YOU could be forgiven for thinking that a national government has been formed in Britain without the formality of an announcement to the electorate.
From the start of the pandemic, Keir Starmer’s Labour was reluctant to differentiate itself from Boris Johnson’s inept handling of the crisis.
On the Ukraine war, Labour has been 100 per cent behind Johnson’s hostility to peace talks, despite Britain being a European outlier in its commitment to continuing conflict.
Now, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has not only backed Starmer’s veto on Labour MPs showing support for the RMT dispute, he has gone further and condemned possible strike action by workers at Heathrow airport later this summer.
Firstly, Lammy is ignorant. The dispute at British Airways is not about securing a pay rise, it is about restoring a pay cut imposed during the pandemic.
Secondly, he is hypocritical. He asserts that a party serious about government does not join picket lines — yet it only takes seconds on the internet to find pictures of Lammy and Starmer doing just that a couple of years back, when politically expedient.
Thirdly, and worst, he is functioning as a strike-breaker. He is demanding that workers accept pay cuts and a falling standard of living, that they abstain from any action to resist these impositions and that if they nevertheless strike, they can expect nothing but condemnation from the party their unions created.
Unite the union general secretary Sharon Graham was absolutely right to say that “David Lammy has chosen to launch a direct attack on British Airways workers.
“Supporting bad bosses is a new low for Labour and once again shows that politicians have failed. It is now down to the trade unions to defend working people.”
A new low indeed, but Starmer’s Labour is adept at finding further depths to plumb.
Lammy’s hostility to trade unionism and his support for imperialist war from Iraq to Ukraine are all of a piece. It is the position of politicians who believe that cringing before the rich man’s frown, not to mention the rich man’s media, is the only way to secure government office.
It is a tactic that aims to defeat the Tories by following them on most key points and relegating disagreement to what are secondary issues for the Establishment, justifying this by reference to a chimerical “national interest” always defined by the capitalist class.
Thus Labour is becoming the Party of Nato and British Airways, but not of Unite and the RMT.
What Lammy’s far more illustrious predecessor as MP for Tottenham, Bernie Grant, would have made of this endless bipartisan posturing can easily be imagined.
He believed in standing up for working people in struggle, whether in the workplace or the community. The present Tottenham MP is on the other side of the barricades.
So Sharon Graham is right. At present, progress must be achieved not just without the leadership of the Labour Party but against it.
A bipartisan parliamentary bloc is forming to stabilise the positions of British capitalism internally and externally, behind all the usual parliamentary froth of loyal opposition and Westminster bubble intrigue.
It is colliding however with harsh class realities impelling growing numbers of working people to take action against the consequences of the crisis, consequences which are only starting to reveal themselves.
The ruling elite will next try to bring down inflation by means of increasing unemployment, the better to discipline the working class.
Doubtless Starmer and Lammy will not be found wanting when crocodile tears are required, but their stab in the back to RMT and Unite will not be forgotten.
