I. The Reset That Wasn’t
The first year of Keir Starmer’s Labour government has already dissolved into the familiar language of “resets.” Angela Rayner’s resignation provided the pretext for another one: new faces shuffled across departments, Peter Kyle promoted to Business, Jonathan Reynolds moved, Justin Madders gone. The Independent could hardly contain its relief, praising ministers for listening to industry and commerce while urging caution in “loading on extra costs for business.” Workers’ rights, we are told, are desirable in principle but dangerous in practice.
The Employment Rights Bill — banning fire-and-rehire, ending compulsory zero-hours contracts, giving day-one protections for sick pay and parental leave — is reframed not as modest reform but as a potential drag on competitiveness. Business, after all, has suffered: Brexit, Trump’s tariffs, high energy costs, anaemic growth. What it cannot withstand, the Independent insists, is the radical burden of bereavement leave.
The sleight of hand is obvious. Workers did not design Osborne’s gilts indexed to inflation, nor preside over decades of under-investment, nor invite Trump’s tariffs. They are the victims, not the cause, of economic crisis. Yet they are asked (again) to carry the weight. The dialectic is familiar: crisis caused by capital, solution imposed on labour.
II. The Mirage of Flexibility
The word that reappears, over and again, is flexibility. Britain must hold on to its one remaining competitive advantage: a flexible labour market. This is not new. Since Thatcher, flexibility has been the euphemism for precarity. It means no job security, no rights until you’ve survived a probation period, no guaranteed hours unless you beg for them.
The Independent insists that zero-hours should remain, if “workers request them.” What is concealed here is the reality of choice under capitalism: the “request” of a worker desperate for hours is indistinguishable from coercion. The employer holds the whip hand; the contract of “mutual flexibility” masks a one-sided relationship of dependence.
Forty years of flexibility have not produced dynamism. They have produced stagnation. Britain’s productivity crisis is not because workers enjoy too much security but because capital has enjoyed too much. Speculation in property, rentier profits, a financial system designed to drain rather than invest. The Labour government could confront this. Instead, it repeats the mantra that workers must not be indulged at the expense of “business confidence.”
III. The Sickness of Work
If proof were needed, The Times obliges. Sick days are at their highest level in fifteen years: nearly two working weeks lost per worker on average. To employers, this is a crisis of absenteeism. To workers, it is a symptom of a deeper sickness: stress, disability, long-term health conditions. 8.7 million adults of working age now live with disability, two million more than five years ago. One in four has a life-limiting condition.
The prescription is always the same: carrots and sticks to keep the sick in employment. Sir Charlie Mayfield proposes precisely that: a system of incentives and punishments to manage absence. Ministers boast it is cheaper to keep the ill working than to support them on benefits. The cruelty is transparent: health becomes a cost, the sick become a fiscal burden, and the measure of policy is not whether people live with dignity but whether they can be coerced into productivity.
Hybrid work has helped some, but the basic logic remains: human beings are treated as capital inputs. The idea that the solution might lie in reducing work, in redistributing wealth, in building a society less reliant on squeezing labour to exhaustion, this is all excluded from debate.
IV. Gaza as Loyalty Test
Meanwhile, the deputy leadership contest reveals how much of this is bound up with questions of loyalty. Gaza, Tim Stanley sneers, has “seeped into the very pores of the Labour Party.” He is not wrong about its centrality. As Vietnam once defined the American left, as Iraq defined a generation here, Gaza defines the present.
The arrests of Palestine solidarity protesters (elderly, priests, ordinary working people) have become a flashpoint. Labour MPs ask whether Isaac Herzog should himself be investigated for war crimes. The response from the right is mockery: Marxist eco-loons, peaceniks, the usual suspects. Yet what is at stake is not fringe radicalism but the party’s claim to moral seriousness.
Rayner, whatever her contradictions, had been one of Labour’s most effective attack dogs against Farage and Reform. Her removal weakens that flank, leaving unions to warn that Labour risks ceding working-class ground to the right. The danger is not abstract: Reform feeds on the same discontent that unions channel, but turns it against migrants and protesters rather than bosses and landlords. To retreat on Gaza abroad and on labour rights at home is to abandon the very people Labour claims to represent.
V. The IMF Spectre
Lurking in the background, shaping every calculation, is the IMF. In 1976 Denis Healey went cap in hand; Labour paid with eighteen years in opposition. Today, Rachel Reeves insists Britain is not seeking a bailout. But the ghost is enough. Bond yields creep upward, the OBR issues warnings, and ministers cite “fiscal responsibility” as justification for delay.
The IMF plays what its own officials call the “bogeyman role.” It need not lend; its presence alone disciplines. Governments invoke its advice as cover for cuts they already intended to make. As one former IMF director admitted: “Sometimes ministers agree with us, but prefer to blame the IMF.”
Reeves is already consulting IMF advice on how to tweak her fiscal rules. The point is not whether Britain is “too big to bail.” It is that the logic of IMF discipline (liberalisation, restraint, austerity) has been internalised by Labour itself. The OBR enforces the same discipline domestically: ambition measured against the bond markets, never against the electorate.
VI. Managed Decline Dressed as Moderation
Louise Haigh, declining to run for deputy leader, put it plainly: “Managed decline dressed up as moderation will not do.” Yet that is exactly what Starmerism offers. A diluted rights bill, delayed and compromised. A fiscal framework designed to shrink ambition. A foreign policy that criminalises solidarity. A party too timid to confront Farage, too obedient to reassure Deutsche Bank.
Unions sense the betrayal. Sharon Graham hints at disaffiliation, the Fire Brigades Union warns of “robust” responses, Paul Nowak pleads for Labour to show “whose side you are on.” The question is not rhetorical. It is the dialectical core of the present.
Starmer says “country before party.” But whose country? The one in which bond yields dictate fiscal policy? The one in which sickness is a liability, Gaza is a loyalty test, and profit is sacred? Or the country of millions who voted Labour for transformation, not technocracy?
VII. Whose Side Are You On?
The Labour leadership insists it can square the circle: pro-worker, pro-business. The unions know otherwise. Reform’s rise proves otherwise. Gaza’s rage proves otherwise. The IMF’s shadow proves otherwise.
A Labour government cannot serve two masters. It cannot placate the bond markets while delivering for workers. It cannot defend business competitiveness while promising dignity. It cannot criminalise solidarity abroad while claiming to stand with the oppressed at home.
The choice is unavoidable: capital or labour, discipline or solidarity, decline or renewal. The question, repeated from picket lines to party conferences, echoes through every editorial and every protest arrest: whose side are you on?
