Where is the industrial strategy? Starmer must act – or workers will turn their backs on democracy
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham speaks at a demonstration to protest at Petroineos plans to close Grangemouth oil refinery, February 2025 (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
4 min read
“Everything has changed,” Keir Starmer recently declared. Some hoped this would signal a wider-step change in the government’s direction.
Up to that point, many of the decisions made by the new administration had signalled continuity. The wrong choice to cut winter fuel payments and disability benefits looked like austerity-lite and, to the public, negated the positive boost to NHS spending.
Coupled with row backs on workers’ rights, National Insurance increases and a refusal to tax the super-rich, it all added up to a gloomy outlook. The approach pointed to an economic strategy based on investor persuasion, as opposed to the development of a meaningful state-backed industrial plan.
In some ways the new government looked like the old. This has done nothing but continue the growth in discontent with mainstream politics and democracy, that has taken hold since the financial crash. At times, this Labour government has looked more prepared for the 1990s than the 2020s.
Nowhere has this been played out more prominently than net-zero. Targets have been set without plans or resources. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are left hanging. A withered state has set targets without the wherewithal to back them up. This is light-touch social democracy without the investment or intervention.
With Scotland’s last refinery hanging in the balance, barely a finger has been lifted in government. Grangemouth could easily provide the green aviation fuel we will need to help hit the government’s own carbon targets. Without intervention, it is destined to be an import terminal for fuel from overseas. The usual jam tomorrow is being promised on jobs, while ministers consider chucking taxpayer cash at Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s football project.
It symbolises the approach of decades of government administration. Support for the super-rich while failing to protect our industrial infrastructure. Without a concrete plan backed by resource, net-zero will see our jobs decimated and carbon emissions simply outsourced.
When Starmer talks of a changed world, he’s right – but that means that we can’t carry on using the same tools and the same economic model of the past. With the world emerging from a period of globalisation, it now looks likely that there will be a correction. An element of economic retrenchment. And with that, the role of the British state will have to change – particularly given the context of our relative decline, compared to the rising superpowers of China, India, Brazil and others.
The neoliberal era delivered deregulation and the removal of the state from much economic decision making. It removed the power of the state to act.
Now, with democracy under attack and public resentment growing, politics must prove it works. That means taking back the power to act within our economy. It’s no good setting targets then leaving it to others. There needs to be a plan, and a real industrial strategy based on intervention, not laissez-faire.
Politics must now deal in delivery. That means taking back responsibility, not trying to avoid it. Otherwise, workers will turn to the populist right. They will turn to Reform UK and others like them.
People aren’t stupid. They know decisions taken by our Parliament no longer reverberate across continents. What we do in Britain matters less to others now. We live in a time where overseas corporations have as much power over our living standards as the state. Over 50 per cent of Unite members are employed by a company with an overseas HQ.
For workers to win in the new world, we will have to do more than demand a reinvigorated Westminster. We will have to build our forces elsewhere. Direct our energy towards the corporate power that has developed through the era of globalisation, and which will likely remain largely intact, whatever comes next.
At this time of relative uncertainty, one thing remains clear to me. If the government fails to use its power to act, people will continue to turn their back on politics and ultimately on liberal democracy itself.
Sharon Graham is Unite general secretary
