Apathy risks being the winner of the next general election unless Labour shows more ambition, the head of one of Britain’s biggest trade unions has warned, as she urged the party against embracing “austerity mark two”.
In an interview with the Observer, Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, said a future Labour government risked allowing Britain to fall behind unless it was prepared to think radically to boost investment, call out the profiteering that had fuelled rises in the cost of living and give the public a stake in energy.
Graham said she was desperate to see a Labour government. However, she warned that it “needs to be bolder” given the huge investments being made by other countries. “I know that it’s an unpopular thing to say at the moment, because everybody feels we should just batten down the hatches,” she said. “The problem with that is that they can afford to be bolder – and I don’t think they can afford not to be.
“There’s one thing to get in and [another to be] literally carried in – carried through those gates because you’re going to make the change that we need. I don’t want apathy to be the winner of this. It’s got to count.”
Graham, whose union has already managed 951 disputes in two years covering 180,000 Unite members as cost of living pressures have surged, said that she feared both main parties were edging towards the rhetoric that saw public services and welfare slashed after the 2008 financial crisis.
“You can feel the language of austerity mark two already,” she said. “There’s no open cheque book, be careful, tighten the belt. We heard all this language before: 10 years of austerity after the 2008 financial crash.
“I can hear it from all sides, actually, in slightly different ways. That’s concerning because the people that paid for the 2008 crash, which was everyday communities and workers, cannot be the same people that pay for this crisis. It’s just not acceptable for that to be the case.”
Graham said she believed the pandemic had changed the public mood, as key workers – from nurses to refuse collectors – kept the country running. She urged Labour not to rule out more tax on high wealth, as well as the nationalisation of energy – something her union will be pushing hard at Labour’s conference.
“We are a two-and-a-half-trillion-pound economy, the sixth richest economy in the world,” she said. “We’ve got families with both parents working and they’re effectively going to food banks. What’s going on? There are different choices you can make. If you had a 1.5% annual tax on wealth over £10m, that would bring in £17bn a year.
“I don’t think it’s the most radical thing in the world to say that there should be a wealth tax. It’s not good enough to have the warm, fuzzy glow for everyone to feel a bit better about themselves. These are hard facts. These are the choices we could make instead. Are we going to make them?”
