistance in 34 years look for political solutions, but what do they find?
Families, most of them in work, driven to dependency on food banks, seek out political allies ready to radically redistribute wealth, but what do they find?
Past generations of working-class and young people would have turned for salvation towards the Labour Party. But what do today’s millions, desperately seeking fundamental change, encounter from Starmer’s Labour – or their powerless subordinates in Scottish Labour?
Starmer trots out the occasional cliché about needing change – then repeatedly announces Labour’s determination to change absolutely nothing!
With every abandonment of past promises, Starmer and Anas Sarwar’s Labour seem hellbent on outdoing the Tories.
They are getting their betrayals in first, even before being elected!
Amidst a growing list of retreats, Labour have dumped previous promises to take Royal Mail and water back into public ownership, made plain they will stick to Tory spending limits with weasel words like “fiscal responsibility”, and pledged even more public money will be poured into the bank accounts of private health companies – on top of the £80bn handed to financiers, not nurses, through Labour’s private finance initiative (PFI) scandal.
Now they’ve committed a vicious crime against the poorest by saying a Labour government will retain the Tories’ cruel two-child cap on benefits – which steals food from the mouths of 80,000 kids in Scotland, and compels women to prove they were raped when trying to get benefits for a third child.
No wonder the knighted UK Labour leader is now more accurately known as Sir Kid Starver.
Instead of radical change to the advantage of the millions of working-class people who create society’s fabulous wealth, Labour promises more of the same rotten poverty, inequality, exploitation, and pollution for the profit of the few.
Labour are the continuity Tories.
Any remaining individual socialist in Scottish Labour is a political prisoner, and I for one stand for the release of political prisoners!
Labour has shown itself to be unashamed guardians of capitalism, and all its inherent inequalities and exploitation. Voters should shun the fake change they offer.