What Did You Think Labour Would Do?

Examining the failures of the Labour government

Anyone who pays even the mildest amount of attention to British politics will no doubt be aware at the moment that Labour are proposing massive cuts, amounting and disability benefits. News of this came after a recent leak to ITV and it’s safe to say that there has been some pretty major backlash to this from across the media and political landscape.

This comes after Labour refused to lift the , scrapped the , and on bus fares, all of which serve to harm the poor and working class most. Labour’s decision on these matters did cause backlash, including from many people in their own party although this didn’t stop them from continuing with these moves.

However, in the case of cuts to disability benefits, the backlash has been , such that Labour themselves are now scrambling and trying to save face in the wake of this.

Something I have noticed in the past few days regarding this that I find somewhat odd is the number of people who voted for Labour voicing concern about this, claiming that this decision is sickening (which it obviously is) or proclaiming that this isn’t the change they voted for.

My response to this, at the risk of sounding smug, would be to question anyone who voted Labour on what they thought was going to happen. Labour already made it clear well before they were even in power that they were going to be party, and this isn’t even something that is up for interpretation.

In the months leading up the the election, for example, many people on the Labour front-bench for providing the country with a sense of “national renewal” and even defended her economic policies. Let’s not forget how health secretary Wes Streeting pledged to go ever did with regard to private healthcare and the NHS. You also have the fact that Keir Starmer quite literally referred to himself as to Laura Kuensberg.

Again, I’m not trying to be smug or pull some kind of “I told you so” point here, I’m just pointing out that these policies that are going to disproportionately harm poor and disadvantaged people are something that Labour made clear they were going to carry out before they even got into power.

Keir Starmer literally referred to Labour as “” before the election was even announced. I’m genuinely curious about what left-leaning people saw from Labour that made them think they were worth voting for. Granted, I know the answer to this and it is the simple fact that most people (rightfully) wanted to get the Tories out.

The problem with this line of thinking is, as many people pointed out, getting the Tories out shouldn’t be the only benchmark by which you vote for someone; that’s not the sign of a healthy democratic system. Voting for the BNP would have gotten the Tories out but I think we can all agree that that wouldn’t be the best idea in the world if we want to actually improve society.

What I’m trying to get at here is that getting the Tories out is only part of the problem; you need to actually replace them with something better, and at this point, I think it’s fair to say that Labour aren’t. Again, the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance came from Labour, not the Tories.

All of these things are why I and, indeed, many other people on the left decided to vote for the when it came time for the 2024 election. Despite the odds being stacked against the Greens, they were able to garner a pretty and their policies were far better than Labour’s are.

Ultimately, and what many people who support Labour on the left refuse to acknowledge, is that the Labour Party is dead. You are never going to move Labour to the left or even back to where they were during the

At least during the New Labour years and the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they had a vision of where they wanted the country to go and they were full of ideas of what they wanted. Hell, there were even ways in which people’s lives improved in that time, albeit largely due to a financial bubble that imploded in 2007. But they did give us and minimum wage reform regardless of in retrospect.

Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner both talk constantly about , and they’re right: they’ve changed them into a carbon copy of the Tories.

The Labour leadership have made their mind up on the direction they want to take the party, and it’s not to the left; it’s taking it to the right, and as a result, the party should be abandoned. The amount of energy and time it would take to reform Labour into a truly progressive party is not worth it, our energy is better spent on building and supporting real alternatives in the here and now.

For the record, even though I voted for the Greens in the last election like I said, I’m not saying they are perfect, and I do have my disagreements with them but it’s undeniable that they are offering a much better vision than what Labour have given us in the last few months that they’ve been in government.

Labour’s since they’ve gone into power and we’re not even a year into this government. We’ve still got 4 more years of this, and unless they start really pulling something out of the bag, I don’t see any way of things improving in this regard. Leon Trotsky once wrote an infamous essay in which he encouraged certain communists to “”, and I think that’s something that people who voted for Labour in the last election need to do.

For anyone who was paying attention to the things Labour were saying in the months and years prior to the election, it was clear that this is the way things were going to go and yet, for some voters, they are totally shocked by it. When politicians show you who they really are, believe them.