Photo by John Lanigan, more photos here...
CUTS: no division, no delay in action
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser - 29-06-10
Barely a day passes without a new batch of devastating butchery to jobs, services, livelihoods and communities being declared by the Tory-LibDem cuts coalition.
The onslaught is relentless – and deliberately so. By announcing wave after wave of attacks, they hope people will be overwhelmed, browbeaten, driven into despair and resignation at the sheer scale of the assault.
These smug, callous upper-class butchers also hope the summer season, with holidays and the daily demands of childcare during the school break, will lull workers and communities to sleep while they get on with the carnage.
The trade unions and their leaderships, in conjunction with community organisations, have a particular duty to prevent the Twin Tories’ noisy chorus of cuts from drowning out the cries of pain and suffering from their victims.
They need to challenge every announcement with hard-hitting rebuttals. Even more to the point, they need to name the days for united mass protests and give people confidence that there is a resistance movement that can defeat the attempts to prop up the bankers and billionaires at terrible cost to working class people.
War declared
June 22nd will go down as the day the Twin Tory Toffs and their class declared open war on the working class.
They declared war on jobs, with plans that authoritative economists estimate will slash 750,000 public sector jobs and 2.3 million jobs in the private sector.
They declared war on services, ranging from rising class sizes to a 50 per cent increase in burial costs to wholesale privatisation (including Royal Mail).
They mounted a war on pay and benefits, whilst jacking up prices through the VAT rise: three years of pay cuts for about 620,000 public sector workers in Scotland alone; slashing of maternity grants, child benefits and child tax credits; an assault on sick and disabled people’s benefits; plans to rob the unemployed of their measly benefit after a year of not getting a job – just as official figures show there are already record numbers chasing every vacancy, and before they scorch the earth we live and work on.
Monstrous Tory lies
As with all wars, the first casualty is the truth. The Twin Tories have peddled two monstrous lies: that we are “all in this together” and that this £85billion cuts was “the unavoidable budget”.
When the Cabinet took a 5 per cent pay cut to show “we are all in this together”, their obedient pups in the press didn’t highlight the fact 23 out of the 29 Cabinet members are millionaires! They are not likely to be heading down to find the nearest loan shark to pay the rent or tide them over with the food bill ‘til pay-day!
And as we have persistently explained in the Voice, cuts are entirely avoidable – if there was a government prepared to tax the obscenely rich and take the fabulous wealth in this country into democratic public ownership.
As the Tories and their hired liars through the editorials pound the public with their message of endless austerity “for the good of the nation”, we face a harsh choice: rise up in a united rebellion on a scale not seen since the days of the defeat of the poll tax, or face massacre by the millionaires’ government.
Street protests
The modest beginnings of resistance have begun. Several protests were held on Budget Day, with lunchtime and evening rallies. On the Saturday after the Budget (26 June) a very lively, colourful Street Rally was held in Glasgow, co-sponsored by the Scottish leaderships of four unions (NUJ, RMT, UCU and FBU); several union branches and the Save Our Schools Campaign. Shoppers stopped and gathered to listen to the hard-hitting speeches, many of them signing up to join the fight against cuts.
But what would have made this event exponentially bigger and more powerful is if the STUC had initiated and built it – or at the very least backed it when others courageously called it – as an initial show of unity and determination to build a mass movement as the mass of the population awaken to the horrendous consequences of the cuts.
Guard against delay and division
Every day and every new war front opened up by Cameron and Clegg highlights the urgent need for those in positions of power in the organised unions and grassroots community groups to avoid three terrible dangers: division, delay, defeatism.
Division is being consciously, viciously whipped up by the Cabinet of Millionaires. They tell us we need to choose between welfare bills and jobs; that even deeper cuts to Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit, Jobseekers Allowance, etc could reduce the number of public sector jobs being slaughtered.
They tell us they will “protect” the NHS whilst cutting “waste” in the civil service and local government. But that is a lie on several counts: inflation is higher in the NHS than on average, so the funds offered to the NHS are actually cuts, and already, before that bites, Scotland faces the loss of 4,000 NHS workers’ jobs (1,523 of them nurses and midwives). You can’t get much more frontline than that – yet these barefaced liars declare they will “protect frontline services”.
Neither council nor NHS cuts!
A monstrous litany of job losses, cuts and closures have been declared by councils across Scotland. The dangers of division – of the Tories’ divide and conquer tactics gaining some success – is already nakedly obvious when you hear leaders of COSLA (the umbrella body of Scottish councils) threatening that if the NHS is “protected” it will mean an extra 50per cent cuts in local authorities, so COSLA will rip up the Concordat with the SNP government, ignore attempts to cut class sizes and end the freeze on Council Tax bills – unless the NHS takes its share of cuts!
The politicians and bureaucrats that make up COSLA are therefore asking for more attacks on the NHS, which people’s lives literally depend upon; threaten to make our kids pay for the bankers’ and billionaires’ crisis through larger classes and a worse education; and into the bargain want to jack up Council Tax bills that low-paid and middle-income families pay a disproportionate amount towards.
All because they swallow the Tory lie that cuts are necessary, there is no money, we have to live within our means. All because they have rejected the SSP’s well-researched alternative to the unfair Council Tax, the Scottish Service Tax, which would leave 80 per cent of Scots better off, and raise at least £500m more for council services per year, by taxing the rich minority far more. And all because the mainstream parties that make up COSLA have no conception of mobilising council workers, service users, the wider trade union and community movement in a war of resistance to the entirely unjustified, vicious, class-driven assault from the Millionaires’ Cabinet.
Build a mass Scottish Demo
The trade unions – led and coordinated by the STUC - need to boldly declare their outright opposition to all cuts, exposing the monstrous lies and myths that the Tories’ case for cuts is built on.
In reply to the Tories’ attempts to trap us into deciding which service, which job, which person’s pay or benefits should be cut, the unions should shout out loud “no cuts – tax the rich instead”.
And it is a matter of extreme urgency that they organise a mass march and other protests to embolden people who are at their wits end with worry over their future.
Pound the Twin Tories
Every week’s delay only helps the Tories sow division, and lays the foundations for the onset of defeatism: people thinking nothing has been done, therefore nothing can be done, so we just have to accept there will be cuts.
Far from it! The treacherous LibDems are in freefall in the opinion polls, with stories of backbench revolts – not because they have a conscience between them, but because they dread losing their seats as MPs. This is not a “strong and stable government”, despite their repetition of that phrase ad nauseam. Now is the time to pound them with a mass Scottish demonstration, local protests and ultimately coordinated strikes across the public sector.
No delay, name the day – unite to stop the cuts
The STUC have yet to announce when they are calling a Demo – though rumours abound that it will be the last days of October, after the government Public Spending Review.
Of course there should be protests then, when the Butchers’ Budget is made more specific. But why wait another 4 months before a major protest demo? Why not light a fire of fury underneath the Tories’ and LibDems’ backsides before they finalise their Spending Review – as a warning that they will not get away with their one-sided civil war?
The European unions are calling a day of action against cuts on 29 September, a weekday, with a likely strike wave in Belgium and a mass march in Brussels.
Unless the unions in Scotland are serious about calling general strike action that day, with transport to Brussels for thousands of Scottish workers, one concrete option in Scotland would be to hold a mass Demo on the nearest Saturday (2nd October), which also happens to be the day the Tory party conference opens.
But regardless of which dates are chosen, it is critical the summer does not just drift by, without a publicly declared plan of militant action by unions and communities – because the government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich will certainly not be asleep!