UK returns to nationalization: Starmer gravitates towards Corbyn

23, Jul - NEWS

As a first step, the new UK Prime Minister put forward a series of nationalisations, which surprised his listeners. The Labour Party, despite the moderation of its programme during the Jeremy Corbyn years (which cost it a huge churn of protest votes from its most radical wing), wanted to make it clear that it was much more to the left than it had been under Tony Blair. The Labour leader of the 1990s forced the party to abandon nationalisation and embrace private enterprise, much to the delight of Margaret Thatcher, who called it ‘his greatest success’. Starmer, by contrast, wants to reverse some of the privatisations signed off by the Iron Lady and return to public management.

Chief among these is the allocation of £8.3bn for clean energy, to be channelled through a state-owned electricity company, through which he intends to revolutionise the market and compete with private companies in the sector. The company, Great British Energy, will be based in Scotland and will focus on the ‘generation, storage and distribution’ of renewable energy, in particular by building numerous wind farms across the country.

Starmer's plans for infrastructure development

Starmer has lifted his veto on wind power, which has so far been paralysed at the behest of successive Conservative governments, and intends to increase the number of such plants across the country. And to ensure they are built and the private sector doesn't abandon them, the prime minister will put them in the hands of a state-owned company that will aim to make the UK ‘a world leader in renewable energy’.

However, the company will not only have a big bag of money to spend on this investment. The new government has also promised to reform town planning laws, which until now have allowed local councils to block the construction of almost anything (houses, railway lines, power lines, businesses) or erect a large number of obstacles that end up adding to the final cost. The aim is to make it easier to build power stations and power lines across the country, reducing costs and timescales. In this term it is proposed to build 1.5 million homes, especially around London, to combat soaring prices.

The list of nationalisations does not end there: Starmer also announced that the former state-owned railway company Great British Railways will return to state hands, reversing the privatisation carried out by Margaret Thatcher at the beginning of the 1990s. In addition, the Minister will allow local councils to run bus networks in their metropolitan areas, which until now have been in private hands.

Curbing ‘labour exploitation’

Another Stramer promise is reform of the Workers' Charter, which will oblige companies to establish wage parity and strictly regulate contract models such as “zero hours” (no fixed hours) that entail “exploitation” of workers. His programme promises to levy VAT on state schools, which he hopes will raise enough money to employ 6,500 teachers in state schools, and to give more protection to tenants by banning evictions ‘without just cause’. In other words, leases would have to be automatically renewed indefinitely as long as there is no legitimate reason to evict the tenant.

It would also ban so-called ‘conversion therapy’ that promises to ‘cure’ LGBT+ people and ‘convert’ them to heterosexuality - a measure that the Conservatives debated for a decade but failed to pass due to the strong internal divisions the issue has caused. All these moves show that the party's shift to the left since Gordon Brown's defeat in 2010 is not a matter of a day. True, Corbyn has moved so far to the left that Starmer may seem like a moderate centrist by comparison, but the measures announced by the new government make it clear that the current Prime Minister does not want to follow Blair's ‘third way’ but something much more progressive.

Starmer also announced that he will bring back some of the laws that were introduced by the previous Tory prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and left halfway through the snap election. One is a lifetime smoking ban for people born after 2009, and another is the English Football Regulation Act, which aims to veto teams joining the European Super League that are not sanctioned by UEFA. If Blair admits anything, it is the idea of stealing part of the Tory programme to give a patina of centrality to his government project.