RABBITS in the headlights, each vacuous statement from Labour ministers exposes their inability to navigate global economic disruption unleashed by US President Donald Trump.
Keir Starmer specialises in tough-sounding preambles — “Let me be crystal clear,” “Let me put it very simply” — before providing scant detail on what his government will do to protect industry or workers, only waffle about acting in Britain’s interest or backing whoever he is addressing to the hilt.
As with Labour’s planning reforms, any assistance on offer is more likely to involve reduced ambition or lowered standards than state-directed investment or procurement policy. Car manufacturing in trouble? Water down targets for electric vehicles. Pharmaceuticals? Cut regulation to accelerate clinical trials.
The most urgent industrial crisis, and one of the most consequential, concerns steel. Labour drags its feet on renationalisation — and is opportunistically outflanked by Reform UK, which demands nationalisation of the threatened Scunthorpe plant as well as two electric arc furnaces in Rotherham.
Trump’s trade war on the world should be a chance to turn the tables on Reform, which has surged in the polls throughout Labour’s attacks on children in poverty, pensioners and the disabled. Nigel Farage’s party has close political and financial links to the United States, and he himself has advertised his closeness to the US president.
These should become huge liabilities given the economic pain coming this country’s way as a direct result of Trump’s decisions. But Labour dithering on steel nationalisation — which should not just be an option on the table for Scunthorpe, but a means of rescuing and giving new impetus to the entire industry, which as we saw at Port Talbot in Wales is far too vulnerable to the short-term profiteering calculations of foreign-owned corporations — squanders an opportunity to kick back against Reform and leaves it an open goal.
Labour’s options are artificially constrained by the fiscal straitjacket imposed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who defends a pig-headed refusal to reconsider with references to the disastrous Liz Truss mini-Budget.
Yet confronted by the far wider economic turmoil ensuing from the abrupt turn to protectionism by the world’s largest economy, the United States — only likely to worsen given the escalating trade war between it and an unflinching China, the second-largest — Reeves appears as a general fighting the last war. She declines to spend to avert catastrophe, for fear of upsetting bond markets; she refuses to endorse a “buy British” procurement policy, citing the hollowed-out principles of a disappearing globalised age.
Starmer has defended every step to the right, every abandoned commitment, with the claim he is pragmatic, not interested in ideology. His government’s inflexibility in the face of an economic order whose rules are changing fast shows otherwise: it is the prisoner of crippling misapprehensions, ideologically bound to a Treasury orthodoxy that has impoverished working people and undermined British industry for decades and is now sinking fast.
In the process Labour is alienating everyone. It has already put the boot into the poorest people in the country, sneering at the sick and disabled that it is the “party of work.” Yet workers abandoned to the whims of billionaires at Grangemouth, facing imposed pay cuts in Birmingham or left wondering where their promised raises are at the NHS are not prioritised either.
Some of its longest-standing allies are reaching boiling point: from the CWU’s warning that a refusal to protect Crown Post Offices calls into question the whole union-party relationship, to the biggest NHS union Unison’s bitter reflection that “health workers expect better from Labour.”
Starmer is a creature of the system, not up to the challenges of a changing world. Labour affiliates, members, councils and MPs need to do something about it, or the ship will go down with its captain.
