Same old story...

The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves,  says Labour is cutting NHS waiting lists, the cost of living and government debt while boosting productivity, investment and growth. But this week’s budget contained few surprises with spending plans that had largely already been floated in the media by Starmer aides eager to prepare the public for a mediocre financial review that does next to  nothing to end austerity or reverse the decline in the living standards of working people. 
Sure there were some sweeteners in the Reeves budget like the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap. The state pension will rise by 4.8 percent – £440 a year – and by £575 for people on the newer pension scheme.  And the national living wage and national minimum wage will also be increased.
Starmer & Co call on everyone “to make a contribution” to protect public services and help people struggling with the cost of living. But in reality workers will continue to bear the burden of the capitalist crisis in higher taxes and further cuts to what’s left of the public services.

A step too far...

“Trial by jury is a cornerstone of our democracy and an essential safeguard against authoritarianism “ says Jeremy Corbyn. “It is truly frightening that such a fundamental freedom is now under attack. Once rights are lost, they are not easy to win back. We must resist this with all we’ve got”. 
But, incredible it as it may seems,  the Starmer Government is indeed thinking of scrapping jury trials in England and Wales for all but the most serious of cases. Starmer’s deputy, the Justice Minister David Lammy,  is proposing to massively restrict the ancient right to a jury trial by only guaranteeing it for defendants facing rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases passing a public interest test.
The plans, obtained by BBC News, are allegedly an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in the courts. But juries are founded on the principle of a fair hearing and a trial of one’s peers. They are considered by many, including legal professionals, to be the cornerstone of our criminal justice system. Judges and barristers have joined in the chorus of opposition to this attack on jury trials forcing Lammy to think again.  He now says that “no final decision” had been made amid rumours of a U-turn in favour of  more modest plans for jury-less super-magistrate courts to hear to cases likely to receive a maximum sentence of three years that was originally floated in the independent review by Sir Brian Leveson. 
Abolishing jury trials would clearly dismantle a core constitutional safeguard that has existed for more than eight centuries. It is the first step towards a police-state. But, at the moment,   it also seems to be a step too far for the bourgeoisie as whole to take if the response of the legal community is anything to go by. 

Robbing the poor

Though the Tories care little or nothing for the working people they exploit to keep the bourgeoisie in clover they have to pose, like virtuous Roman Senators, as impartial governors of the state machine  –  especially in the run-up to the general election. When the going is good the bourgeoisie will sacrifice a tiny fraction of their immense wealth to maintain the health service and what’s left of the “welfare state”. When times hard – and they certainly are now as we enter the 16th  year of a recession that still shows no sign of recovery – they will try to pass the entire burden onto the backs of the workers with austerity measures that they call the “national interest”.
This week’s Spring Budget was no exception. Jeremy Hunt tinkers around income tax and national insurance contributions but at the end of the day it was as Keir Starmer said "just another short-term cynical political gimmick”.
This is a budget for the wealthy drawn up a government that represents the ruling class. People on low incomes or benefits will be hit by cuts in the social wage. Pensioners face an average £1,000 hit to their incomes because of the tax changes. The Labour leader says the Tories “give with one hand and take even more with the other" and "nothing they do between not and the election will change that” – and on this occasion he’s quite right. But Labour has nothing to offer in exchange. 
The renationalisation of all the utilities, industries and services that were once in public ownership would pour billions back into the Treasury. The health service could be rescued by restoring the wealth and profit taxes of the Wilson era and scrapping the Trident nuclear arms system could easily provide the funds to end the homelessness crisis. But the Starmer leadership is committed to maintaining the tax-break regime that began after the Tory come-back in 1979  
Paul Nowak, the General Secretary of the TUC slammed “a deeply cynical budget” packed with “wishful thinking on productivity and pre- election gimmicks”.  We need a government that will take responsibility for growth, Nowak said, with stronger public services and strengthened public infrastructure not least to meet the climate crisis. For working people up and down the country a change of government cannot come to soon.
Indeed. We will all be glad to see the back of Sunak. But we’ve also got to defeat the class collaborators and bureaucrats who run Labour and most of the unions these days. If we don’t we can only expect the same again from Starmer & Co.

A slap in the face for Starmer

Galloway bagged almost 40 per cent of the vote in the Rochdale by-election last week that was dominated by the war in Gaza. Starmer and the sad-sack Blairites that surround him told us that the average Labour voter wasn’t interested in Palestine. Last week proved them wrong.
Though there is a substantial Muslim minority in Rochdale the swing to Galloway and his new Workers’ Party of Britain went far beyond the Muslim community. Disowning their own candidate for supporting Palestine and making remarks deemed to be “anti-Semitic” by the Starmer bureaucracy didn’t help Labour either.
Galloway says he believes his win will “spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates in scores of parliamentary constituencies”. But, of course, we’ve heard all this before.
The MP kicked out of Labour for opposing the imperialist invasion of Iraq in 2003 returned to Parliament on two previous occasion on his old Respect platform. But Respect never took off as a national party. Whether Galloway is third-time lucky this time round remains to be seen but without the mass support of the union movement that seems unlikely. 
Nevertheless George Galloway’s victory was a slap in the face for Starmer & Co. It augurs well for Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election in London and it was a warning shot to Labour to never take their traditional vote for granted. Now it’s their turn to look over their shoulder. Let them wonder where their slavish support for Israeli aggression and boot-licking the Americans is taking them...   

The language they understand

Budget Day is never good news for workers – least of all when it’s under a Tory government. But whilst the Chancellor droned on in Parliament workers were walking out in a new wave of strikes against the austerity regime. Tube workers and train drivers, junior doctors, teachers and civil servants were all taking industrial action over pay.
    Down the ages the employers’ mantra has always been “Management’s right to manage”. In its purest form, it is expressed in the Master and Servant laws of the Victorian era when unions were barely legal, and the ‘corporate’ laws of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In post-war Western ‘democracies’ the corporate class do their best to marginalise unions and limit the right to strike.
    The bosses claim that they have their workers’ best interests at heart and that strikes are pointless and useless. But no-one believes them.
    If it wasn’t for the unions, kids would still be climbing up chimneys whilst their parents slaved away in factories and mines six days a week for just enough to keep them going.
    The five-day week, paid holidays, pensions, free health care and education, all the trappings of what we used to call the Welfare State – were won by the labour movement. Genuine reforms by Labour governments brought in the health and safety legislation and recognition laws that empowered the unions in the 1970s.
    Those days may be forgotten but what workers still know is that free collective bargaining is meaningless without the ability to withdraw one’s labour. And at the end of the day, the only thing Management understands is industrial action.
    

One–Nil to Lineker

Gary Lineker has been reinstated as presenter of Match of the Day following an apology from the BBC. The BBC has wisely backed down over the Lineker saga whilst the Government tries to distance itself from a row that was clearly of its own making.
    The Government clearly wanted to silence Lineker who had Tweeted his objections to the Government’s new asylum seekers’ plan – a widely-publicised but clearly personal opinion made in his own time and on his own Twitter account.
    Many believe that the Government wanted the BBC to make an example of the sporting guru. The Government clearly believed that packing cross-Channel asylum seekers off to Rwanda was a vote winner that would shore up Tory support in the so-called “Red Belt” of northern seats taken from Labour at the last general election. But they were much mistaken.
    Millions of people supported the football guru who was suspended for comparing the language used by the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to introduce the new Tory ‘Illegal Immigration Bill’ to that used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Millions more defended the former England player’s right to free speech – a right supported by Lineker’s colleagues who walked out in sympathy. Even the supine Labour leader was moved by the furore over the sports presenter to call on Rishi Sunak to “stand up to his snowflake MPs waging war on free speech” following the Gary Lineker row.
    What Lineker said was quite right. The Tory plans are indeed “beyond awful”. As he said: “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ‘30s.”

More Tory rubbish

The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, tells us that austerity is coming to an end. But there was little sign of that in his budget statement to parliament this week. Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell rejected his claim, saying that more welfare cuts were come. He also said that prisons, schools and local authorities would not have much to celebrate about the new budget, and should be preparing for more difficult years ahead.

Hammond said this was a budget for "strivers, grafters and carers". But it was, as usual, a budget for the capitalists, bankers, industrialists and landowners who really run this country. The Chancellor doled out some sops to provide the mainstream media with more fake news about a “give away” budget for “Middle England”. But robbing Peter to pay Paul seldom fools anyone these days.

The bourgeois media trumpeted Hammond’s decision to lift some low-paid workers out of income taxation by raising the personal allowance to £12,500. But raising the higher tax band to £50,000 will benefit the high-earners whose loyalty the Tories need to retain at the next election.

A one-off £400 million “bonus” for schools to buy “little extras” goes nowhere to compensate for a decade of cuts, whilst the much vaunted £4 billion for mental healthcare comes out of the existing £20 billion already earmarked for the NHS, which everyone who works in the health service thinks is woefully inadequate.

Hammond says that austerity will end but “discipline will remain”, which means the same in Tory-speak. No wonder the Labour leader has called this a “broken-promise budget”. Jeremy Corbyn points out that the spending plans bring no benefit to poorer people and will only lead to further cuts to many public services.

Corbyn deplored the decision not to reverse the benefit freeze, saying: “The benefit freeze takes £1.5bn from 10 million low- and middle-income households. A low-income household with children will be £200 worse off. For them, there is no end to austerity. Labour would have ended the benefit freeze.”

Corbyn told parliament: “This government is harsh on the weak and feeble on the strong… This budget won’t undo the damage done by eight years of austerity and doesn’t begin to measure up to the scale of the job that needs to be done to rebuild Britain.”

That job can only be done by Labour. Corbyn’s overwhelming support within the trade union movement and the rank-and-file of the Labour party shows that Labour is still a potentially strong weapon for our class. Although the New Communist Party has never confused Labour with a revolutionary party, nor imagined that we can build a people’s democracy through parliamentary elections, a Labour government, with its organisational links with the trade unions and the co-operative movement, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

Our strategy is for working class unity. We struggle to defeat the right-wing within the movement, and campaign to strengthen the left within the Labour Party and the unions. We support Labour’s demands for the restoration of trade union rights, progressive taxation, state welfare and a public sector dedicated to meet the people’s needs.

The shaky Tory coalition is riven with dissent over the European Union. It can and must be brought down to pave the way to a new general election. Mass pressure from the labour and peace movement is needed to speed the day and ensure that Labour gets a big enough mandate at the next general election to govern without the dubious assistance of the Scottish National Party or the Liberal Democrats.