Starmer promised to introduce his ‘New Deal’ for workers within one hundred days of the election of a Labour government. Coming as it did two-thirds of the way through its first hundred days, the TUC Congress in Brighton should have drawn up a balance sheet of the initial stage of the new Labour government. This could have been the basis for a plan of union action to prepare workers for a response to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first budget at the end of October and the struggles to come. This didn’t happen. But the congress did reveal that there are two main trends within the union movement in how it responds to Starmer’s government.
Starmer’s speech to congress was in line with the narrative that he and Reeves have touted since they were elected in July. It was peppered with ‘difficult choices’ and the need for ‘partnership’ between the unions and the employers – a clear intention to try to mollify the unions ahead of likely Labour austerity. He spoke on the very day that his cut to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance was passed in parliament and the day before Tata Steel announced devastating job cuts, with his government doing little more than offer a measly £500 million handout already promised by Rishi Sunak’s Tory government.
At one wing of congress was the TUC leadership and, predictably, the leaders of unions such as the GMB and USDAW. From the rostrum, the day before Starmer’s speech, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak called on unions to “roll up their sleeves” to work with the Labour government.
However, this was immediately followed by two debates that posed a fighting alternative to partnership. First, the Scottish education union EIS headed up a composite motion, ‘End of the hostile environment towards workers and unions’. The amendment from civil service union PCS, initiated by the left NEC majority coalition, and calling for a recall congress if Starmer hasn’t implemented his New Deal commitments “within the first hundred days”, was incorporated into the composite motion and passed by congress.
The very next motion was from the POA, calling for repeal of the ban on their prison officer members’ right to strike, which was first taken away by the Tories and then by Gordon Brown’s New Labour after being briefly restored. Again, this was passed by congress. But rank-and-file union activists will have to fight for the demands in these motions to actually be implemented.
Undoubtedly, Starmer has enacted a plan to try and buy time for his new administration. Foremost in this is an attempt to placate the union leaders and attempt to bring them on board with his broader policy agenda.
This is what also lies behind the above-inflation pay rises in the public sector, along with announcements to repeal Rishi Sunak’s Minimum Service Levels (MSL) anti-union legislation as well as David Cameron’s 2016 Trade Union Act – which enshrined the 50% voting threshold in industrial action ballots. In addition, just before the TUC congress, the government tabled its rail public ownership bill in parliament.
Some of the union leaders have been effusive over these steps, in order to justify their relationship with the new government, and in most cases, they have recommended the pay rises. But on closer inspection, those pay offers represent an inadequate step in the direction of recovering the huge amount lost by workers over the last 14 years. And, crucially, they are not totally funded, meaning that government employers in local government, NHS, education and the civil service will be looking to take them back with the other hand through cuts to services, jobs and working conditions.
It is, of course, correct to welcome any gain made by workers, and if carried out, to celebrate the repeal of some of the most recent Tory anti-union laws. But to refuse to face up to the class reality of Starmer’s government is not merely a mistake, it is to willfully fail to prepare workers for what is coming.
And that prospect has already been trailed by Starmer and Reeves themselves. The first months of their government have been full of dire warnings about the economic legacy left to them by the Tories. Reeves’s constant warning of a £22 billion ‘black hole’ in government finances has now been backed by the cabinet secretary.
So any talk of ‘give Labour time’ is wrong and will disarm workers. In reality, the concessions package given by Starmer, even if inadequate, is most likely ‘as good as its gets’, rather than the opening line of a transformative agenda.
This is not to say that we should draw pessimistic conclusions – that nothing can be won from Starmer’s Labour. Actually, as Reeves herself as admitted, the public sector pay offers were necessary because “there is a cost to not settling, a cost of further industrial action”. This is the priceless legacy of the strike wave of the last few years, the biggest sustained period of strike action for over three decades. Moreover, as we have highlighted, it is a factor that didn’t confront Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to the same level when their original incarnation of New Labour took office in 1997.
The scale of the action taken in the strike wave has been revealed in official figures. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that the number of days lost to strike action in the private sector rose from 15,000 in February 2022 to 668,000 the following December. In the public sector, there was a tenfold rise from 45,000 days lost in November 2022 to 497,000 in March 2023.
As a measure of what was won by this action, the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) estimates that workers in Scotland alone won £4.4 billion in pay and pensions settlements in the two years to April 2024, whereas they would have been £3 billion worse off if the opening offers had been accepted. This is a trend mirrored in the rest of the UK.
But in making some grudging concessions, Starmer hasn’t suddenly become a champion of the working class. The most fatal error is to indulge in wishful thinking. Starmer spent the strike wave not just on the sidelines but actively preventing Labour MPs, or at least his shadow cabinet, from joining picket lines. This was his way of showing the capitalists that he was a safe representative of their interests and profits. His tail-ending of the Tories over Gaza was a further sign, this time on foreign policy.
Starmer was welcomed by the capitalist establishment precisely because he represented the defeat of Corbynism within Labour and the restoration of the party as a safe haven again for big business. This is his starting point, although it doesn’t rule out some temporary side-steps under the pressure of the working class.
In fact, some of Starmer’s policies which have been lobbied for by the unions, such as rail nationalisation, would be welcomed by a section of the capitalists, who want some restoration of the infrastructure. But as signed-up servants of the system, Starmer and Reeves will look to make workers pay for the impending deepening capitalist crisis. The announcements on child benefits and pensioners heating allowances are a cruel warning of how they will approach any Labour austerity.
This is the harsh reality that union activists will have to face up to, at a time when many union leaders will be muddying the waters, by saying that Labour is ‘listening to us’.
This won’t be the first time the union leaders have been enlisted, some willingly, as partners of a Labour government, when they are moving onto the offensive. The ‘terrible twins’ Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon of the TGWU and AEU unions (now Unite) were seen as left militant union leaders who took on Ted Heath’s Tory government in the early 1970s. But they in effect defended the ‘Social Contract’ of wage restraint of the Labour government, elected in 1974, when it rolled out counter-reforms from 1976 onwards.
And under New Labour, some of the union leaders entered into partnership, as they have done in Wales with the Labour-led Welsh government. When Blair was discredited by his domestic policies and by the war in Iraq, many union leaders desperately tried to talk up Brown’s pro-worker credentials, even though he had been just as much the New Labour architect as Blair, including announcing the sacking of 100,000 civil servants in parliament in 2004 when he was chancellor.
This was met by strike action by PCS, at the time with Socialist Party members in leading positions in the union. Today the new left coalition in PCS, in which Socialist Party members play a key role alongside allies in the Broad Left Network and other left groups and individuals, is fighting to return the union to its militant traditions – indicated by the left being behind the congress amendment calling for a special TUC congress if Starmer doesn’t fulfill his New Deal promises. This shows that building fighting broad left organisations in all unions is an essential task for militant reps.
The union leaders differ from Labour MPs in that they can come under the direct pressure of their members, which can push them further down the road of struggle than they initially intended to go. This was seen in the recent strike wave and also, eventually, during the Labour governments of the past. This was especially the case in the 1970s, when action erupted against the Labour-imposed cost-of-living squeeze, peaking in the 1978-79 ‘Winter of Discontent’ strikes by mostly low-paid public sector workers. This was part of a process that saw millions drawn into the union movement, reaching record membership levels of over 12 million in 1979 and a union density of over 50%.
That was a period when the post-war boom came to a shuddering halt. Starmer faces an economic inheritance far more analogous to the 1974 Labour government than the comparatively benign situation that was left to Blair in 1997. The catastrophic funding crisis in local government under the Tories, with the issuing of Section 114 notices in major cities such as Birmingham, is now moving on to brutal cuts. There is a similar crisis opening up in higher education, which could see movements of students, as in 2010 when the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition trebled tuition fees as the first cut of their austerity offensive.
The unions must not repeat the mistake that was made then of not giving a lead to that mass youth movement, marrying it with the power of the workers movement. This potential was shown a year later, when two million public sector workers took strike action together against Cameron and George Osborne’s attack on their pensions. Today, after the recent strike wave, the authority of the unions is even greater than it was then.
In the impending class battles, a political strategy is an essential part of the armoury that workers will need. It was a serious mistake by steel unions not to demand from Starmer nationalisation of Tata to supplement and strengthen industrial action. And this necessary approach would be far more powerful if the unions were to take steps to establish a political voice.
There is a crucial difference between now and the 1970s. Then, Labour was seen far more by workers as ‘our party’, especially those organised in the trade unions. In fact, this connection was an important factor in the trade union leaders initially managing to hold back the fight against the attacks of the then Labour government.
But Blairism represented the consolidation of New Labour as a pro-capitalist party. The vicious counter-revolution against any remnant of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and programme, headed by Starmer, is proof of the capitalists’ determination to restore its historical gain of a thoroughly reliable political alternative to the Tories.
The explosive events of the summer, which saw far-right forces take to the streets in violent protests, and then met with a tide of counter-protests, show the ferment in society. And this is at the start of Starmer’s reign. It is therefore essential that the workers’ movement prepares industrially and at the same time takes steps to fill the political vacuum with its own demands, policies and party.
Rob Williams