Scott Hunter, Swindon Socialist Party and TUSC candidate in Swindon North
For young people today, the words ‘public services’ almost sound like a sick joke. 14 years of Tory austerity have left most services in Britain on life support.
And we have more needs than ever. 1 in 6 young people experience a mental health need, and those from the lowest income bracket are 4.5 times more likely to experience severe needs than those in the highest. More than a quarter of a million young people are on the NHS waiting list for mental health support.
And without support, it snowballs and has impacts for our whole lives. Health problems (physical or mental) can get worse. This then impacts people’s ability to study and work, which in turn will impact quality of life and even what money gets put into our pensions, if we ever get one! The NHS was meant to provide care ‘from cradle to grave’ but now poverty stalks working-class people through our whole lives.
The NHS is just one thing, but the list goes on. Education budgets have been cut, as well as youth services. Councils are cutting back spending and services to legal minimums. The future looks grim.
It is truly shocking just how quickly the state of things has degraded. What happened?
The running-down of our public services has been no accident. It’s been a deliberate political choice from successive New Labour, Con-Dem and Tory governments to make the working class pay for the bosses’ crisis of 2007-08. The politicians, representatives of the capitalist class, bailed out the banks and have sought to pass the cost on to workers and young people through spending cuts and wage freezes.
We all want to get the Tories out and put to bed the 14 years of austerity. But Keir Starmer’s New Labour Mark II has no answers for young people crying out for an alternative. Starmer has already committed himself to ‘iron-clad fiscal responsibility’ and made clear that there will be no major increases in public spending under a Labour government. Millions will vote Labour on 4 July, hoping against hope for some relief from the misery of the past 14 years. Working-class and young people are going to have to fight hard to get any improvements to our lives.
The strike wave of the past few years has shown the way. Many young people, who didn’t even know what a trade union was, have been awakened to what can be achieved through fighting, working-class struggle. Young workers have flooded into some of the trade unions and will be learning lessons of the past few years. First among them: striking works! If you fight together, you can win, or at least improve what was on offer at the start.
We have seen multiple generations lose out to austerity; we can’t afford to throw more lives away! There must be no reprieve for Starmer – we must fight in the trade unions to make sure they enter this new period ready to fight.
Young people and workers also need a political voice. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto met with huge enthusiasm from young people, and it would be significant if he and other expelled Labour lefts were elected as independents. But we need more than just scattered independents. We need trade unions, socialists, community and anti-war campaigners to get organised into a new mass party of workers and youth to fight in parliament and the council chambers.
