Stability
“All UK families are set to be worse off by 2030,” the Resolution Foundation warned this week in the Guardian, “with the poorest hit hardest.” That is not an unfortunate side effect of economic policy; it is the policy. Median incomes will remain below pre-pandemic levels for the rest of the decade. There will be no recovery. Just a permanent, managed decline, accompanied by the fiction that the right kind of stewardship might make it gentler.
Rachel Reeves has been clear about what her party will offer. Labour will accept “tough decisions” and is preparing £18bn of departmental cuts. According to The Independent, Reeves will ask the civil service to draw up plans to slash administrative budgets by 15%, saving £2.2bn a year. No department is exempt, not even those already in crisis. This is not a critique of Tory spending plans. It’s a continuation.
“Labour is not here to dismantle austerity — only to run it more quietly.”
In the Guardian, it was reported that Reeves “raised the spectre of Liz Truss” to convince Labour MPs to support the cuts. She argued that Truss’s downfall proved the need for “economic credibility,” and warned that the markets, not voters, would punish any deviation from fiscal restraint. Starmer’s Labour is no longer pretending to be radical. It is not even pretending to be redistributive. It has adopted the logic of its enemies, and now asks only to administer it more competently.
There was a time when “fiscal responsibility” was a dog-whistle. Now it’s the tune. Reeves and Starmer aren’t just refusing to challenge Tory economic orthodoxy, they’ve embraced it wholesale. Growth is fetishised, but redistribution is taboo. Government is to be shrunk, even as inequality grows. And if the poorest suffer the most — as the Resolution Foundation projects — Labour’s only response is silence.
“Growth is fetishised, but redistribution is taboo.”
Cruelty
The government is also considering what it calls “reforms” to Personal Independence Payments, as reported in the Guardian. These include means-testing, mandatory treatment regimes, and replacing cash with services or vouchers. One proposal is to “tighten eligibility” for people with mental health conditions. The Department for Work and Pensions claims too many people are “being parked on welfare,” and that a “modern, tailored service” will offer more efficiency. In truth, it’s an attack on cash benefits for those least able to fight back.
The Guardian quotes a warning that such plans “could have serious consequences for the wellbeing of people who rely on PIP, and put more pressure on local authorities already at breaking point.” Labour has issued no criticism. Reeves has said she won’t scrap benefit sanctions or the two-child cap. Lisa Nandy has declined to commit to reversing Universal Credit cuts. Labour is not here to dismantle austerity, only to run it more quietly.
Meanwhile, The Independent reports that Brexit is costing UK businesses £10bn a year in lost trade. Food, chemical and manufacturing exports are among the hardest hit. Labour’s position remains unchanged: “We will not rejoin the single market, the customs union, or return to freedom of movement.” It is not strategy but submission, to a Brexit settlement that everyone knows has failed, but no one will name.
There is a vacuum where opposition should be. Into that vacuum steps Nigel Farage, who told Politico this week: “The system is completely broken. It’s a cartel between Labour and the Conservatives. And it needs to be smashed.” He’s not wrong about the system. But what he offers is the same old racist nationalism in new packaging, the politics of the gutter.
Labour has become a party of order without purpose. It promises growth but not redistribution, spending without borrowing, governance without politics. Starmer’s great achievement has been to reframe defeat as pragmatism. Thatcher once said her greatest triumph was New Labour. Starmer’s will be to ensure no one ever builds anything different.
Resistance?
And yet, resistance is beginning to reassert itself, not in declarations or party manifestos, but on picket lines, university campuses and the streets. In Birmingham, waste workers have been on strike since 11 March in a dispute over pay. Rubbish piles up, negotiations stall, and the Labour-led council pleads poverty, a line that could have been lifted straight from Whitehall. The pattern repeats across the country. In London, Heathrow cleaners working for British Airways staged a walkout over “poverty pay”, protesting at the airline’s headquarters on 15 March. The action was backed by Unite, whose general secretary has been among the few voices to criticise Labour’s unwillingness to challenge low pay across key industries.
At Newcastle University, staff launched a 14-day strike in response to £35 million in budget cuts that threaten up to 300 jobs. The University and College Union accuses management of targeting staff while corporate pay soars. These are not isolated events; they are fractures in a consensus that no longer holds.
On 16 March, demonstrators filled Westminster and east London under the banner of the Palestine Coalition. The Met described it as “a very busy weekend of protest.” It is not only about Palestine, it is about the way anger is policed and political energy corralled into acceptable channels. Labour, fearful of backlash in swing constituencies, remains silent or hostile.
“These acts of resistance are dispersed, tactical, and often defensive. But they are political.”
These acts of resistance are dispersed, tactical, and often defensive. But they are political. They mark out the beginning of a refusal, not only of specific policies, but of a political order that insists nothing can fundamentally change. Whether they congeal into a movement is another matter. But they contain, in embryo, the kind of politics Labour has abandoned: grounded, oppositional, collective.
The story of Starmer’s Britain is not yet over. But it is being written, in strike ballots, street marches, and the silences that follow betrayal. Labour no longer opposes the system. It administers it.
“Labour no longer opposes the system. It administers it.”
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