By Paul Moorhouse PRMI in Scotland. 27 May 2025
11 months ago British voters decisively voted to reject the increasingly crisis ridden right-wing Tory party which had been in government since 2010. The incoming Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed that with 411 out of 650 parliamentary seats he had a ‘clear mandate to rule for all four nations’. How does that stack up nearly a year on? Just who is Starmer ‘ruling for’?
However, this impressive parliamentary majority never reflected more than lukewarm support in any part of the (increasingly dis-) United Kingdom. Labour contested none of the 18 constituencies in the north of Ireland. Those seats they fought were won mostly because Labour was not the Tories in England and Wales and neither the Tories nor the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party, north of the border. On 33.7% Labour only increased its share of the vote by 1.6% compared with its ‘worst ever’ result in 2019, whilst the Tory vote plummeted by almost 20%.
The threat of right-populism
Lack of enthusiasm for any establishment parties was demonstrated on the one hand by low turnonout and voter registration, barely half of those eligible too vote did so, and on the other by the election for the first time of the far-right racist Reform UK and a number of independent candidates, opposed to the genocide in Gaza (especially in constituencies with large Muslim populations).
Thus Labour’s victory only superficially contradicted the world-wide eclipse of the political ‘centre’. Growing polarisation below the surface reflected popular frustration with the social and economic cost of the crisis of the profit system. Without organised resistance by the oppressed and exploited, this can only strengthen the far right, and fascistic, reaction.
The reality of this was brought home barely three weeks after the election when racist riots broke out across England and the north of Ireland targeting asylum seekers threatening to break into and burn down their hotels and hostels.
The potential for a mass fightback however was shown when hundreds of thousands joined anti-fascist demonstrations and vigils over the first weekend in August, and in Belfast 15,000 people turned out on 10th August (an equivalent mobilisation in London would be approaching a third of a million).
Starmer’s Labour acts in interest of big business
The lack of any enthusiasm for Labour stemmed from its anxiety to present itself as a ‘safe pair of hands’ to British and International capital. Before and after the election Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, fawned on big business and financiers promising to stick to Tory austerity rules and became obsessively anxious to dampen down voter expectations by avoiding ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unaffordable’ pledges in their manifesto.
This was bad enough, but the reality however proved far worse. Three weeks after being elected, Reeves told Parliament that Winter Fuel Payments made to 11.6 million disabled and older citizens were to be scrapped for all but the 1.8 million poorest pensioners. The payments, worth between £200 and £600 in the previous two years, were capped at £300 at a time when 6.1 million households were estimated to be in fuel poverty and energy prices were driving a cost of living crisis.
A year on, whilst forced by widespread opposition into a promise to ‘review’ these cuts in 2026, Labour has announced swingeing cuts to health and disability benefits which, if implemented, will push 400,000 more people into poverty.
100,000 hospital posts are threatened in England alone in plans announced by Health Secretary Wes Streeting and yet more cuts are certain to be announced when Reeves delivers her spending review on 11th June. Many of these have already been implemented by freezing recruitment, leaving essential posts empty.
The potential to resist these attacks is shown by the firm rejection of a derisory 4% pay increase by the doctors’ union the British Medical Association. However, effective action requires a strong united front based on rank and file organisation and accountability in all unions. It was frankly an insult to their members that the right-wing bureaucracy of the biggest health union, Unison, invited Streeting to address its health conference this year.
The right-wing “Reform” party wins local elections
In view of their shared record of pursuing vicious class war politics, forcing the poorest to bear the brunt of capitalist crisis, it is little surprise that Labour and the Tories both took a beating in council elections across England on May 1st. Both parties lost control of all the councils they had held prior to the elections.
However they faced little resistance to their diet of austerity. The closest to an effective opposition came from the Green party, which is largely untested in power in Britain and managed to double the number of seats it holds.
In the absence of any real alternative, the biggest gains were made by the racist far-right Reform UK party, which was able to present itself as ‘anti establishment’. In reality ,however, most of the councillors running the 10 local authorities Reform now control are well-heeled business people, many of them (including Sarah Pochin who won the Runcorn by-election, the same day, to become the party’s fifth MP) have defected from the right of the Tory Party.
Reform adminstations have set about emulating the ‘slash and burn’ far-right policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, on occasion this has an air of farce, for instance their pledge to ‘abolish Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’ – despite the fact that none of their councils have any!
Resistance needs to be built
Women, trans-people and above all people of colour living in many of the poorest communities have every reason to be very afraid in the face of the racist, misogynistic and LGBTQ+-phobic rhetoric and actions of these suburban mini-Hitlers.
It is vital that in every area rank and file union activists, community organisations and user groups establish conferences of resistance and other organs of struggle to build a democratically organised intersectional fight-back against these council attacks and the cuts raining down on jobs, services and rights from central government. Through this kind of grass root unified struggle the trade unions can be transformed and working people can regain the political voice needed to beat reaction.
Reform’s victory does not however, represent a fundamental shift to the right by the majority of working class or even middle class people in former labour strongholds such as Durham. In large part it reflects a deepening of the disengagement from, and demoralisation with, establishment politics. Although this prepared the way for Starmer’s ‘super majority’, it is disappearing just as rapidly as it came into being.
However it also reflects the very real strengthening of the populist far-right world wide. Reform leader Nigel Farage represents a similar threat to the rights and liberties of ordinary people in Britain as Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Orban in Hungary and Modi in India.
Reform also provides a rallying point for the ugly fascist thugs who organised the attempted pogroms against asylum seekers, Muslims and people of colour on the streets last August. For this reason they must be opposed decisively.
Labour moves further to the right
Starmer’s politics is now focussed on the threat Reform poses to his electoral base. His ‘solution’ is to capitulate to, and even ape, Farage’s programme of chauvinism, misogyny and hate.
On 12 May he introduced an immigration white paper. His speech was full of racist ‘dog whistles’, including accusing previous Tory administrations of turning Britain into a ‘nation of strangers’. This was straight out of Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, for which Powell was driven out of the Tory Party as too racist.
The proposals in this white paper to ‘end reliance on overseas labour’ represent a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of 6.8 million foreign born workers (one in five of the labour force).
Scandalously the response of most trade union leaders has been to line up alongside the bosses of the food, care and other industries who use migrant workers’ current legal precariousness to undermine wage levels rather than launch a serious campaign for the rights and living standards of all workers.
Starmer has also engaged in a campaign to attack the rights of asylum seekers, seeking to prevent refugees reaching Britain to claim asylum. His first foreign trip after becoming Premier was to meet his Italian opposite number the far right Giorgia Meloni (inheritor of Benito Musolin’s political legacy) to discuss ‘border security’ in which he has since invested £75 million.
Retreat from ‘defending womens’ rights’
Migrants and people of colour are not the only ones caught up in the net of Labour’s headlong rush to the right and ramping up of state powers . The threat to the trans community is, if anything, even more immediately existential.
The English NHS under Wes Streeting has banned puberty blockers for young trans people (a step which was immediately followed by the administrations in the other three nations) Following a recent Supreme Court ruling Labour are rolling back the rights of trans women to use women’s spaces everywhere from public toilets and changing rooms to hospital wards. British Transport Police have even announced that in future trans women will be body searched by male officers.
Starmer defends this intrusive interference with the dignity and bodily autonomy of trans women (which amounts to sexual assault by officers of the state) as a ‘defence of women’s rights’ and has even rolled back on his previous confirmation that ‘trans women are women’.
But it represents a wider capitulation on his part and that of the Liberal establishment, and British state to the misogynist agenda of the far right which threatens cis-women as well.
This was confirmed by the revelation that the National Police Chiefs’ Council has issued chilling new guidance on investigating ‘child deaths’. Officers must now conduct investigations into all miscarriages and still-births, searching women’s homes for abortion drugs to “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy”.
This could also include checking a woman’s internet searches, messages to friends and family, and health apps, “such as menstrual cycle and fertility trackers”. Police will also be able to obtain medical records from NHS providers without obtaining a court order.
These draconian powers and procedures would not look out of place in Republican Alabama. The president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), said: “The new guidance is shocking. Women in these circumstances have a right to compassionate care and to have their dignity and privacy respected, not to have their homes, phones, computers and health apps searched, or be arrested and interrogated.”
And yet further militarisation
Internationally Starmer has thrown Labour wholeheartedly in support of NATO’s offensive in Ukraine and, despite muted criticism of Netanyahu’s most recent escalation of the genocide in Gaza, continues to arm Isael. In fact he cynically portrays both these blood baths as ‘opportunities’ for growth in Britain’s arms industry, whilst abandoning zero-carbon targets which if linked to common-ownership of the fuel industry and a radical democratic plan for energy transition could create well-paid jobs and eliminate fuel poverty at home.
Starmer speaks of his ‘vision’ for ‘hard working Britons’. In reality, by shackling us to the burnt out profit system, he is conjuring up a spectral nightmare of a militarised and impoverished island where racism, misogyny and transphobia rule our lives. We deserve better and must fight for it.