Labour promises of prosperity based on slaughter are the ultimate betrayal

by Ken Ferguson

• Capitalist cheerleader Chancellor Reeves’s so-called “spring statement” which plunged tens of thousands into poverty and placed the development and sale of pitiless weapons of death at the heart of industrial strategy surely shatters any illusions that her party is in any way progressive.

Watching the Chancellor trot out her menu of stale and reheated measures, I found myself struck by the heady mixture of commonplaces and duplicity, delivered with a straight face, while reading the burial rites on Labour’s already threadbare working class credentials.

Of course the immediate focus on this atrocity has fallen on the real world impact of benefit cuts on tens of thousands people living in or at the edge of poverty. To be clear, a Labour government, elected less than a year ago, has as an act of policy, chosen to plunge 250,000 people into poverty.

Revolting as this choice undoubtedly is, anyone watching its delivery could hardly avoid noticing that the prosperous, well-fed MPs around her looked unlikely candidates to have had any direct experience of the terrors of debt.

Studiously avoided is the truth that these cuts are, like the workhouses of old, aimed to force people into jobs, often insecure almost certainly low paid through what can only be called economic terrorism.

Reeves’s ‘unachievable’ aspirations
Even government spokespeople were forced to admit that the idea that the quarter of a million facing benefit cuts would find well paid alternative jobs was at best fanciful.

Like a drowning woman, Reeves clutched at the fairy-story straw that a massive increase in house building would follow her bulldozing aside the so-called “blockers” standing in its way, boosting economic growth.

Hardly was the ink dry on her statement however than industry chiefs poured cold water on these hopes pointing out that the total shortage of skilled labour meant that such aspirations were simply unachievable.

Other examples abound but at their heart is one factor in common that the hard line pro business policy of the Starmer which shuns public ownership leaves them at best as bail out bankers to business at worst as paralysed spectators.

Indeed as I write this the news breaks that closure is looming over the Scunthorpe steel blast furnaces as the government refuses to support public ownership underlining the folly of relying on market led solutions.

The truth is that like many other Labour governments Starmer makes the choice to pamper big business placing the burden on the working class.

But probably the most striking aspect of the statement was the unashamed endorsement of the idea that a central pathway for a reindustrialisation of our economy will be built on the development and sale of ever more sophisticated weapons with the ultimate purpose of killing men, women and children.

This is of course in many ways the logical outcome of the bellicose warmongering fronted by Starmer and his entirely fake “Coalition of the Willing” and should give food for thought to those in the Labour movement calling for increased arms spending.

Of course there will be broad agreement about the need to reverse the Thatcherite destruction (carried on by Labour) of manufacturing industry and with it a return to skilled well paid work.

Addressing this turns a harsh spotlight on the ghost missing from the so called spring statement — the rapidly escalating and dangerous climate crisis.

Labour’s conversion to militarism
Voice readers will recall that as he transitioned for supposed Corbyn loyalist to Trump acolyte Starmer ditched a pledge to spend £28bn on a green new deal replacing it with the shadowy Great British Energy recently exposed in these pages.

However, Labour’s conversion to militarism and abandonment of the need to tackle the climate crisis does not mean that the issue has gone away. Readers need only recall the LA firestorm, countless droughts and rapidly melting ice caps to confirm this.

It is now clear that there is scope for an immense re-industrialisation and skills development producing the technology and equipment needed to harness Scotland’s vast wind, wave, tidal and hydro resources.

Despite being labelled by the late Alex Salmond, “the Saudi Arabia of renewables,” little has been produced, in Scotland, in the way of jobs from these riches.

Indeed workers such as those at Bi Fab on the Forth watched on as equipment they could have built was towed into place less tan 20 miles way after having been built in Indonesia.

The alternative to rapidly sinking SS Starmer and its “leave it to the markets” mantra is in plain sight and entirely practical — public ownership.

With the climate crisis we face a challenge to our collective well being and, ultimately, survival. Such a crisis demands not cosmetic fiddling with car parking or wood burning stoves but the public ownership of Scotland’s natural resources and their development under collective ownership with urgent action to manufacture equipment here and re-skill workers to deliver it.

The choice to take the path of a Socialist Green New Deal to serve both the needs of people and planet while rejecting the role of merchants of death is surely one that we should urgently take.

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