Weapons of resistance to the cuts
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser. 29-9-2010
The Twin Tories in Downing Street have declared a vicious war on workers and communities with their worst-ever public sector butchery.
The opening shots were fired in the June Budget, but even worse salvos loom on 20 October, their Comprehensive Spending Review.
Cameron and Clegg’s wild axe-men rely on three primary weapons: damn lies, divide-and-rule tactics and defeatism.
In building a resistance movement capable of stopping the cuts to services, benefits, jobs, pay and pensions, we need our own weapons of resistance. A powerful combination of arguments and action can boost the fighting confidence of those who face decimation and build a mass rebellion to stop the Millionaires’ Cabinet – and their pale imitators in Holyrood and Scotland’s 32 councils. It’s been done before!
Lie no 1: We are all in this together
This is an obscene invention by the Tory-LibDem Cabinet of 29, which has 23 millionaires and four ex-bankers in its ranks. When they sanctimoniously cut their perks by 5 per cent, it did nothing to persuade millions of low-paid workers and people barely surviving on benefits of £55-65 a week that “we are all in this together”.
One of the biggest causes of the economic crisis is the £1.3trillion cost of the bankers’ bailout in 2007. Since then, at least one in six bank workers’ jobs have been slashed (27,000 in the RBS alone) – but top banking bosses awarded themselves £8bn in bonuses last year. Unemployment in Scotland has nearly doubled since the banking crisis – to 232,000 – with youth unemployment up by 80 per cent. Yet the richest 1,000 individuals have amassed £350bn in personal wealth.
And several recent studies show the planned cuts will hit the poorest 13 times harder than the richest – opening the scissors of inequality even wider.
Lie no 2: Public Sector debt is at an all-time high, and must be cut
Public sector debt as a proportion of national economic output (GDP) is around 70 per cent. High unemployment is a major cause of that – the failure of employers to retain let alone expand jobs and therefore tax yields. But debt in the UK was never below 100 per cent of GDP from 1920 ‘til 1960! In 1948, it was proportionately four times higher than it is now. But rather than leading to swingeing cuts, the mass pressure of a working class movement demanding recompense for the privations of World War 2 led to the creation of the NHS, the welfare state, expansion of state education (with comprehensive schools introduced), vast house-building and a period of relative prosperity for working class communities, which lasted ‘til the early 1970s.
Lie no 3:The public sector is far too big in this country
Over one in four Scottish workers is directly employed in the public sector, so cuts will devastate families and communities. Forecasts of over 100,000 job losses are now common currency – after being dismissed when the SSP first warned of this scale of slaughter in the May elections. But is a cynically orchestrated lie to claim public spending is out of control compared to other countries. It is lower here as a proportion of the economy than in the likes of France, Italy, Austria, Scandinavia. Spending on health and education is already lower in the UK than in most other western economies; well behind Germany, France, most OECD countries – and roughly half the USA’s health budget as a percentage of the economy.
Lie no 4:The government, like households, has to cut back spending to match its income
This is an economically illiterate lie, designed to fool people with its ‘homely, common-sense’. For starters, wage cuts led to reduced spending power since the 1970s, and capitalist governments actively hounded people into record levels of credit to make up the shortfall – boosting sales and profits through plastic cards! Without credit, the economy would grind to a halt.
But more to the point, if the entire public sector is cut back, with the entire working- and middle-class simultaneously forced into tightening their belts, it adds to public sector unemployment, reduces spending power, thereby slashes jobs in the private sector – and sets in motion a vicious downward spiral. For every £1 earned by public sector workers, 70 pence is spent in their local community. So pay cuts/freeze impacts on the private sector, including small businesses. For every public sector job lost, at least one private sector worker is made unemployed.
Lie no 5: There is no economic alternative to cuts
Unlike hard-pressed households, where wage cuts and attacks on the already-miserly levels of benefits makes it impossible to escape horrendous hardships, the government has vast scope to increase income to the public purse, rather than slashing what it spends. Recent surveys show that Scotland already suffers some of the worst conditions in Europe in terms of longer working hours, less holidays, lower wages, worse public services, poorer pensions, later retirement age – and lack of sunshine! But there is no excuse for the appalling levels of social provision, given the mountains of wealth heaped up in the coffers of a handful of individuals, banks and corporations.
Answer: No cuts – Tax the rich
When the SSP declares “No cuts – tax the rich” it is no glib sloganising, but the essence of a viable, rational, fair alternative.
The very richest 1,000 individuals wouldn’t notice the difference if a 10 per cent wealth tax was levied on their collective £350bn of riches. But the £35bn collected would fund 1.4 million new jobs, on decent wages of £25,000 a year.
The rich dodged over £120bn in taxes last year – based on the current, millionaire-friendly tax rates!
The policy of the SSP – adopted overwhelmingly at this years national conference of the PCS union – to restore tax levels on the very rich and big business to pre-Thatcher levels (83% top rate income tax, 52% Corporation Tax) would raise at least £250bn extra for jobs and services.
Taxing the rich would lay the foundations for a vast expansion of social well-being for the people of Scotland. Democratic public ownership of the major industries, banks, energy, construction and services would allow a rational planning of clean, green, sustainable production, with ‘people not profit’ the guiding principle. Of course there’s an economic alternative to cuts – in essence, socialism.
But what can we do this side of gaining socialism?!
Demand real action from the politicians who claim to oppose the ConDem cuts, for starters!
In May’s Westminster elections, the SNP issued sound-bites about electing ‘champions for Scotland’. On 20 October the arch-butcher Osborne will announce devastation and privatisation for four years to come. In November the SNP Scottish government will have to choose between passing on Westminster cuts like obedient servants of the Millionaires’ government – or mount a mighty defiance campaign of the Scottish people. Instead of cutting Scotland’s cloth according to the remnants handed out by Westminster, the SNP should set a Defiance Budget – with no cuts whatsoever – and call communities and public sector workers into action to demand the funds off Westminster to balance the books.
Councillors across Scotland’s 32 local authorities have to set local budgets in February. They are mostly led by parties other than the Tories or LibDems. If they are worth a carrot, these councillors would set Defiance Budgets, People’s Budgets – and unite with the unions, pensioners’, students’ and community groups to demand the necessary funds off Holyrood to balance the books – without a single cut to jobs, pay, pensions or services, and without hammering low- and middle-income families with hikes to Council Tax bills.
But how can councils or the Scottish government protect jobs and services?
Hand-in-hand with defiantly setting No Cuts budgets, appealing for the backing of the Scottish people for their courageous stance, councillors and MSPs should launch a crusade for a fair, progressive alternative to the regressive, unfair Council Tax. There is no need to face a Hobson’s Choice between cuts and Council tax hikes – both hammering the poorest hardest.
As recent editions of the Voice have explained in detail, the SSP’s alternative proposal – a Scottish Service Tax, based on income, with the first £10,000 income exempt, and a sliding scale of tax bands rising from 4.5per cent to 20 per cent (on incomes over £100,000) – would raise nearly twice the income from Council Tax next year!
A total of £3.4bn instead of £1.8bn – a source of surplus to allocate to jobs, pay and service - with a much-needed redistribution of some of the obscenely bloated incomes of the rich minority to the rest of us.
If new New Labour MSPs and councillors are not just cynical vote-snatchers, they should put their verbal opposition to the Tory cuts into action by supporting such a simple, progressive alternative.
If the SNP government hopes to survive the 2011 elections, they should turn their 2007 election pledge into action through an emergency Bill to abolish the hated Council Tax and replace it with an income-based Service Tax that would demolish the excuses for cuts in one fell swoop.
What can WE do to win?
Don’t sit back and wait for the politicians!
Trade unions have a particular opportunity and duty to lead the battle, given they represent many of Scotland’s 620,000-strong public sector workforce. They need to hold workplace meetings, street stalls, mass leafleting of workers to turn the STUC’s 23 October demo into a mass protest of tens of thousands.
That march in turn could be used to launch preparations for coordinated, united industrial action across the entire public sector – to rock the cuts coalition, and drive back their butchery.
Alongside the unions, community groups, pensioners’ forums, youth organisations and anti-cuts campaigns should pound the politicians with demands for action louder than words – Defiance Budgets and moves to scrap and replace the Council Tax.
Initially, demos, rallies and protests are weapons of persuasion – to show those who live in mortal fear of the cuts that they do not stand alone. And that we should not fall for either divide-and-rule tactics or the poison of defeatism being spread by the government and the majority of the media. As cuts bite, alongside coordinated strikes the resistance movement will require the likes of sit-ins to protect endangered schools and community facilities.
But surely we cannot beat the cuts coalition?
It has worked before! Thatcher was the chief hench-woman of the rich, portrayed as invincible, the Iron Lady. But two key examples of her government’s defeat should give courage to this generation of anti-cuts fighters: the victory of Liverpool socialist council in 1984, and the downfall of the poll tax ) and Thatcher!) in the early 1990s.
Liverpool’s socialist councillors had the courage and conviction to set a No Cuts Budget, lead workers and communities in a powerful mass movement that included regional one-day general strikes and demos of 50,000…and force the ‘invincible’ Thatcher Tories into conceding £60m for jobs and services.
Likewise a popular mass revolt of the Scottish people paved the way for the burial of the poll tax.
It has been done before! The Tories and LibDems can be defeated. So too can councils that wield the axe rather than stand up for local people against the Downing St Butchers. We need the weapons of resistance to become the property of hundreds of thousands, to help build a mass movement