Rebel against the cuts
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser 11-02-11
Anger mounts daily with the reports of the gaping, widening gulf between ‘them and us’ the rich and the rest of us; the billions for the bankers and the massacre of jobs and services for the millions.
One banker ushered in the New Year with the immortal words: “the period of remorse and apology from the banks needs to be over”.
The very same Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, is about to pocket £8.5million in a bonus. He will be only just outstripped by Stuart Gulliver, chief executive of HSBC, who stands to get a £9million banker’s bonus – making ‘poor’ old Stephen Hester of the Royal Bank of Scotland look like a pauper – by bankers’ standards that is – with ‘only’ £2million bonus on top of his salary.
Them and us
Families suffer cuts in Child Credit; workers endure pay cuts for the sixth consecutive year; people freeze in poorly-insulated houses as energy companies’ profits heat up; students face savage charges for being educated for society’s benefit; 135,000 Scots went bankrupt last year (the largest number since 1960); and well over 100,000 Scottish jobs face the slaughterhouse of Tory, LibDem, SNP and Labour cuts.
We are told “there’s not enough money to continue present spending levels”. Try telling that to the bankers about to enjoy £6-7billion in bonuses, or the six biggest energy companies whose profits soared to £8billion last year.
The mantra that cuts are necessary and unavoidable is an obscene lie, designed to demoralise and cow people into thinking there’s nothing we can do to stop the cuts Juggernaut that is devouring people’s lives and spewing out sickening profit margins for the parasitic minority.
Spineless NationalParty
The Scottish SNP government is busy pushing through its budget, which is based on their spineless acceptance of the £1.3billion cuts to this year’s block grant from Westminster.
Far from being ‘Scotland’s champions’ as Alex Salmond claims at election time, the SNP government has chosen to get down on its knees and accept a good kicking from Westminster’s twin Tories, rather than stand up on their hind legs, refuse to pass on a single cut, and lead a mass rebellion of the Scottish people with the cry “Give us back our stolen £billions”.
In turn, an array of Labour, SNP, LibDem and Tory councillors are handing out cuts that range from the cruel to the downright crazy.
Aberdeen (SNP-LibDem) is making 900 staff compulsory redundant. Glasgow (Labour) is savaging education, social services and vital community services with cuts of £90million. Renfrewshire (SNP) is shedding 60 teachers to replace them with lesser-trained staff, provoking a strike ballot by the teachers’ union, EIS. And they are shutting down a string of disabled people’s day centres – a cruel attack on the most vulnerable. North Ayrshire (Labour minority) has even considered a four-day week for schools, which would wreak havoc to working families, not to mention the wreckage to young kids’ futures, and the jobs slashed. And they claim they’re not alone; that other councils are considering this same cost-cutting insanity.
These are mere samples of a horrendous menu of butchery across Scotland’s 32 councils.
Scotland needs socialist councillors
If anyone ever doubted the need for a socialist alternative that resists these cuts, and puts forward a rational, fighting alternative, look no further than West Dunbartonshire.
The ruling SNP council plan to jack rents up 4.5 per cent, but seek absolute pay cuts from the workforce. They want to decimate free school transport, free school meals for P1-3; the 24-hour sheltered housing service for the old and frail; cut concessionary leisure centre fees to children, claimants and council staff … and get rid of 5,000 council houses at a time when there are 10,000 on the waiting list!
But one councillor stands out from the crowd; the Scottish Socialist Party’s Jim Bollan is putting forward a No-cuts budget, plus a rent freeze, demanding back the £17.6million required to balance the Council’s books.
That courageous stance has been backed by all four major local council workers’ unions – UNISON, UNITE, GMB and EIS – plus numerous tenants’ organisations.
This goes to show at least two things: if councillors in other parties had the bottle and the beliefs to defy Westminster and Holyrood’s cuts, and demand back the funding to protect jobs and services, they would muster massive public and trade union support; and the fighting, socialist policies and strategies of the SSP are an indispensable weapon in the teeth of horrendous cuts.
We can win
Cuts can be defeated. Even the smug-faced assassins Cameron and Clegg have to take account of what forces their attacks unleash. That is even more the case with more localised politicians, keen to get (re)elected to Holyrood in May, or hold onto their council seats. The scale and depth of a resistance movement will shape how much they dare to cut, how much they are compelled to retreat.
Although pathetically late in its being called, the TUC demo in London on 26 March is one of several key events in this resistance movement. It promises to be a mammoth event. Trains are booked from Glasgow and Edinburgh, sleeper services from Inverness and Aberdeen, and thousands of workers and students from Scotland are booking places.
Build 26 March TUC demo
The bigger the march, the more confident the crowd when they return to their communities, workplaces and colleges, to take up the cudgels against cuts.
Likewise, the bigger the mass march, the more wary the governments will be to confront them.
As John Jamieson, PCS national executive committee member and SSP activist told me, “Pensions is the big issue right now for civil servants. The Hutton Report proposes a massive rise of 3 percentage points in our contributions to the pension scheme, but it could be even higher. This is despite the fact the cost of civil service pensions is falling, because after our national campaign of action a few years ago we won a deal that protects the pensions of existing staff, but new staff don’t get as much.
"So what the employers are threatening is a pay cut, for the sake of cutting the wages bill – not because the pension fund needs topping up.
"Already the university and college lecturers’ union, UCU, is preparing a ballot against a huge rise (3 percentage points) in their pension contributions.
"Our union, PCS, have written to the UK’s top civil servant, Sir Gus O’Donnell, demanding reassurances that there will be no such cut in income through increased workers’ pension contributions – especially at a time when we are suffering pay cuts already. We have written twice, still no reply. I think the government is watching what the response to the TUC demo is before they openly decide to declare war on us, for fear of mobilising even greater resistance. So the bigger the demo, the better chance of making the government think twice before they attack.”
Co-ordinated strikes
At last September’s TUC conference, rousing speeches echoed the land with calls for co-ordinated strike action against the cuts. At December’s Scottish Council of UNISON, a motion was passed unanimously calling for a co-ordinated one-day strike of the Scottish public sector. Leaders of several unions – such as Mark Serwotka (PCS), Bob Crow (RMT) and Len McLuskey (UNITE) - have issued similar calls.
The time for such words to be acted upon and systematically built for amongst Scotland’s 620,000 public sector workers has arrived.
Councils setting cuts budgets run parallel to cuts in the NHS – contrary to the soothing lie that the NHS is protected. Last week alone, 24,000 public sector jobs were put at risk, according to a UNISON survey. That includes 7,600 in Scotland, including 3,708 NHS workers who have been earmarked for the chop.
There can be no room left for divide-and-conquer tactics – communities versus workers, NHS versus local government versus education, public versus private sector.
The unions have the potential power to make a bold call for united strike action, with rallies and demos that could enlist the support of thousands of students and communities, as a warning shot across the bows of both the Westminster and Holyrood axe-wielders’ governments, and above all as a huge boost to the fighting spirits of those currently scared out of their wits at the horrendous insecurity they face.
Doing an Egypt?
A month or so ago very few would have predicted the revolutionary wave that has hit Egypt, and the chain of uprisings in the region. But for several years the Egyptian workers’ movement has fought and organised against Mubarak’s dictatorship and their own employers. Then the moment arose where all this effort and organisation became a critical part of the people’s revolt; workers’ unions in Alexandria, for instance, approached the conscript soldiers and won their promises not to fire on the crowds who took to the streets.
We are far from ‘doing an Egypt’ right now in Scotland, but the simple message needs to be broadcast: even the seemingly immovable force of a dictatorship can be challenged, let alone the would-be dictators at Westminster, who have no mandate to rule or ruin Scotland.
A demo of a million on 26 March would rock the smug butchers and bankers. A call by union leaders and serious preparation for a Scottish one-day public sector strike with rallies would hammer the cutters into retreat. And the SSP’s socialist alternatives, centred on taxation of the rich and democratic public ownership, would lift the sights of millions to the future that is possible, if fought for by unions, communities and students.