by New Worker correspondent

At 9.35 on last Monday morning a couple of fireworks were heard to go off near this correspondent’s house when Sir Keir Starmer MP KC announced his intention to resign as leader of the Labour Party and also as Prime Minister. But the reactions from trade unions was less exuberant.

Unite declared that “Keir Starmer’s decision to resign was the honourable and right decision” but now “…there is no time to waste, everyday people are literally on their knees. Labour has one last shot to learn from the errors of the last two years. A failure to act, will result in a doomsday scenario for Labour”.

Unite’s brief shopping list for the new leader includes: “immediate action on industrial strategy, with investment in jobs and industry. That investment must be made now and not at some far-off point in the future.”

At first glance that seems reasonable and desirable, but we should be wary of the unspoken details of that demand. Less than a fortnight earlier, on the occasion of another resignation, that of John Healey as Minister of Defence, Unite made clear what was a priority in its demand for an industrial strategy.

Then, general secretary Sharon Graham declared: “John Healey’s resignation letter has laid bare the utter chaos at the heart of government on this issue. Defending the UK and investing in our defence industry simply can’t be done on the cheap. British defence needs investment. Failure to protect UK defence jobs would be a national betrayal.” Along with the Daily Telegraph she bleated that “what is going on in regard to yet another delay on the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) is fast becoming a national disgrace. Make no mistake jobs and skills are at risk.”

In particular, Unite wants Starmer’s successor to pull up his socks up to ensure that contracts including a new tranche of Typhoon fast jets, the Skynet satellite, the Project Euston dry docks facility for nuclear submarines and the A400M transport plane are signed-off and production lines in Britain are rolling as soon as possible. Just what we need to get Britain working!

In the good old days, Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson resigned from Attlee’s Cabinet for precisely the opposite reasons. Unite need not worry, however. The chief contender for the soon-to-be-vacant throne, Andy Burnham, helpfully informed readers of the Times that: “I am not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill. Not at all.”

These will be a different sort of cuts, however: “not the traditional Westminster way of just crude cuts, short-term cuts that then create a backlash and create more political turbulence. It is actually going to do things that will reduce the benefits bill, moving towards a more preventative state that makes the right investments to support people into work.” So that’s okay then…

As for increased military spending, this too was favoured but was described differently: “It’s defence and security but also resilience” that will bring equal opportunities to the arms race through “social value” such as apprenticeships and work placements.