By Jeremy Dewar, 10 February 2015
In May the Conservatives want to win the election to make even deeper cuts, which will take us back to the 1930s. We must stop them.
Forget George Osborne’s claim that Britain could become the richest country in the world. Don’t be fooled by David Cameron’s desire to see full employment.
These are just soundbites to divert attention from their record in government. A smokescreen to hide their real intentions.
Remember the Coalition promised they would eliminate the deficit and reduce Britain’s debt by 2015. That didn’t happen.
Instead the deficit has ballooned to over £100 billion this year. Why? Because we have just suffered the longest and deepest recession in a lifetime.
Half the deficit is spent – not on hospitals, schools or green energy production – but on servicing the debt. £1 billion a week straight to the bondholders, the very same people who caused the great crash in the first place.
That debt now stands at £1.45 trillion and is set to grow and grow. Far from reducing the debt, the Tories’ cuts have increased it.
The Tories think that they hold a trump card when it comes to employment: record numbers in work and the official unemployment rate down below 2 million.
Only the truth is a lot different and most working class people know it.
A TUC survey estimates that there are now 1 million jobless people who are not included in the figures, because they are denied benefits under the toughest regime ever.
Millions more have been hounded into declaring themselves self-employed, whereas in reality they are earning way below the minimum wage. Similar numbers are trapped in precarious jobs:
part-time, zero-hours contract, agency, minimum wage.
No wonder real wages have crashed through the floor. Even Bank of England economist Andrew Haldane says we are living through the longest and steepest decline in wages since the mid-1800s: a 10 per cent drop on average.
Cuts
Osborne announced another round of austerity in his final autumn statement. Another £55 billion of cuts on top of the £35 billion already made. The next five years will see austerity accelerate.
The A&E crisis is the net result of £20 billion of cuts and £7 billion of privatisation in the NHS. But the Tories want another five years to finish off the job of dismantling the NHS.
They cut 630,000 public sector jobs in the last five years. The new package would cull another 1.1 million.
Osborne’s latest austerity programme would take public spending, as a proportion of national wealth, down to levels not seen since the 1930s, since before the creation of the modern welfare state.
Their Lib Dem partners in crime claim this would be a disaster, even “political suicide” according to David Laws. Hypocrites.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and treasury minister Danny Alexander actually signed off this austerity package. They agreed to it only last December.
But these liars want to worm their way back into office – with the Tories again or with Labour, they just don’t care! They deserve the punishment at the polls that they will surely get.
In anticipation at the anger this scale of attack will produce, the Tories are proposing more restrictions on our right to strike:
• A minimum 50 per cent turnout on all strike ballots
• A minimum 40 per cent of all those balloted voting for action
• Companies can employ agency workers to scab on strikes
• New “minimum service levels” to keep public services running during strikes.
The TUC’s Frances O’Grady called this “a democratic outrage”. Quite right. No government since 1945 achieved these margins. The Conservatives only won 23.5 per cent of those eligible to vote in 2010, so who are they to dictate to us?
Throw them out
The Tories are neck and neck with Labour in the polls. The billionaire owned media will campaign hard to turn this into a right wing majority. But this is by no means a certainty. We can stop the Tories winning another term.
To do this, the unions are key. Sure they will send thousands of full-timers and activists out to canvass and campaign on the doorstep, but the reality is that working class voters will not turn out in their millions unless we can force the union leaders to place clear demands on Labour:
• Fully fund the NHS
• Tax the rich, make them pay
• Reverse the cuts
• Raise the minimum wage – £10 an hour
• Cancel the debt
