After winning one of the dullest elections in history,⁽¹⁾ where less than 60% bothered to vote, Labour has quietly slipped into office to carry out the task of managing UK incorporated. The main job is to reassure international capital markets that their investments are safe — no more Liz Truss profligate spending announcements based on unsecured borrowing or energy price guarantees. So, even before the Budget Chancellor Reeves cancelled the winter fuel allowance in one swipe. (Of course, if you’re really ‘poor’, you can go through the official rigmarole of applying for another state benefit.)

Labour’s turn to do the political managing coincides with a batch of results of public enquiries over scandals that go back years. The trick is to prolong the whole process until the original issue is out of the public eye and there are other, more pressing matters to hit the headlines. The government might claim that most of these scandals occurred outside of its watch. But the proof of the pudding will be how far Starmer and crew implement any recommendations for redress.

“The System Isn’t Broken, It was Built This Way”

Let’s start with the enquiry into the fire at the Grenfell Tower block of flats which occurred on 14th June killing 72 people (18 of them children).⁽²⁾ By public enquiry standards the first part, called by Theresa May the day after the fire and charged with establishing what happened, was pretty quick. It reported the basic facts in October 2019. The second part took almost five more years.

Contrary to the impression given, Grenfell was not the first cladding fire to claim lives. Already in 2009 six people had died in a fire that engulfed Lakanal House in Camberwell. Here too the danger from extremely flammable cladding was compounded by dilapidated fire safety equipment and totally unsuitable procedures for a situation where, since the sweeping aside of hundreds of safety rules in 1984, anything goes. Basically a profits maximisation method of refurbishing using the cheapest components, regardless of the dangers involved, has created human tinder boxes whose inhabitants cannot move because they have nowhere else to go or because they can’t sell, and where for the most part they can’t afford to redress the damage. Meanwhile the National Audit Office reported in November that the official target of ‘remediating’ problems of building over 11 metres high by 2035 is unlikely to be met. Especially as 60% of the buildings in question have yet to be identified!

The three worst companies named by the report: Arconic, the US supplier of external cladding, Celotex and Kingspan, suppliers of insulation who were able to deliberately “manipulate the testing process, misrepresent the data and mislead the market”, are still trading. That’s capitalism for you.

As for the victims, a paltry £150mn compensation for some has come via civil cases involving 900 bereaved family members, survivors and local residents. But when it comes to official recognition of responsibility, never mind compensation for the victims … still waiting. As Karim Hussain, one of Grenfell’s inhabitants whose uncle died in the blaze, told the inquiry:

It’s always the same thing everywhere — we suffer and they prosper. The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.

Little Joy on Horizon

In 1999 the Post Offfice introduced Fujitsu’s Horizon software for accounting and stocktaking. Subpostmasters quickly complained about bugs in the system after it falsely reported missing revenue — often for many thousands of pounds — but they were ignored. Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 Post Office branch managers were wrongfully convicted of crimes including theft, fraud and false accounting. Some went to prison and many more were financially ruined, often with tragic personal consequences. Almost a quarter of a century later it is finally officially recognised that the real culprit was Fujitsu’s faulty software. Yet, of the 700 cases the Post Office itself took to court, by April just 37 had received compensation settlements.

Legislation (applying to England, Wales and Northern Ireland) to overturn convictions and pay compensation became law in May. In September Rachel Reeves announced alongside the budget that £1.8bn would be allocated for subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted by the Post Office. Still, the new government has seen fit to launch a parliamentary inquiry to look into delays in compensation settlements. … Expect more delays.

Meanwhile, although Fujitsu said in January that it would “voluntarily pause bidding for future public sector contracts” while the public inquiry was ongoing, the group has won six public sector contracts worth over £1.4mn. You couldn’t make it up!

This is by no means the end of the delayed compensation bills the new government is now facing. Alongside the Budget, Reeves also promised to set aside £11.8bn for the victims of the infected blood scandal. In the 1970s and 1980s about 6,000 people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders were treated with contaminated clotting factors containing HIV and hepatitis viruses. Some of them unintentionally infected their partners.

It took until 2017 before PM Theresa May called a public inquiry which opened in 2018 and lasted until January 2023. Of the 1,250 people originally infected with HIV (including 380 children) fewer than 250 are still alive. By the time the final report was published in May 2024 at least another 710 people who had become infected had died. Nothing like procrastination for reducing your liabilities!

Luckily for Labour, the mother of all enquiries — the probe into what went on in the corridors of power and beyond during the Covid epidemic,⁽³⁾ will last years. The public hearings alone are expected to continue until 2026 and there is no specified end date. Still there are plenty more scandals brewing for future enquiries and delays. Thames Water, for one, has been doing nothing for years except use customers’ payments to speculate and generate fine bonuses for shareholders (see our website for more details on this one).⁽⁴⁾

Meanwhile, it’s the mixture as before. Following Rachel Reeves’ neither here-nor-there budget (apart from increasing military spending), Starmer had to spend his time “reassuring the markets” that his government wasn’t intent on taxing big business in order to spend on public services.

The Condition of the Working Class

It’s not getting any better for the working class. ‘Disposable income’ is still lower than before Covid. More people are loading up with personal debt, made easier by pay later options with your credit card.

The UK has the highest level of homelessness in the ‘developed world’. One in 200 ‘households’ are dumped in emergency lodging. This can’t be helping people’s psychological state. Again, there’s an uptick here with an increase in young people’s ‘inactivity’ due to mental health problems.

Just another strain on the poor old NHS which has been underfunded for decades and is now grappling with its longest ever waiting lists. We’re all living too long (though that’s becoming less true) and getting too fat. Obesity stops people from working and is a drain on the NHS and public finances. Solution: not a serious banning of junk foods, nor education about a healthy diet, never mind the means to pay for it. No, the answer is medication, with the weightloss drug Mounjaro: another lucrative money stream for big pharma. (The first death has already occurred: another scandal in the offing.)

AI, electric cars, smart phones notwithstanding, post-modern Britain sometimes looks remarkably Dickensian. Take prisons. They are so overcrowded that some prisoners had to be released early in order to accommodate the recent race riot criminals. Suicides are up of course. But there’s going to be no Elizabeth Fry. Meanwhile local councils are facing the government’s famous black hole – a £22bn shortfall in the public finances. … We could go on. The key question is “what to do?”

The reformist Left who think they can jolly-on Labour simply do not get it. When they are not advocating antediluvian cure-all policies like ‘nationalisation’ or recipes for capital flight (a la Liz Truss) such as higher capital gains taxes, they keep on peddling the notion that with the right policies (usually state intervention) capitalism can be fine-tuned to bring prosperity for us all. After more than fifty years of the opposite it’s no wonder they are hardly a force to be reckoned with or even recognised within the working class.

No, the truth is there is no chance of workers in general prospering under the present system. And that goes for everywhere in the world because world capitalism is in crisis. As capitalism’s long-running profitability crisis speeds up the race between environmental disaster and the prospect of global war, the only force which can yet save the planet by overthrowing the whole rotten system is the world working class. But time is running out. We need to get organised politically across the globe which means a political party to bring us all together. Not as a government in waiting but as a fighting alternative to the decay of the system. We are not that party but aim to contribute to its formation. Why not join us?

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 69) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation.

Notes:

Image: Natalie Oxford (CC BY 4.0), commons.wikimedia.org

(1) Labour Wins But It's No Victory for the Working Class

(2) Grenfell Tower: A Tragedy Foretold

(3) How the Pandemic Revealed the Real Health of Nations

(4) Thames Water, Macquarie, and the False Choice of Nationalisation