The local election results, and Reform’s defeat of Labour by 6 votes in the Runcorn and Helsby By- Election (previously one of Labour’s safest seats) shows that Starmer’s government is in free fall, the weakest and most hated British government less than a year after winning a general election outright, that anyone can remember. It should be recalled that Tony Blair’s political ‘honeymoon’ after his landslide election victory in 1997 lasted for the entirety of his first term, until 2001, and in some ways only fully ended with the eruption of the mass movement against the Iraq War. Starmer’s government, which was elected with an overall majority in the House of Commons of 174 seats, only received just over 33.7% of the vote in July 2024, and is now in second place behind Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform party, with the Tories in third place, according to most opinion polls. Liberal Democrats and Greens are coming up behind as Britain’s two-party system, as previously known, shows sign of disintegration.
Starmer’s government is riven by severe contradictions. Sometimes it seems like a far-right government itself, but objectively it is a government of very right-wing social-liberals, not even traditional right-wing social democrats, but still formally attached to the labour movement through the Labour Party’s long-time link with the trade unions. It was not created as part of any class-based election campaign or class polarisation. It was openly touted by many in the ruling class as a failsafe for them given the chronic dysfunction of the Conservative Party, which came close to disintegration in its final post-Brexit term, with three different Prime Ministers: Johnson, Truss and Sunak, and obvious decay.
This government has a huge majority, but a weak social base. It retained the Tories hated two-child benefit cap, attacked the winter fuel payment for pensioners, and now undertaken a large-scale austerity attack on the disabled. The attacks on pensioners and the disabled, grotesquely, happen concurrently with many in the government, including Starmer, promoting the Assisted Dying Bill (i.e., legalising euthanasia for the elderly and sick). This now seems to be in parliamentary trouble. There have been revolts before against these attacks, but the local elections and Runcorn seem to have bought about blind panic in the Labour Party. So, there is now talk of the attacks on pensioners and the disabled being reversed, so desperate is Labour to try to regain some sort of initiative. This is despite Rachel Reeves’ insistence that these attacks were supposedly essential for economic stability. Now blunting their impact on Labour’s political fortunes appears to be essential for the government’s political stability. So, some of Reeves’ policies could be thrown overboard.
Starmerite privatisation of the NHS
There is more turmoil and polarisation on the way. The government has also made a show of putatively attacking and cutting the Tories’ previous neoliberal bureaucracy in the damaged National Health Service, phasing out the ‘NHS England’ quango, and local Integrated Care Boards which are also Tory creations as part of their stealth privatisation drives in the Cameron and May governments, mostly preceding Johnson and Brexit. But this is a deceptive flank attack from Labour’s uber-Zionist Health Secretary, Streeting, who is heavily invested in private healthcare himself. It appears that by attacking Tory-created NHS admin, it is using a ‘thin-end-of-the wedge’ tactic that will be used for alternative models of stealth privatisation later.
The only sop the government has made to the workers movement is some gains for trade union rights, extending protection against unfair dismissal to day one of employment. It also promised to outlaw zero-hour contracts. The latter has been considerably diluted, but this is one of the very few things on which leftists must support the government insofar as it acts, however tepidly. This is the only aspect of Corbynism it was unable to simply abolish, because it depended on right-wing trade union leaders, who had to deliver something, to tolerate its purges of the left.
This was buried since the election with an avalanche of attacks on democratic rights particularly of those critical of the government’s support for genocide in Gaza. Almost the first crisis it faced after the election was a wave of far-right near pogroms occasioned by a murder of children in Southport, Merseyside, by a deranged young person who was widely misreported as being a Muslim asylum seeker. The Starmer regime supressed the pogroms as best it could by mobilising the police, but it was the anti-racist left, including left-wing forces around the SWP, who mobilised a mass protest response that successfully undercut the wave of attempted pogroms. However, since then the government has gone on the warpath, starting its own campaign of deportations and further attacks on refugees and migrants.
But the most outrageous attacks by the government have been on the Palestine Solidarity movement, and to a lesser extent other causes, such as environmentalists and more recently, there have been outrageous arrests of those protesting Labour’s disability benefit cuts. Regarding the Palestine movement, there have been a plethora of phoney charges of support for ‘terrorism’ and vicious, police-state type raids on Palestine activists, as well as harassment and attempts to ban Palestine solidarity events in the face of the genocide that have gone much further than the Tory regime ever dared. Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman had to resign after she tried and failed to find a pretext to ban Palestine marches, but Labour in power found a pretext to forbid the coalition that calls the marches – Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition and Friends of Al Aqsa – from assembling at the BBC on 18th January. There were numerous arrests over that, including of some of the key organisers of the protests. Even MPs who participated were threatened by the cops. The pretext being that there is a synagogue half a mile away. Now the government is seeking to pass new anti-protest laws to give the police powers to ban protests that supposedly might disrupt religious services by passing near to some prayer house. It’s obviously designed to find excuses to arbitrarily ban demonstrations, particularly against the Gaza Holocaust. Thus, this pro-genocide government is as big a threat to democratic rights as Trump in some ways.
Reform, racism and working-class alienation from Labour
A revolt against the government’s anti-worker character being directed through substantial working-class electoral support for the right-wing populist Reform is a dangerous occurrence in many ways, given that only last summer Britain erupted in a wave of racist riots and attempted pogroms led by people who are very much on the radar as part of Reform’s social base. Reform is a racist, xenophobic party, and a great deal of its appeal is to the most backward sections of the working class who given the defeats inflicted on the left in the previous period by Starmer, have gained influence in the wider working class. There is evidence in the public domain that Starmer’s project for the ruling class always was to destroy the Labour Party as a party with roots in the working class and hand it over to such right-wing forces, and even grounds for suspicion that Starmer was some kind of operative for British intelligence, or something similar, even in the days in the early 1980s when he professed to be a supporter of Militant and other more obscure factions of the Trotskyist left. He was promoted with great rapidity by the ruling class after serving some kind of apprenticeship, it seems.
Those in the Labour Party who want to throw Starmer/Reeves’ draconian attacks overboard to save the Labour Party are behaving quite logically. For Reform, while much of its appeal to backward layers of the working class is simply xenophobic and racist, there is also an element reflects working class discontent with neoliberalism that a working-class party ought to find ways to give expression to. There were already, before the May elections, the beginnings of stirrings of opposition in the labour movement to the government’s attacks: threats of large-scale rebellion by MPs pushed by opposition to the disability benefit cuts. Though these MP’s, except for the fringe of leftists such as Zahra Sultana who were previously punished by Stamer for rebelling also over the two-child cap, tend to be opportunists whose words mean little. There is agitation against the cuts in some trade unions, particularly the Fire Brigades Union, and there is already a major local clash between the government and the UNITE union over a bitter, and militant, bin workers strike in Birmingham, whose council is bankrupt due to austerity. The possibility of some attempt to impose conscription of young workers to fight in Ukraine is a possibility, though maybe remote due to the sclerotic state of the British armed forces. Whether they could even organise conscription effectively is open to massive doubt. But this is also a possible source of mass opposition.
Such things are tangential to the contradictions within Reform’s base. Craig Murray points out:
“So what are the actual politics of this? Well, Reform voters are primarily motivated by dislike of immigration. While there are respectable economic arguments over the desirability of immigration, the simple truth is that most Reform voters are rather motivated by racist dislike of foreigners. I know that I have commenters here who like to deny this, but frankly, I do not live under a rock, I have fought elections, I used to live in the then-UKIP hotspot of Thanet, and I do not have a romanticised regard for the working class, and I have no doubt that Reform primarily channels racism.
“But the interesting thing is that does not mean that Reform voters are ‘right-wing’ in an economic sense. Opinion polls have found that most Reform voters favour renationalisation of public utilities, for example, and Farage has appealed to this by advocating for the nationalisation of the water industry and backing the nationalisation of the steel industry. Reform voters also favour rent controls, employment protections, and minimum wage legislation. On the left/right axis in economic policy, Reform voters are very substantially to the left of their party leadership, who almost certainly do not really believe in any of those things at all, though they may sometimes pretend.” (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/05/the-strange-death-of-social-democratic-britain/)
This really is a symptom of how the Labour Party has betrayed the working class. Over 50 years since the Wilson-Callaghan government kicked off the neoliberal offensive with its 1976 IMF-dictated cuts in the Welfare State and the NHS, and then Labour betrayed the miners’ strike of 1984-5 on the road to transforming itself into an openly pro-capitalist, neoliberal party under Tony Blair by abolishing Clause 4, Labour’s formal commitment to something approximating to parliamentary socialism. One particularly salient aspect of Craig Murray’s narrative is the way he points out how George Galloway’s Workers Party of Great Britain (WP) has adapted to this mixed sentiment, including the xenophobia and implicit racism, instead of acting to separate out these two strands in its intervention in the Runcorn by-election:
“George Galloway with the Workers’ Party has attempted to provide the mix of social conservatism in culture wars, including anti-immigration messaging, combined with left-wing economic policy, which might define a kind of left-wing populism, but failed miserably in Runcorn. It is only fair of me to make my own position clear, having stood for the Workers’ Party in the General Election on the issue of stopping the genocide. I do not support the culture wars agenda of the Workers’ Party and would not associate myself with the ‘Tough on Immigration, Tough on the Causes of Immigration’ messaging the party used in Runcorn, even with the second half of that message emphasising an end to imperialist destabilisation of vulnerable countries. It is still too dog-whistle for my taste.”
The Workers Party, in pandering to anti-migrant sentiments of this sort, even though to a degree it is benefiting from an element of semi-submerged class-consciousness that is part of the political makeup of Reform’s base, is not acting as an independent working-class force. Divide and rule is the agenda of the British ruling class – dividing the working class along xenophobic and racist lines. In tailing after Reform, the WP is tailing after the agenda of the British ruling class. Those rulers may have serious disagreements with Trump about Ukraine, but they are broadly in favour of his social reactionary measures and the role they are playing in dividing workers. This lack of class politics is also shown in the Workers Party’s approval of the British Supreme Court’s recent ruling against transexual rights. The “Workers Party’s” idea of the working class appears to resemble Alf Garnett.
A Fascistic Attack on Transexuals
This judgement asserted the ‘primacy’ of ‘biological sex’ in determining who is allowed to go where when single sex facilities are open to the public, the most common of which are public toilets. As a result of this judgement, and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission ‘guidance’ that was rushed out shortly afterwards, it has been pointed out that in some cases transwomen – male to female transexuals – will be banned from using women’s toilets, while in other cases, the same transwomen will be banned from using men’s toilets as well. The converse is also likely to be true for transmen – female to male transsexuals.
Transsexuals are a tiny minority of the population, and this is a policy of the ruling class in using them as scapegoats, again for a divide-and-rule agenda. This is a fascist-like agenda that is obviously designed to terrorise and exclude trans people from public activities generally, and to whip up bigots and vigilantes against them. It is fitting that the new US administration whose political clout no doubt acted upon the minds of Britain’s lackey Supreme Court ‘Justices’ in coming up with this decision, at its inaugural in January, greeted the world with two Nazi salutes from the world’s richest billionaire, Elon Musk, which signified the culture wars the Trump regime intends to wage against workers and oppressed minorities around the world, including first of all against the social and political gains of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The British ruling class are on this, as on so many other issues, simply lackeys of the US.
Starmer certainly is a lackey of the US, and a partner in crime of Trump. In this regard he immediately did another about-face and wholeheartedly backed the British Supreme Court’s anti-trans judgement. Though he, and others in Europe, have been whinging for the past few months that Trump had not been on board for Biden’s previous policy of arming and funding Ukrainian Nazis, which culminated in the last period of Biden’s presidency in Britain being given permission to fire Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia, skirting WWIII (at least Biden was sufficiently discreet as to not have his leading spokespeople giving Nazi salutes at public events, however). Starmer must be very pleased that now Trump has now once again given the green light for such blatant acts of war, which they clearly are since Ukraine does not have the skills or satellite equipment to fire and target Storm Shadow. The latest Starmerite provocation in this regard is a contingent of troops from Nazi Maidan Ukraine marching on VE Day, supposedly to celebrate the defeat of Hitler, while these Nazis engage in terrorist threats and actual attacks against Russia aimed at the real 9th May Victory Day celebrations of those who actually did defeat the Nazis, in Moscow.
For all the confected outrage from various US and European social liberals and the like over Trump’s pause in Biden’s war, Starmer hastened to Washington to kiss Trump’s posterior, and now even jointly attacked Yemen with Trump’s forces in defence of the genocide of the Palestinian people. This joint action with a US president who has openly endorsed the forcible expulsion of the Gaza population to make way for an Israeli-US ‘Riviera’ in the Gaza Strip intensifies even more Labour’s involvement in the genocide. The only government in the region that has tried to enforce the Genocide Convention against Israel is that of Yemen, and now British forces have joined Netanyahu-Trump’s SS Einsatzkommandos in directly committing atrocities against those resisting the genocide, which has apparently forced Yemen into a ceasefire. It could well be the most successful act of genocidal solidarity since Hitler destroyed the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 as retaliation for the Czech partisan assassination of Reynard Heydrich, the Nazi butcher of Prague.
What is really missing is a party that can crystallise opposition to this dying neoliberal regime on a class struggle, Marxist basis. The British section of the LCFI participates in all initiatives that point in that direction, such as the Socialist Labour Network, with the aim of crystallising such a party programmatically capable to developing in a revolutionary direction beyond failed social democracy, whose neoliberal remnants are strangling the labour movement.
