If you spent your life sat indoors reading government press releases, you would believe Britain is on the up. Stick your head out of the front door and reality hits. Need to use any of Britain’s public services? Another blow.
For all the Labour government’s infrastructure spending fanfare before and after the 11 June spending review, taking place after the Socialist goes to press, it will detail Tory-style cuts to day-to-day spending on public services.
Local government, in which an estimated 600,000 jobs have been lost since austerity began in 2010, continues to face cuts. That means more closed libraries and children’s centres, and more brutal attacks on workers like the £8,000 pay cut Birmingham City Council is inflicting on bin workers.
Government departments face a literal jobs decimation – 10% of civil service jobs are set to go. Any area that isn’t health or defence will be cut in real terms. Even then, the expected 1.2% real-terms increase in health spending is far less than what is needed and well below the pre-2008 average of 4.3%. The trade unions need to fight. The vast majority of public sector pay deals, themselves insufficient, are unfunded. Cue the Labour government trying to play off workers demanding fair pay against funding for services. We demand both! Strike ballots scheduled for this summer and autumn should link the issue of pay to funding.
Britain has 156 billionaires, and the government can ‘afford’ to spend through the nose for new submarines and nuclear warheads. It can definitely afford to stop closing libraries and to give NHS workers a decent pay rise. However, this Labour government is choosing to leave vast hoards of wealth and resources in the hands of the super-rich while attacking working-class communities.
We need a political alternative. The trade unions’ fight for pay and funding should be linked to backing their own candidates in elections, independent of Labour, to fight on the side of workers against the super-rich bosses, and as a step towards building a new mass party of the working class.
