For struggle and socialist policies to end Labour’s class war

by Richie Venton, SSP national trade union organiser

• A new and vicious class war against the working class has been unleashed, against the sick, the disabled, children, pensioners, workers, and the public services even a half-civilised society relies upon.

Older people will recall the heartless assault 40 years ago on the miners, other manufacturing workers, and the whole fabric of society by Maggie Thatcher’s government. She wrecked the lives of millions in pursuit of even more grotesque wealth for the capitalist rich, the bankers, spivs and speculators of the City of London, creating a lost generation of young people without jobs or future hopes.

Young people today still live the horrible consequences: low-paid, insecure work, decimated services, ripped-up health and safety measures, and the worst levels of inequality since at least Victorian times.

Ten years ago, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition waged their own war on the sick, disabled, unemployed, pensioners and public service workers, under the banner of austerity; a coldly calculated political choice to make the working class pay for the economic meltdown triggered by bankers’ greed. Successive Labour and Tory-Lib Dem governments bailed out the bankers to the tune of £1.3bn, which conveniently happened to be the same amount stolen from workers’ wages in the 30 years after Thatcher’s rampant class warfare.

A year ago, millions desperate to be shot of 18 years of Tory class cruelty either voted for Labour’s meaningless, deceitful, one-word manifesto promise of ‘Change’, or simply refused to vote for any of the capitalist parties, after decades of brutal experiences at their hands.

Attacks on sick & disabled
Now in their Spring Statement, the ‘change’ capitalist Labour had in mind was unveiled in all its cruel obscenity.

To adapt the infamous speech of 40 years ago by that other Labour traitor, Neil Kinnock, we witnessed the grotesque chaos of a Labour government — yes, a Labour government — scuttling round Westminster handing out cuts notices to the sick, disabled and most vulnerable.

Death notices for many, as their support systems and means of staying alive are kicked from underneath them by MPs who’ve just awarded themselves another £2,500, raising their salary to £94,000!

That’s what you get when you start out with a capitalist ideology, pickled into a dogma that the entirely invented, self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’ must be obeyed.

And that the demands of the military-industrial complex — the merchants of mass death — must be a heard, at the expense of obliterating the means of survival for at least 3.2 million people.

Labour has chosen to fund death abroad by causing death at home — in both cases, a cull of working-class people, regardless of their nationality.

“Pocket money,” says Labour!
While being ‘oh so sensitive’ towards the money markets and demands of big business, in issuing £5bn cuts to Personal Independent Payments and the health element of Universal Credit, these crass Labour politicians — starting with Starmer himself at his Cabinet meeting — compared it to removing children’s pocket money!

These payments are the difference between life and death for millions. They go towards the additional costs of living with a disability or chronic illnesses. Now the paltry £97 health component of Universal Credit is to be slashed to £50, costing sick and disabled people £2,800 a year. And they’re looking at entirely excluding 100,000 18-21 year olds from claiming it.

The most savage cuts are from PIP, with up to 1.2 million disabled people poised to lose entitlement to payments of up to £6,300 a year — losing linked carer’s allowances too.

Demonising the victims
Over a third of those on PIP are suffering mental distress. In their obscene attempts to justify investment of public money in warfare rather than welfare, Labour minister Wes Streeting spoke of “over-diagnosis of mental health conditions”, as if mental ill-health (or neurodivergence) was a life-style choice!

Not a word about people having just lived through Covid, health cuts (with 40% of those on PIP awaiting medical treatment, according to the DWP’s own figures last week), the collapse in mental health services, nor climate anxiety, the housing crisis, skyrocketing rents, rampant job insecurity and low pay… all contributory factors to the burgeoning mental health epidemic blighting millions of lives.

And capitalist Labour has dredged up all the filthiest methods of the capitalist Tories, including cynical attempts to demonise the victims; to make out they are a different species, entirely apart from people in work, in the manner the Victorian ruling class spoke of ‘the deserving and undeserving poor’.

This divide-and-conquer method is based on a filthy lie. PIP payments are issued to help with the additional costs of survival that go with long term health conditions, whether in or out of work; 38% of these payments go to people in a job.

Mass action against cuts
Socialists, and particularly the trade union movement, in collaboration with Disabled People Against Cuts and other groups, need to nail this lie and block the path to divisions between workers not receiving these benefits and those who do.

The working class consists of those too young, too old, or too sick to work, or simply unable to find a job — due to the abject failure of the capitalist system to provide them, or to make the necessary workplace adjustments to accommodate some disabled people — as well as workers not cursed by ill health or disabilities.

It’s not the first time Labour and specifically Rachel Reeves have played this filthy, divisive tactic, of which the worst imperialists and Tories in history would be proud.

I well remember lambasting Reeves in articles and speeches 10 years ago, when the Tory-Lib Dem coalition set their sights on cuts to some of the very same benefits and pensions.

Asked by the press whether Labour would stand up for the victims of these attacks, Reeves, then Labour shadow minister of work and pensions, responded, “Labour is not the party of benefit claimants, we are the party of workers, the clue is in the name”.

That’s one of a multitude of reasons why I and the Scottish Socialist Party vociferously warned that Starmer and Reeves’ Labour are the Continuity Tories, out to rob the rest of us to enrich the rich, long before, during and since last year’s general election.

Fury has rightly erupted, with demonstrations all over the UK, led by Disabled People Against Cuts, socialists and trade union activists.

This needs to be built into a powerful mass movement, bombarding the MPs and MSPs, linking defence of these minimal payments for everyday survival with a battle to vastly improve all benefits and pensions; win an immediate £15-an-hour minimum wage for all workers aged 16 or over; alongside the struggle for vastly improved Statutory Sick Pay.

Health & safety
The TUC and STUC needs to turn fine policy decisions into decisive action — including one I proposed at the 2020 STUC Congress for full average wages for all workers and Statutory Sick Pay of £370 a week. And vastly improved health and safety measures, supervised by elected union health and safety reps in every workplace.

This would help reduce the spread of long-term sickness by poverty levels of sick pay (or often none at all) forcing workers back prematurely, exacerbating illnesses into long term conditions, and reduce work-related stress which has damaged the mental health of millions.

The government’s own research has revealed only 23% of bosses make any adjustments to make workplaces more accommodating to people with chronic health conditions and disabilities who want at least some work, but without being bullied and blackmailed into low-paid, totally inappropriate jobs under threat of losing all incomes. Powerful workplace unions, including health and safety stewards and disabled members, could insist on and monitor such supportive measures.

Labour’s betrayals
Their full frontal assault on the sick and disabled is only the latest in a litany of betrayal of the working class by Labour:

• Deprivation of 90,000 Scottish kids from benefits; removal of Winter Fuel Payments from nearly a million pensioners in Scotland
• Refusal to compensate over 330,000 Scottish WASPI women for loss of thousands in pensions
• Outright refusal to intervene to save Grangemouth workers’ jobs; retention of Zero Hours Contracts when bosses plead poverty
• Delays and dilution of their minimal promised improvements to trade union rights…

The list is endless, escalating, and must be resisted with mass action and a fighting alternative to inspire people into action.

No excuse for ANY cuts
There is absolutely no excuse for these life-threatening choices — and choices they are.
The SSP has persistently argued for a multitude of ways to fund and improve benefits, wages, pensions, jobs and public services — but Labour insists on choices based on the class interests of the tech giants, arms companies, bankers, warlords, landlords and big business generally.

Labour refuses to equalise the taxation rate on capital gains with that on incomes, which alone would raise over £14bn a year — nearly three times the amount they’re chopping off the sick and disabled.

They take no steps to end the crime of tax avoidance, evasion and non-payment by big business and the rich, estimated to be an annual loss of £120bn by the PCS union’s research. That’s equivalent to two years’ entire Scottish government budget!

Along with Thatcher, Labour governments have slashed Corporation Tax — which is only levied on the profits of the biggest businesses — from 52% to its current 25%, and Starmer has been cast iron it’s not going to rise. Restoration of the 52% rate would raise at least £85bn this year for jobs, infrastructure, wages, benefits.

5% wealth tax on millionaires
The SSP has been on the streets and fighting election campaigns with the call for a 5% wealth tax on all millionaires. That alone would raise £260bn in a year; think about it, that’s over 50 times as much as Labour claims to have had to make the ‘tough choice’ of slashing off the sickest, most vulnerable.

And that’s even before a socialist government would take all the giant arms companies, energy monopolies, transport, construction and banking industry into democratic public ownership, so as to plan for human need, not the inhuman greed of the capitalist system.

Immediate protest action, married to such a socialist vision, can defeat this new class war on the working class — this time unleashed by a party claiming to be ‘Labour’.

Defeat rich Reform UK fakes
And in doing so, also block the path of the fake ‘anti-establishment’ multi-millionaires of Reform UK, who amongst other things denounce what they call “useless public spending”, with calls for £150bn in cuts to public services, and replacement of the NHS with private insurance schemes, which recent figures indicate would mean you being charged £129 to see a GP; £457 for an MRI scan; £1,368 for an A&E visit, and £10,958 to have your appendix removed!

Socialist election breakthrough
The living proof of the potential for this socialist alternative was shown in the recent Glasgow Southside Central council by-election. The SSP fought a campaign on a shoestring budget, got virtually no mention in the media (even after the result!), but fought a vigorous campaign on the streets and round the doors on many of the above policies.

Confronting the attacks on working-class lives by all the parties in power at local, national or UK level (Labour, SNP and Greens), we championed investment in housing, health, a £15 minimum wage, and welfare instead of warfare, highlighting our consistent opposition to Labour’s arming of the genocidal Israeli state.

We fought for no cuts to any jobs or services, replacement of the unfair Council Tax with our progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax, and a Socialist Green New Deal to build council houses at affordable rent, provide free public transport for all, and vastly improve neighbourhoods with social investment.

SSP nearly quadruples vote
The result? We came a good 4th, defeating Reform UK, UKIP, the Tories and Lib Dems. We increased both the SSP’s absolute vote and percentage share of votes compared with 2022, almost quadrupling our vote share from 2% then to 7.25% this time round. This is a highly significant electoral breakthrough, which must be built on.

Join the SSP
Anyone who wants a socialist force that can counter the war on the sick, disabled, civil service jobs and public services has a place in the SSP.

Anyone wanting to gain a foothold for socialist fighters in the Scottish parliament in 2026 — all the better to aid people in struggle and popularise socialist alternatives to all the capitalist parties of cuts and profiteering — should recognise the SSP is the vehicle to achieve that breakthrough.

The time is rotten ripe for change, real change, socialist change. We are a principled, proven party of working-class socialism, who dare to be different.

The SSP appeals to you to put some of your time and talent into forging that future, joining the SSP to do so.

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