The claim made by Labour, the Tories and nearly all newspapers is that there are substantial policy differences between the two major parties. Labour Affairs has argued that there aren’t and that an elaborate charade is mounted for the British public to make them believe what is not the case. Now the Labour Party has published a “Full final policy platform set to shape next Labour manifesto”.^[1]

This document does nothing to dispel the impression that the Labour Party is in substantial agreement with the Tories except in points of detail, just enough to maintain the illusion that there might be substantial differences. There is an extremely long list of proposals couched in aspirational verbs such as ‘develop’, ‘create’, co-operate’, ‘champion’, ‘restore’ and ‘examine’. None of this can be taken too seriously until it is formed into specific proposals that Labour can be held to account for.  The following are the proposals that Labour Affairs found that are specific enough to qualify as potential policy rather than aspirational waffle.

• Create GB Energy: a new home-grown, publicly-owned national champion in clean power generation.
• On taxation: End tax breaks for private equity bosses, Remove the non-domiciled tax loophole, Close the loopholes in the windfall tax on oil and gas companies and remove the tax loopholes that private schools enjoy.
• End ‘one sided’ flexibility and ensure all jobs provide a baseline level of security and predictability, banning exploitative zero-hours contracts and ensuring everyone has the right to a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work, based on a 12-week reference period.
• Repeal the Trade Union Act 2016, the minimum service levels (strikes) bill and the conduct of employment agencies and employment businesses (amendment) regulations 2022.
• Keep the promises made to the North and Midlands and deliver Northern Powerhouse Rail and High Speed 2 in full.
• Reform our broken bus system. Hand power and control to local leaders through the Take Back Control Act. Give communities the ability to take on powers to franchise local bus services. Lift the ban on and promote municipal bus ownership.
• Make the NHS the preferred provider of commissioned healthcare services and will end the reliance on outsourcing and cronyism.

Note that all of this is to take place within Labour’s ‘iron clad’ fiscal rules, which seem to preclude the state mobilising resources for investment unless the money required comes from taxation. A glance at the list above illustrates the complete lack of ambition about mobilising resources via taxation. Labour does not propose any other sources apart from the paltry fiscal measures mentioned above. The rest will have to be ‘leveraged’ from the private sector, which is to say that some kind of Private Public Partnership will be set up to provide risk-free and highly profitable opportunities for businesses. Foreign Policy and Defence are full-on globalism and imperialism with not a hair’s breadth of difference with the Tories. We suspect that there will always be resources for whatever imperial adventures the United States requires Britain to undertake, ‘iron clad’ fiscal rules or no. We can be equally sure that the iron clad rules will be invoked to renege on the promise to extend HS2 or to support local authorities who wish to run their own bus services. There is no attempt to substantially alter trade union legislation to allow trade unions to act more effectively in their members’ interests and no suggestion of extending working class or trade union power into the Board of Directors. Even Teresa May was more ambitious than this.

There have been times in the past when Labour was able to act as an effective reforming party for the working class interest within capitalism. These were times when it had working class politicians in its leadership who were capable of exploiting the opportunities, often limited, that arose. Even that is no longer the case. The party is run by a middle class elite interested in managing capitalism and in developing their own careers. The Labour Party’s particular job at the present time is to mobilise a different sector of the population for capitalism and imperialism from the Tories. The appeal is pitched at the traditional working class on the one hand and liberal minded graduate workers, on the other together with some minority groups. The rhetorical pitch is therefore somewhat different from that used by the Tories. However, it lacks coherence. Working class voters worried about jobs, health, transport and housing are not going to be concerned about whether some women have penises, an issue that seems to mightily exercise the Labour leadership.

Thus the  ‘uniparty’ charge levelled by ourselves and other commentators is substantially correct and not ‘lazy’ or ‘puerile’ as claimed by mainstream political commentators whose jobs depend on the pretence of difference, so that they have something to comment on. In order to maintain the illusion of difference, ferocious rhetoric about the ‘incompetence’ of the opposing party is deployed by Labour spokesmen. Politics thus becomes a competition about who is the most efficient manager of a fundamentally flawed and unjust system.

The most damaging aspect of this is that the trade union movement continues to talk and act as if the Labour Party is still an instrument for promoting working class interests. All the evidence suggests that not only is this not the case, but it is not likely to become the case. The Labour Party is a sink for activism and the trade union movement should adopt a transactional attitude towards it. In practice the Labour Party is in hock to corporate business interests, lobbyists and wealthy individuals, not to trade union members.

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^[1] https://labourlist.org/2023/10/labour-national-policy-forum-final-document-summary-policy-manifesto-party-conference/?source=email-labour-list&link_id=27&can_id=d506d7bda96fdb52434de3140efa7f5d&email_referrer=email_2068729&email_subject=revealed-labours-policy-on-everything-and-by-election-latest