The working title for Labour's coming austerity is: "There's not much money left."

The joy over Starmer becoming Prime Minister after fourteen harsh years of Tory government tasted like ersatz whipping cream in a can rather than freshly beaten.

It was nice to see conservative government ministers Portilloed. But under the rules of neoliberalism, our schadenfreude will be as superficial as our spite against reality TV show contestants hired by producers to be loathed by the audience.

It's all out of the fire and into the frying pan with this new parliament. Labour has an overwhelming majority, but their MPs aren't mavericks but company men and women. They are as brave for change as chocolate soldiers for battle. A

Any Labour MP who would have had the courage to break ranks with Starmer and his ilk were purged from the caucus.

So, at least, for the next few years, they will do as they are told to enjoy the pleasures of their office.

The public will be told to be patient. Rome wasn't built in a day bollocks will fall from the lips of government ministers and pundits who owe their livelihoods to maintaining the status quo.

Starmer will be better than the Tories for the first while because the conservatives allowed their corruption to become overweening.

In the smallest of measures, the relief voters feel at seeing the Tories lose and Starmer's Labour win govt is like eastern Europe breathing easier after being liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

But the knife will turn soon enough. Come autumn, when the summer is a series of stored jpeg memories on people's phones, Labour will pounce brutally- if yesterday's terse comment by Rachel Reeve's comment upon assuming the role of Chancellor- is anything to go by.

"There's not much money left," she said. I thought this was also true in 1945. But that Labour govt was able to build from the ground up a functioning Welfare State that included the NHS.

In May 2015, a few days after that General Election where Ed Miliband's Labour was trounced by David Cameron's Tories, My dad was asked to speak at an event in London called Philosophy Football. It was held to give courage to the young that things could change for the better. There must have been 8 speakers there, including my dad, who addressed hundreds of young people packed into a theatre.

My father's segment was to speak about what it felt like to be young in 1945 and vote for what turned out to be Britain's most transformative working-class government in History. His words are below and illustrate perfectly- what Britain elected on July 4, 2024, bears no resemblance to what his generation elected in July of 1945.

On July 5, 1945, I was twenty-two and voted for the first time. After a savage Great Depression followed by a brutal world war, at the age of 22 and still in the RAF, I voted for the first time. On Election Day 1945, I felt- finally- my chance to grab destiny by the shirt collar had come. 

My politics were forged in the slums of Yorkshire that I dwelt in as a lad. But it was in the summer of 1945 that I finally felt able to exorcise the misery of my early days from my soul. During that long ago July, I was a member of the RAF stationed in Hamburg- a city left ruined and derelict by a world war that had just ended in Europe at the time when lilacs bloom.

I had been in uniform since 1941. But my war had been good. I walked away from it without even needing a plaster for a shaving nick. At its end, my unit and I had been seconded to be part of the occupational forces charged with rebuilding a German society gutted by Hitler and our bombs.

It was in the palm of that fire-bombed and ravaged city that I voted in our first general election since the war began in 1939. As I stood to cast my ballot in the summer heat, I joked with my mates, smoked Players cigarettes and stopped to look out towards a shattered German skyline.

I realised then that this election was momentous because it meant that someone like me, working class and rough and ready, could change their future- for the better through democracy if socialism was on the ballot.

Waiting my turn, I felt seasoned with sorrow, not just from the carnage Britain had endured during the Second World War but also from the grim decade before when the Great Depression had ravaged Britain with the brutality of a medieval pestilence.

So it was only natural and right that I voted for a political party that saw health care, housing and education as human rights for all its citizens, not just the well-to-do.

When I marked my x on the ballot paper. I voted for all those who had died like my sister in the workhouse, and for men like my father who had been broken beyond repair by the Great Depression and for women like my mum who begged, borrowed stole and were beaten by cruel men to keep their children fed. And I voted for myself and my right to a fair and decent life.

I voted for Labour and the creation of the welfare state and NHS free at the point of use for all its patients.

Now, nearly 70 years later, I fear for the younger generation's future because the social welfare state is being dismantled brick by brick by neoliberal governments that heed corporate interests before human interests.

Our lives are worth more than being obedient servants to the 1%. It's time we put the shoulder to the wheel of socialism and seize our day again like we did in July 1945.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I am offering a 20% reduction in a yearly subscription to ensure my prescriptions can be purchased today. One new subscriber covers that cost. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John