The shadow cast by Trump’s second presidency is so overwhelming that the shadow cast by the Starmer/Reeves government over the last few weeks has gone inadequately remarked upon.
- In both countries, social injustice is killing people on a grand scale. And the UK is now a very bad country to be poor in.
- In both countries, women and children are disproportionately affected. Never forget that there are a million children living in destitution here in the UK.
- In both countries, the cruel grip of neoliberalism goes all but unchallenged, turbocharged by a new oligarchy of the super-rich and the media they own and control.
I keep asking myself how long it will take Labour MPs to remember that they have a backbone, personally, and that their Party once stood for something, collectively.
I went to a wonderful event on Tuesday this week, hosted by the New Economics Foundation, celebrating five years of inspiring work establishing the need for Universal Basic Services here in the UK, underpinned by a new Social Guarantee – a new social contract, if you will, between the state and the people.
Do please check this out β if only as a partial anti-venom to today’s toxic politics.
https://neweconomics.org/campaigns/universal-basic-services
https://www.socialguarantee.org
I doubt there are as many as a dozen Labour MPs who would have felt that they were completely in the right place at this event, sharing inspiring progressive ideas, emphasising the enduring centrality of social justice in any well-governed nation.
Labour has morphed into an utterly despicable neoliberal clone. As such, it is as irrelevant to the needs and aspirations of the UKβs exhausted citizens as are the Tories in their hopefully unstoppable death spiral.
Four years of Trump as US President is an unspeakably awful prospect. I can’t quite believe this is what I’m feeling, just six months on from the general election last year, but the prospect of another four years of Starmer and Reeves is only marginally less awful.
Jonathon Porritt
