| From Unity, 14 August 2010 |
Agenda for inequality in the DNA of the Tory partyby John MalloyAneurin Bevan, the post-World War II Health Minister who fought to establish the National Health Service, famously stated: “No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep, burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned, they are lower than vermin.”The phrase came to mind this week when reports emerged that the UK’s Cabinet of Millionaires planned to scrap free school milk for children under five. A leaked letter from the Health Minister, Anne Milton, to the Scottish Public Health Minister, Shona Robison, was explicit, stating: “Abolition of the scheme is likely to be highly controversial, particularly as this will affect some children in low-income families . . . This should not prevent us from ending an ineffective universal measure—and this would clearly be the best time to do it, given the state of public finances and the need to make savings.” By Sunday 8 August, however, fearful of the policy’s ability to remind us of a previous Tory robber (“Maggie Thatcher, Milk-Snatcher”), Downing Street had stated that the possibility of such a withdrawal had been ruled out. The retreat on this particular cut doesn’t show, however, that the “New” Conservative Party will measure policy for damaging, regressive, material effect: it is simply that for a Government led by a former PR man, some headlines are worth avoiding. It doesn’t mark, for example, a retreat on a budget that even the Government’s own Equalities Minster, Theresa May, accepted would inevitably increase inequality. In a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (leaked to the Guardian), May, who also doubles as Home Secretary (showing that the Tories prefer irony to empathy), stated that the budget posed “real risks that women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and older people will be disproportionately affected,” to such an extent that the Government would be vulnerable to legal challenge for breaches of the Equality Act (2010). In broad terms, the central thrust of this UK government will be a brazen disregard for widening inequality and a desire to claw back any provision that has been collectively won. They are emboldened in a way that even an iconic hate-figure like Thatcher in her first term of office was not. This is because she had a fear of initial industrial opposition and the risks to her parliamentary majority that the new Government—having cobbled together its opportunist collation, secured a fixed term of five years, and doctored the scale of parliamentary rebellion that could topple them—has not. Boosted by cheering media, with an agenda written by the European Central Bank, and facing a trade union movement weakened by a thirty-year assault on rights of representation and industrial action, the Tories display the class confidence at the heart of their ideology. Their assault will be at its starkest in Northern Ireland, and it is welcome to see a challenge to the Right’s class confidence and voodoo economics coming from the largest trade union in the North, NIPSA. Building on its commissioning of a research report from Trademark, The Case for Public Services in Northern Ireland), the union has begun a series of meetings with local political parties to emphasise that they have a duty to fight the Westminster orthodoxy. This week also saw NIPSA engage in a widespread public leafleting campaign, outlining “who suffers most from public spending cuts.” The aim of such activity is to shatter the bogus consensus on cuts and thus undermine the “lower than vermin” government’s agenda. |
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