We can’t go on like this, Labour must offer more than continued Tory austerity

Over the last fourteen years, the UK has undeniably been devastated by fourteen years of successive
Tory prime ministers. The country is now in crisis with crumbling public services, our welfare state
having been dismantled and with people all across the country facing an unprecedented squeeze in
living standards, all while the UK has become the most unequal country in Europe. The sad reality is
that while the Tories have overseen an unprecedented rise in child poverty and an explosion in food
bank use, the superrich in this country have never had it better. The wealth of billionaires in this
country has increased by £438 Billion over the last decade while ordinary people have never had it
so bad as real wages remain below the level they were at the time of the 2008 Financial Crisis in real
terms. The people of Britain are calling out for a transformative government that will deliver real
change and deal with the unprecedented economic, social and of course environmental crisis that
the country faces today, sadly the current Labour leadership offers the country nothing but
continued Tory decline.

To understand the extent to which our country has fallen apart over the last fourteen years, you
have to look no further than the study from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
which found that in the eight years prior to the coronavirus pandemic there were 330,000 excess
deaths as a result of Tory Governments . Now in the face of this devastation you would expect the
Labour Party to be opposing the current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s plans for a second-round pf
devastating cuts but Labour has made it clear that it will not deliver the investment that our public
services need. Of course Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves will use the excuses about
‘tough choices’, claiming that they can’t afford the change the country needs but is this really true?
The University of Greenwich found that a 1% wealth tax on the richest 1% would raise between
£70bn and £130bn per year, money which could go towards our NHS, our schools and towards
ambitious policies like abolishing tuition fees, free school meals and radical anti-poverty measures to
deal with the frankly appalling levels of destitution that we shamefully face as the sixth richest
country on Earth. A wealth tax would only be the tip of the ice berg when it comes to money that
can be raised for cost of living support and our public services, similarly raising capital gains in line
with income tax rates would raise £15 billion per year and this is before we come to the money that
could be raised from increasing income tax for the top 5% of earners or raising taxes on big business.
Yet Labour refuses to back policies like free school meals and refuses to reverse the shameful two
child cap on benefits implemented by the Tories, the two policies combined would cost £3bn a year,
a fraction of the sums that could be raised from a rebalancing of our tax system to deal with the
country’s inequality crisis. It’s clear that the tinkering around the edges of a broken system as Labour
currently proposes to do will not help alleviate the £500bn of lost spending as a result of Tory and
Lib Dem austerity.

It is important that we also deal with Labour’s recent abandonment of its £28 billion per year climate
investment pledge, cutting its policy to an abysmal extra £4.7 billion a year above Tory plans. In
abandoning what had been the party’s flagship policy, Labour couldn’t have given a clearer
statement that it does not care about our future. Environmental scientists have been clear how
difficult it will be to meet the UK’s climate commitments without a major increase in investment.
Even with the £28 billion that had previously been pledged, the UK’s investment spending would

remain well below that of comparable countries and the National Infrastructure Commission has
stated that Britain’s infrastructure spending needs to rise by at least £30 billion per year. Not only is
scrapping a commitment to a green industrial strategy environmentally destructive but both
economically and socially too. The scrapping of the policy will leave Britain behind both the US and
the EU in the race for green technology, sending hundreds of thousands of good quality
manufacturing jobs overseas that could have gone to areas devastated by the deindustrialisation of
Thatcher. It further leaves Labour without a plan for about reducing sky high energy bills, dealing
with the UK’s flatlined economy that has now entered a recession and of course leaves Labour
without a plan to end the longest squeeze on wages since the Napoleonic Wars.

Labour will almost certainly form the next government but from Labour’s sacking of shadow
ministers who voted for a ceasefire in Gaza, to Keir Starmer’s backing of transphobic policies from
the Tory government, Labour is clearly failing to offer a hopeful vision for the future. Young people
who are disillusioned by a Labour Party of middle managers offering nothing but Tory policies
shouldn’t have to accept that nothing will ever change and that things will continue getting worse. If
young people want to vote for a party that supports green investment in our economy, taxing the
rich to fund our public services, bringing energy, water and mail into public ownership, scrapping
tuition fees, bringing in rent controls and reversing Tory welfare policies then they can use the
elections coming up this year to vote Green. In the local elections in May, the Green Party is
currently second in Headingley and Hyde Park – within touching distance of adding to the green
councillors already on Leeda City Council. The greens are further second overall in three of the four
wards that will make up the new Leeds Central and Headingley parliamentary constituency for the
next general election likely to be held later this year. It’s clear that if you want real change and a
country that works for the many not the few Labour won’t deliver what’s needed.