In his first major speech as Prime Minister on Tuesday, 27 August, UK Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, warned that life for people in Britain ‘is going to get worse’ before it gets better. Referencing ‘tough choices’ and ‘difficult’, ‘unpopular decisions’, Starmer has resurrected the language of erstwhile Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, slasher of council budgets and the social security nexus in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Like Osborne, Starmer spoke of the need to ‘be honest with people’ concerning the nature of UK finances and the £22bn ‘black hole’ left by the Tories that sits at its centre.

If honesty was what was desired, however, then it would have to involve acknowledging that rather than there being ‘no choice’ other than to impose further austerity on an already ravaged nation, economic decisions are always political decisions and that the further proposed measures spring from a decided set of political and economic choices. The idea that the deficit was unknown in advance of assuming power strains credulity, given that everyone, including the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility), who provided a very similar figure prior to the recent election itself, knew of the pressures on budgets. The real problem is that the political choices that the Labour government are making will pass the burden of economic facilitation onto the backs of those least able, but also the most consistently asked, to bear it (of course, women, people of colour, and disabled persons, bear the brunt of these policies). This is the ‘pain’ that Starmer is asking them to bear for the benefit of supposed ‘long-term good’.

Refusing to scrap the Conservative government’s two-child benefit cap, will needlessly consign millions to poverty in a land in which poverty has risen sharply over the past 10 years. Added to this, Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have decided to remove the Winter Fuel payment offered to millions of struggling pensioners, in a country that has struggled far more than other comparable countries with energy affordability in the midst of what has been record profits for energy companies. That such profits have grown at the same time as the spread of food banks across the country remains a striking illustration of the Dickensian reality of capitalism in the UK in recent years.

Questions are being asked as to whether the new government has any real economic ideas at all. Despite the clearly dysfunctional nature of the UK economy, which is more and more a rentier economy, and one which lacks the productivity and spread of wealth of some of its European competitors. Labour refused to tax the super-rich or consider proposals that would radically alter the landscape of British society. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has instead spoken of the need for local authorities, decimated by the austerity policies of the previous Conservative governments, to further tighten their belts (the fact that Starmer is on record as having accepted more gifts from wealthy backers than all Labour leaders combined since 1997 only serves to heighten the outrage).

All of this raises a question about their commitment to the failed orthodoxy of austerity. A concern with debt-to-GDP ratios is stressed by those connected to Labour as implicated in their economic calculations, but the class nature of the project should also be recognised. As Clara Mattei notes in her recent book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, austerity policies have their roots in the early twentieth century, in the efforts by post-WWI economic and political elites to crush working-class power. While the Labour government has settled long-running industrial disputes with junior doctors and teachers and has ended the farce of Rwandan concentration camps, Starmer himself has waged a war on the left of the Labour Party and seems to lack the will to push the bounds of the possible within the limits of managed capitalism. The fact that austerity policies almost always fail to meet their stated goals of stabilising the economy cannot be ignored by anyone who studies history. At the same time, their capacity to intervene decisively in the class struggle is readily apparent to any Marxist worth their salt. It is clear to most where Labour stands relative to class struggle.

What this means for the future of the Labour Party and of political discourse in the UK may soon become clearer. Starmer, who has the lowest approval ratings of any sitting Prime Minister at this early of their premiership, has obliterated any hope that he was willing to chart a different course. After 14 years of Tory rule, to enter government with a 173-seat majority and then to declare that there is nothing that can be done other than to continue with such inhuman Tory policy will cause clear disgruntlement in a population already angered and disenfranchised.

Of course, as Marxist humanists, we know that the little that can be offered in terms of the welfare provisions of state capitalism does little in terms of challenging the central abstract dominations of economic life. While this is so, they nevertheless constitute a meaningful baseline level of relief to those at the sharpest end of the wage bargain – a level of crude dignity otherwise denied in a system based around production for profit. Labour’s failure to even try to resurrect the crude dignity of Keynesian policy should force us to question anew the configurations of contemporary strategies for capital accumulation and what our resistance to them should be.