Ever since he won the Labour leadership, ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer has fallen over himself to prove his credentials to the establishment. Campaign pledges have been broken. The party has been purged of leftwingers. And working-class voters have been slapped in the face.

　　Labour’s so-called ‘New Deal for Working People’ is now next on the chopping block.

　　As part of this package on workers’ rights, Labour promised to ban ‘fire and rehire’, scrap zero-hours contracts, and repeal the 2016 anti-union laws (but not the rest of them!)

　　And yet despite previous pledge-breaking, this news seems to have come as a terrible shock to Britain’s union leaders.

　　“Totally unrecognisable”; “betrayal”: so reads the official response by Unite general secretary Sharon Graham to Starmer’s latest U-turn.

　　To maintain their profits, Broken Britain’s bosses see no option but to attack workers’ rights, pay and conditions. This is why they are pressuring Starmer into reneging on these pledges.

　　We know from his previous form what ‘Sir’ Kid Starver is really all about. He is a wooden marionette of the establishment and the capitalists.

　　This shows what life will be like under a Starmer government. Even the smallest promises that he cynically offers to workers will be dropped at the beck-and-call of the bosses.

　　So what are the unions doing to halt this? At the time of writing, a threat of reduced union funding to the Labour Party is as far as things have gone.

　　But such threats have been brushed aside by Starmer many times before. After all, if he can’t get money from them to pay the party’s bills, he’ll happily get it from big-business donors!

　　RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said earlier this year that voters had to “grow up” and vote Labour. But it sounds like it is the trade union leaders who ought to stand up, flex their muscles, and prepare for a fight with an incoming Starmer government and the capitalists they will faithfully serve.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  LiuTingting

　　From:https://communist.red/the-crisis-in-british-industry-and-the-need-for-fighting-leadership/（2024-5-14）