Unity

From Unity, 26 June 2010

Tough but fair—not

Although its contents came as no surprise, the extent and the enthusiasm showed by Tory Chancellor Osborne for his vicious attack on public services, welfare payments, jobs, wages and pensions was hard to stomach.
     VAT will go up from 17½ per cent to 20 per cent from 4 January, and welfare benefits will be slashed by £11 billion by 2014–15. Housing benefit will be cut by £1.8 billion, and tough new medical assessments will be introduced from 2013 for anyone claiming disability living allowance. Benefits, tax credits and public-service pensions will suffer a cut of around £6 billion by the trick of uprating them in line with the generally lower consumer prices index rather than the retail price index.
     Public-sector workers will suffer a two-year pay freeze, despite a current 5.1 per cent rise in retail prices and forecasts of continuing price rises. A 25 per cent cut in public spending will inevitably mean major job losses.
     The nerve of the multi-millionaire slasher to declare in launching his emergency budget on Tuesday that “we are in this together”—a lie echoed locally by the Northern Ireland Secretary, who said he recognised “that some of today's measures will be difficult for all of us in Northern Ireland.” Alongside the assault on the poor and the public sector goes the progressive reduction of corporation tax on companies, from 28p in the pound to 24p over four years, which compares with 32p under the last Tory government.
     This was an out-and-out Tory Budget to please the financiers and international speculators, who are demanding deep cuts plus a free rein for profit-hungry privateers. The Liberal Democrat partners were shown to be irrelevant to the fundamental Tory policies of the so-called coalition. As Osborne boasted, “I want a sign to go up above the British economy which says Open for business.”
     As Brian Campfield, leader of the public-sector union NIPSA, bluntly put it, "The government has shown its true colours, unashamedly, with a tax reduction for businesses and a hike in VAT for the population generally, a measure which will have a disproportionate impact on the poorer sections of our society."
     There is more of the same promised from a spending review in the autumn. Northern Ireland will also be singled out then for planned “rebalancing” of the Northern Ireland economy to boost the private sector. Yet, as Campfield also made clear in his response to Tuesday’s budget, “the private sector has never delivered sufficient jobs for the people of Northern Ireland, so there is no reason to think that this budget will change that.”
     The Case for Public Services in Northern Ireland, a recent report from the non-profit organisation Trademark commissioned by NIPSA, gives the lie to the Tory claim that savage cuts to public services are an “economic necessity.”
     “If we are to avoid another crisis the economy that emerges from this financial catastrophe must be different to the one that led to the recession . . . A more equal and sustainable economy must have public services at its heart . . . Public investment in transport and an educated and skilled workforce is just, equitable, of lasting benefit to the economy and essential for future prosperity.”
     In response to the Con-Dem budget the general secretary of the rail union RMT, Bob Crow, warned of “widespread industrial and community resistance” against “this assault on the British people.” The leading left-wing Labour MP John McDonnell also forecast massive resistance. "People rightly perceive a grotesque unfairness in being forced to pay with cuts in their jobs and services for a crisis caused by the greed of the bankers.”
     Building resistance is now the task in hand, not the talk of rebalancing through becoming a special economic zone with tax advantages to be heard from the political establishment in Stormont. All those affected and affronted by the unfairness of this budget must be rallied to an alternative all-Ireland economic and social strategy. There needs to be an all-Ireland National Development Corporation making cross-border public-sector-led growth the dynamo of the reintegration and building of a sustainable national economy, giving real meaning and substance to national unity.
     “All the anger around us as a consequence of fierce attacks on the working class will do nothing unless it is converted into industrial, social and community action. That action has to be expressed politically. There is a challenge for those on the left to build alliances that are lasting and sustainable and that pave the way for breaking the dead hand of conservative Government coalitions” (Communist Party of Ireland, An Economy for the Common Good).

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