Socialist policies to beat cost-of-living crisis

  • We need a new workers’ party
  • Vote TUSC on 4 May

No one to be cold, no one to be hungry, no one to be homeless. This should be a basic expectation in the world’s sixth-richest country, in the 21st Century.

Instead, rising prices plunge growing numbers into poverty, onto the streets and into food bank queues. Meanwhile, big bosses and major shareholders rake in obscene profits and gluttonous dividends.

On the bosses’ side, the age-old Tory party captained by rich-list Rishi. And sat on the bench ready to come on, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, “unrecognisable from 2019”, when under Jeremy Corbyn it stood for building council housing, free university education and an end to austerity.

Taking to the pitch in the mighty strike wave, working-class people have refused to give up the fight to maintain our living standards – standing firm for fully funded inflation-proof pay rises, but without a mass political party behind us.

Having already received bumper energy bills, water bills, rents, and supermarket receipts, households will also be receiving record-high council tax bills. We are being asked to pay even more for even less, again.

Through over a decade of cutbacks, councils led by any combination of Tories, Lib Dems, Labour and Greens have carried out austerity. Founded by and still receiving funding from the trade union movement, the Labour Party, where it leads councils, has taken the axe to jobs and services.

We need councillors prepared to fight for no one to be cold, hungry or homeless. That’s why Socialist Party members are among 260 standing for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) in local elections on 4 May. All TUSC candidates pledge to vote against cuts. Socialist Party members are fighting everywhere for councils to set no-cuts budgets to meet people’s needs, mobilising the trade unions and local communities in mass campaigns to demand the money from central government.

We need a new mass workers’ party that is prepared to back workers striking for a real-terms, inflation-proof pay rise, and to defend services. That party needs to be armed with a fighting socialist programme to take the on the super-rich – nationalising the banks and big industry under democratic workers’ control. Then, rather than being run to maximize the profits of the rich, the economy can be planned to provide warmth, food and a home – a decent standard of living for all.

  • Visit tusc.org.uk for a full list of candidates