WHEN does a crisis stop being a crisis, and when does change start to actually involve changing things?

Those are the questions arising from the round of party conferences just concluded.

The crisis, economically speaking, has been in train since the bankers’ crash of 2008. That epic smash spoke to the instability of global capitalism in a world awash with fictitious capital trying to defy gravity’s pull on the rate of profit.

From that seismic event has flowed 15 years of austerity and sustained pressure on living standards. Fifteen years is a long time and it did seem at one stage that the crisis might stop being a crisis by virtue of being normalised and sustainable within existing class relations.

Inflation, and the officially acknowledged cost-of-living crisis, upset that particular apple cart.

Fact is, downward pressure on real wages over a prolonged period has a different impact to sudden and dramatic cuts.

If inflation runs at 2 or 3 per cent, and workers are offered a 1 per cent wage rise by their employer they know they are sustaining a real-terms cut, but is normally liveable with, or at least not worth the trouble and uncertainty of taking strike action to oppose.

Of course, 10 years of that and you are significantly worse off. You may have adjusted household budgets and foregone some things you previously enjoyed, but you are still that much nearer the precipice.

Therefore, when your boss then offers you, say, 4 per cent while inflation is running at over 10 per cent, that is an additional cut that few can bear.

The great wave of industrial action over the last 18 months bears witness to that. It has ensured that, yes, the crisis has remained a crisis.

Yet, as has been widely noted, the strike movement has not produced any discernible political articulation, neither within the Labour Party nor alongside or in opposition to it. Will anyone involved in leading Enough is Enough ever explain what happened to it?

Thus placed, the crisis remains a containable one for the Establishment. However, it needs to make some acknowledgement that people would like an alternative to year after year of economic misery.

So everyone is for change. Rishi Sunak has noticed that there is so little to cheer about after 13 years of Tory government that he pledges that his sort of Conservatism is the change we are crying out for.

The actual changes he proposes are picayune. He has cancelled half a railway line, postponed phasing out diesel cars, merged some exams and banned smoking for younger people.

Whatever one thinks about these measures in themselves, they scarcely measure up to the scale of the change needed and, indeed, desired.

Step forward, Keir Starmer. He too pledges change. However, he will not actually change anything from what Sunak is presently doing.

In particular, he proposes no change that might upset anyone powerful, from the bond market to the US government.

In essence, then, we have a general acknowledgement that things are pretty bad and bipartisan acceptance that nothing much can be done about it.

No politician wants to talk about inequality, about the control of decisive economic sectors, about poverty, taxation and certainly not foreign policy.

A lot of the “change” Sunak and Starmer offer consists of pledges not to do things they weren’t going to do anyway.

Substantive change has to wait until growth is restored to anaemic British capitalism. Liz Truss had a plan for that — slash-and-burn neoliberalism — which the markets themselves didn’t like.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell had a plan too — state-led investment. The Establishment didn’t like that either.

But Starmer and Sunak have no plan at all other than hoping something will turn up sooner or later, and keeping the money markets pacified in the meantime.

When even the cowed Labour conference votes for change, as it did by endorsing Unite’s call for public ownership of energy utilities, the party leadership hastens to declare, Blair-style, that no heed will be paid.

So we are heading towards a Lampedusa election, in the spirit of his celebrated novel The Leopard. “If we want everything to remain the same, everything has to change,” his character Tancredi explained.

But this is the tribute political vice pays to popular virtue. It must perforce pretend to give the people what they clamour for.

It seems most likely that it is Starmerite “change” that will be put to the test after the Lampedusa election.

The wrath of a disappointed electorate is already accumulating, and the left needs to prepare for it breaking over the heads of a Labour government.

Labour’s ‘pest control’ – the final straw?

“Fleas.”

That is how an anonymous senior Labour official chose to describe those people — mostly Muslim as far as can be told — who have resigned from the Labour Party over Starmer’s pro-war crimes stance on the Gaza crisis.

Speaking to controversial journalist Lee Harpin, the source described the departures, which include many councillors and the BAME officer of Young Labour, as “shaking off the fleas.”

Clearly, in the context, it is a deeply racist response, a crude extension of the Starmer gang’s disdain for Muslims.

It appears that one of those who has resigned has lost family in Gaza, so Harpin’s source makes a mockery of the Labour right’s purported monopoly on common humanity.

It also speaks to the established contempt the authoritarian Labour apparatus holds for the membership it is supposed to serve.

All this to back up the decision by Starmer, the buffoonish David Lammy and the slippery Emily Thornberry, to endorse Israel’s action in cutting off food, fuel and water from besieged Gaza, a clear breach of international law.

The “fleas” may have finally had enough. Many who have struggled to reconcile the depredations, deceit and prejudice of the Starmer leadership with their long-standing loyalty to the Labour Party seem to be reaching the end of the road.

They are told they must not join protests against the Israeli ethnic-cleansing assault on Gaza — an injunction Labour MPs seem to have respected, to their shame.

Labour’s pointless patsy general secretary David Evans has gone further, telling local parties that they may not even discuss the crisis lest an argument upsets someone or other. “No politics, please, we’re Labour,” as the old joke goes.

And now “fleas.” Starmer’s Labour has not only abandoned democracy, it seems to have left any scrap of decency behind too.

And all in aid of the holy trinity of British imperialism’s world role — loyalty to Nato, possession of nuclear weapons, and uncritical support for Israel and reaction in the Middle East generally.

Of course, there will be many who will still stay in Labour, as there were during Blair’s Iraq aggression.

The challenge is explaining that choice to the children of Gaza being bombed and starved in Labour’s name.