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.
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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.