RMT protest July 2012, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
When Tory Chancellor George Osborne presented his Autumn Budget Statement what he served up wasn’t so much a speech as a load of lies spun together with well-rehearsed anti-working class hoopla. The Socialist unravels some of the Con-Dems’ claims.
Lie #1: “The economy is healing”
With regard to the deficit, former member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee David Blanchflower explained: “the part-time Chancellor had fiddled the size of the deficit by accounting tricks”. Behind Osborne’s sleight of hand is ‘growth’ forecast cut from 0.8% to a contraction of 0.1%, and lower forecasts for future years too.
With trade and industry figures down now, instead of growing the economy is shrinking. What gets called a triple-dip recession is more like a constant bumping along the bottom.
Lie #2: The government is taking measures so “it always pays to work”
Research from the TUC shows that over the last 30 years, as pro-big business governments have legislated in the interest of the super-rich, the share of national income going to wages has fallen. Workers on the median income are now £7,000 a year worse off in real terms.
‘Making work pay’ requires a living minimum wage rate of at least £10 an hour and investment in a massive programme of socially useful public works to create jobs. Instead the Tory/Lib Dem coalition enforce workfare slavery on the unemployed. They limit most working-age benefits to a 1% rise for three years, breaking the link with inflation, condemning millions to misery – driving the living conditions of those who can’t work, or can’t find work, or enough work, into the dirt.
Lie #3: “We’re all in this together”
Where’s the cap on rents? Or on energy and food price prices? And, if industrial-scale tax dodging, price hiking and wage cutting hasn’t netted sufficiently obscene takings for the super-rich, Osborne has gifted them a cut in the rate of corporation tax – making it one of the lowest of the world’s main economies.
£800 billion is lying idle in the bank vaults of the big corporations. While benefit claimants face cruel, destitution-threatening sanctions, big business refuses to spend these cash piles on investing in jobs and services, because it sees no easy way to make a profit.
Lie #4: “There is no alternative”
Osborne says cuts may be painful but there’s no other ‘road to recovery’. This lie is compounded by the Labour so-called opposition confirming that they will maintain pay freezes and other cuts. But there is an alternative.
A socialist government would, for example, reverse the decades of corporation tax cuts and impose a 50% tax levy on big business’s hoarded billions.
It would nationalise the tax-dodging privatised profiteering utilities and banking system under democratic popular control and use the resources to fund massive investment in decent jobs and public services. That could be just a start.
So don’t just get angry with Osborne and Co. Get organised. Get socialist.
On Tuesday 11 December workers and trade union members responded to the National Shop Steward Network’s call to lobby the TUC general council. They demanded a date for a 24-hour general strike in the first part of 2013. The general council agreed to send out a consultation to all affiliates.
Across England and Wales many workers and anti-cuts campaigners back this campaign. As we go to press there is a report from Knowsley where a packed 100-strong emergency meeting of the local government Unison branch voted unanimously for a motion calling for a 24-hour general strike.
