Keir Starmer and Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, were in the Swiss resort of Davos this week, rubbing shoulders with the world’s super-rich and their political representatives at the ‘World Economic Forum’. The visit of Labour leaders to meetings like Davos can gain nothing, in any way, shape or form, in the interests of the working class.
Whereas it is the role of the mainstream media to feed pap to the masses, Davos is a venue where the top strategists of capitalism have relatively serious discussions among themselves about the problems facing their economic system. But for anyone even vaguely to the left of Genghis Khan, it must be even hard to breathe, given the stinking atmosphere of wealth, entitlement, and above all, hypocrisy. It is a glittering galaxy of affluence, corruption and, we should not forget, of economic and therefore political power.
This is the venue to which hundreds of private jets fly, so their owners can pontificate to the world about climate change. Where the world’s most sophisticated and successful tax-dodgers, all representatives of the staggeringly wealthy, come to bleat about global poverty and inequality. Sometimes they even appeal for governments to please “tax us more”, although that is strictly for the cameras.
Davos is padded out with academics, pop stars, sportspeople and celebrities, to give the proceedings an air of ‘democracy’, but it is in reality owned by a few dozen billionaires and their corporations.
Billionaire jamboree
The World Economic Forum, which organises the jamboree (and other events and publications) is an international organisation, run and financed by large international corporations, their client financial institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, and their bought and paid for politicians. It has a board of ‘trustees’ made up of the great and the good, and you would look in vain for any representation from a trade union, a human rights group, a peasants’ or indigenous rights organisation, or any students or youth.
A Labour leader has no business in Davos. It is true that when he was Shadow Chancellor five years ago, John McDonnell visited Davos. It was a political mistake for him to attend, but at least he went to criticise those who were there, to “tell a few home truths”, as he put it. “Davos is what I expected”, he said. “It embodies the criticisms I have made of it in the past. I don’t think the people here have any comprehension of the contempt in which they are held,” adding that in the world outside there was an “avalanche of discontent and resentment.”
For all that McDonnell should not have gone – he was spitting in the wind at best – there couldn’t have been a greater contrast between his visit and the Starmer/Reeves visit his week. The current tLabour leader was not there to criticise, but to ingratiate himself.
Starmer’s attendance is part of the pattern he established as soon as he was elected leader and ditched his ‘ten pledges’. Speaking to the members – particularly in the campaign to get himself elected leader – he drops in an odd radical-sounding phrase to keep them on side. But speaking over their heads to big business, Starmer is at pains to make it clear, “I’m your man”.
The entire policy thrust of the Labour leader and shadow chancellor is based on the market economy, on capitalism. They have not understood, or choose not to understand, that it is a system in terminal decline, which can only sustain itself globally by shifting wealth from the poorest to the richest.
Two thirds of all new wealth cornered by 1% of global population
According to a recent Oxfam report, the world’s rich are still getting richer. Over the past two years, they say, the richest 1% have accumulated nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together, a staggering $42tr. “Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7 billion a day even as at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages.” Since the start of the Covid pandemic, the report tells us, “the world’s richest 1% have increased their wealth by a staggering £21 trillion – enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.”
Right across the globe there is pressure on the living standards, working conditions and democratic rights of working class people, because it is the only way this decrepit and failing system can operate. But in reply to this, there is also a growing, albeit often inchoate, movement in defence of those living standards. The strike wave in France this week over pension reform, and the unprecedented strikes in the UK over living standards, flow from the same international crisis of capitalism.
It is with this scenario as a backdrop that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves made the trip to Switzerland, not to remonstrate with the super-rich, but to tell the moguls of international business that Labour (their Labour) is on their side. We had all the usual forelock tugging and cap-doffing to business leaders: Labour will work “in partnership” with business; Labour will rebuild the UK economy “on the rock of fiscal and financial responsibility”, and so on and so forth. It was all as the Financial Times correspondent noted, a sign of “Labour’s [for which read Starmer’s] embrace of global capitalism”.
2024 will not be the same as 1997
Starmer’s adoption of Tory-lite policies – meaning policies based on what is fundamentally the same economic outlook of the Tories – will boomerang on any Labour government he may lead after the next election. Like the rest of Labour’s right wing, he is making a serious blunder if he imagines he can repeat the victory of 1997, and follow it with thirteen years of Labour government.
Twenty-seven years on from that election victory, the economic conditions that would be faced by an incoming Labour government would be far worse. There is an inkling of understanding of this at the tops of the Labour Party, and it explains the desperate search for any policies – anything at all – that will cost nothing. But set on that track, an incoming Labour government will be forced by the logic of the capitalist system to carry out cuts in living standards not dissimilar to those faced today. It will be government of crisis from Day One.
Under those circumstances, all the business-friendly links that Starmer and Reeves cultivated in Davos will be mean nothing. He will be unable to prevent a storm of anger and protest among supporters of the Party, especially in those unions whose leaderships have backed Starmer to the hilt.
Many ordinary workers and Labour supporters have illusions in a Starmer-led Labour government, and that is the reason for Labour’s huge rise in the polls. But if Labour sets itself on a business track, it will lead to deep disillusionment among many and outrage among others. The beginning of Starmers tenure as Prime Minister will be the beginning of the end of his tenure as Labour leader.
As for the ‘Masters of the Universe’ in Davos, some of them might be calling for wealth-taxes, but only because they can sense which way the wind is blowing, and higher taxes are a better option than pitchforks. They may sense that if socialist ideas become more popular, the vanishingly small proportion of the population who hold all the wealth will not face more taxes, but the expropriation of their wealth and power.
