Link to this page: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/689/12971
From The Socialist newspaper, 12 October 2011
Wales Assembly budget: Labour piles on the misery
Edmund Schluessel
The Welsh Labour-led government's 2012-2013 draft budget, published on 4 October is the second one in a row to cut Welsh public services. It proposes 12.2% cuts to education, 3% cuts to the NHS and an average of 6% cuts to environment, housing and fire services.
An 8.2% cut to higher education support calls into question how long the Welsh government intend to keep their promise of lower tuition fees in Wales.
Funding for workers' literacy and numeracy programmes has been halved, as has money for the poor to access post-16 education. Anticipating this slashing of support for education, Youth Fight for Education, involving students from half of Wales' universities, have organised a demonstration and an All-Wales Student Assembly against education cuts on 21-22 October. Activists from Wales will be leaving from the Assembly to join the new Jarrow March for the week of 24 October and will be supporting the rally welcoming the march in London on 5 November.
A 5% real-terms cut to local government will give councils across Wales an excuse to sack thousands more workers. While some trade union branches are already taking steps toward industrial action against the cuts, public sector unions Unison and GMB can no longer make apologies for a Welsh government that takes its members' money and yet acts completely against those members' interests.
In the whole budget there is only one winner: big business which will receive £10 million in handouts through "enterprise zones", £4 million for incinerators and an additional £1.7 million through "encouraging innovation".
The government will claim, as Thatcher did 25 years ago, that "there is no alternative" to the cuts. The Socialist Party has always put forward an alternative, based on struggle, tested and proven in Liverpool council in the 1980s: defy Cameron and Clegg, set a budget based on need and hand the bill to Westminster.
If Labour in the Assembly put half the effort into such a fighting programme as they do into making excuses for implementing cuts, Wales would have all the money it needed to create jobs and build a sustainable, productive economy. They, alone and in partnership with Plaid Cymru, have failed to do so. Welsh Labour have written the budget of the Welsh government; but only a new, mass workers' party can write a Welsh budget that represents the interests of the working class of Wales.
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In The Socialist 12 October 2011:
Socialist Party youth and students
Interview with a Jarrow marcher
Marching in the footsteps of history
International socialist news and analysis
US: Occupy Wall Street - Demanding jobs not cuts
Socialist Party workplace news
Strike on 30 November - no secret talks
'We have not gone away' say Southampton council workers
60 printers sacked as bosses make a million
Socialist Party news and analysis
Sovereign debt crisis, recession... No way out under capitalism
Cameron's big 'them and us' society
Fox takes cronyism to new level
Wales Assembly budget: Labour piles on the misery
Con-Dems' policies increase poverty
Socialist Party reports and campaigns
NHS protesters occupy Westminster Bridge
Health campaigners take Ascot by storm
Coventry by-election helps build socialist alternative to cuts
London elections - more support for TU/anti-cuts stand
Socialist Party fundraising
Socialist history
Battle of Cable Street 1936 - When workers stopped the fascists
The Socialist - readers' comments
Portrait of a pension pilferer
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