FOR millions of people, the soaring cost of food, heating and rent confirmed in new inflation figures is as terrifying a prospect as the omicron variant.
The absence of these considerations from Prime Minister’s Questions today exposes the isolation of the Westminster bubble from the dilemmas facing everyone else.
Keir Starmer poses as the nation’s saviour, boasting that “without Labour votes last night a vital public health measure would not have got through,” in a reference to the huge Tory rebellion of Tuesday night.
It is truer to say that without Labour votes, Boris Johnson and his government would not have got through that vote without having to make serious concessions.
The Prime Minister is genuinely in trouble. The problem is that this will not equate to any gains for working-class people at all unless someone is pushing for those gains. Labour is not.
It’s aware that statutory sick pay is so low that many people dare not take a Covid test if they feel ill. They cannot afford to self-isolate. This hobbles efforts to contain the virus and was a major reason for the second and third waves.
The opposition has pointed this out on multiple occasions. It advocates raising the miserable £96-a-week rate and reforming labour law to ensure it is universally available.
Or rather, on paper it advocates that. In reality it ignores it. If it knows that the government needs its votes to pass “vital public health measures,” why not make support conditional on raising sick pay?
Starmer has ample experience of playing hard to get. As shadow Brexit secretary he took part in bargaining with the Tory government over what concessions Labour wanted before it would be ready to vote through Brexit legislation.
Johnson cannot afford the crisis of a lost vote in the Commons as the public seethe over mounting evidence of rule breaches by top Tories. So where are Labour’s red lines?
Starmer says Labour is acting in the national interest, that it is not playing politics. No socialist should have any time for such sophistry: the handling of the pandemic is a political question.
But even if we park the more general criticism – that the removal of this government is in the “national interest,” or rather the interests of the vast majority of the peoples of these nations, so Labour should be doing all it can to bring that about – the party’s slavish support for the Tories does not help fight the virus.
It is not just sick pay. It is NHS pay — how is our health service to cope while suffering from tens of thousands of vacancies? Labour was sounding the alarm about the impact on non-emergency care and cancer detection of Covid-related delays a couple of weeks ago. But it won’t use its leverage to force the government to reward health workers for their efforts and help address the NHS recruitment and retention crisis.
It is pay in general — because a poverty-pay Britain in which millions have no savings worth speaking of is also a Britain in which people work through illness rather than risk time off. It is social security, for the same reason — yet Labour did not tell Johnson to restore the £20 universal credit uplift in return for the lifeline it threw him.
Covid-19 has highlighted many of the structural injustices of the British economy. One reason the British state has proved so incapable of handling it is that the measures required to do so imply more fundamental changes to the way things are than our rulers will accept.
The cost-of-living crisis is a case in point. We will not stop the next wave while ignoring people’s ability to feed, shelter and keep themselves warm. But today’s pantomime PMQs shows that this reality is as far from Starmer’s thoughts as it is from the PM’s.
