Local councils in England will shortly get the news they’ve dreaded hearing ever since George Osborne announced his massive cuts package last month – details of the reduced funding they will get from Whitehall for 2011-12.
Osborne’s “spending review” is based, among other calculations, on slashing local government spending by a mammoth 27% over the next four years. To achieve that, central government grants could be cut by over half, according to independent analysis.
The Coalition has frozen council tax – the only other major source of council funding – so the net result has to be the axing of tens of thousands of jobs, the devastation of essential local services and a sharp rise in charges to local residents. Birmingham City Council is already planning to cut its workforce by 10,000 over the next four years.
Areas like the North-east, where public sector jobs are the mainstay, will be the hardest hit. The Association of North East Councils has written to ministers telling them that they are “undeliverable” unless the government wants to devastate the region, especially as the cuts are scheduled to be heaviest in the first of the four-year cycle in a process known as “frontloading”.
Some Labour-controlled councils are not waiting for the grant announcement. Earlier this week, Lewisham Council passed a £16 million cuts budget amid a stormy protest.
Others like Lambeth leader Steve Reed are making excuses in advance for carrying out government diktats. Writing on his blog, Reed admits that councils “across Britain [including his own] are working out how to implement funding cuts on a scale not seen since before the Second World War”. His main gripe is that the cuts are being “frontloaded” to force councils to close services down “rather than manage the cost reductions in a more sensible and measured way.”
But when all is said and done, Reed and his fellow Labour councillors intend to make the cuts as demanded while claiming that they are not their fault because they originate with the Coalition. That’s true of course – but someone has to carry them into practice and Reed and Labour councillors around the country may moan and groan but they will obey orders because to do otherwise would mean defiance and potentially put them outside the law. And we can’t have Labour councillors put in such a dangerous and difficult position!
If any of them had an ounce of political courage, Labour councillors who control most major authorities would resign their seats and fight bye-elections on the pledge of refusing to draw up and pass a cuts budget. They would mobilise their communities and council trade unions to fight the Coalition in the way Lambeth Council of the early 1980s fought the Thatcher government. But don’t hold your breath on this one. Instead, they intend to pass on the cuts and smash services.
In these circumstances, local communities and local authority trade unions have no other choice but to begin a struggle to oust the councillors from their cosy offices and council chambers. They should reject the argument that councillors are just “carrying out orders” because this not an acceptable defence. Let the Coalition send in their own people to do the dirty work.
The way the cuts are being made ready at town hall level prove once and for all that local government is a fiction. We are talking centralised, undemocratic Whitehall control. Local democracy died a long time ago and it’s time to move on. That’s one of the themes for discussion at the December 11 People’s Assemblies event in London. Register for it today.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Spending Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spending Review. Show all posts
Friday, December 03, 2010
Monday, November 08, 2010
No time for burying heads in the sand
Political innocence is one thing. But desperately hanging on to a blinkered point of view in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is altogether more dangerous.
A blunt refusal to grasp that the system of capitalism is in crisis was all too evident at an anti-cuts conference called by the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress (SERTUC) at the weekend.
SERTUC President Martin Gould told union representatives that the LibCon spending cuts were “ideologically” driven. The economic situation, he insisted, was “the bankers’ crisis, not our crisis”.
He was taking his cue from TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, who repeated the mantra that government policy is, “not driven by economics but by a political project” (October 21). And that the spending review was “not an economic necessity but a political choice” (October 19).
There was not the remotest suggestion from leaders who spoke that there might be a real, objective global economic crisis, manifested in mountains of debt. that was driving the British state to withdraw from its post-World War II role of providing social support.
On the contrary, they said that “a lot of money can be squeezed out of the rich and the bankers”. In the face of “60% of the population believing that the cuts are necessary and inevitable”, Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers said that a campaign of education was the answer. She compared the cuts agenda with the sinking of the Titanic, in which the rich passengers got the lifeboats while the poor had no chance. Heather Wakefield of UNITE called for “a battle of ideas” and “mass mobilisation”, saying there was a need to “get political” and “challenge council officials”.
Never the remotest suggestion that it was time to get off the sinking ship of capitalism altogether and transfer ownership and management of resources into the hands of the majority in society.
Behind the claim that there is no serious debt or financial crisis and that pouring money into job creation (a total failure in the US) is the answer, lies an unstated assumption. The trade unions and working class must be kept chained inside the system of production for profit and the political status quo. Of course, if the cuts are purely “ideological” in their nature, it follows that they can be reversed or halted through pressure – within the system.
The Public and Commercial Services union has issued a popular pamphlet “There is an alternative”, which calls for resistance to the cuts and for a “new economic strategy”. Nonetheless, it says that the government should be forced to implement it. Yes, the PCS is right. We need a new vision. But the notion that the LibCons or New Labour will deliver it is totally in their dreams.
Jenny Sutton, chair of the London Region of University and College Union was the only speaker who took the bull by the horns. “We can’t wait until spring. There must be something before Christmas to embolden people – and not just a protest – we must stop that wheel from turning. There must be a real commitment to a general strike.”
Yes, real action is needed but that action must have a strategy that goes beyond resistance and protest if it is to be successful. The cuts agenda is evidence that the existing economic and political system is well and truly broken and cannot provide for the needs of the majority in society. To deny that is to bury your head in the sand at a time when it's necessary to raise our sights.
Only a truly alternative economic and political system, based not on profit, but collective stewardship, as outlined in the Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, can provide lasting answers to the cuts. Working for a Network of Peoples Assemblies on December 11 to implement these strategies is the way forward.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
A blunt refusal to grasp that the system of capitalism is in crisis was all too evident at an anti-cuts conference called by the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress (SERTUC) at the weekend.
SERTUC President Martin Gould told union representatives that the LibCon spending cuts were “ideologically” driven. The economic situation, he insisted, was “the bankers’ crisis, not our crisis”.
He was taking his cue from TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, who repeated the mantra that government policy is, “not driven by economics but by a political project” (October 21). And that the spending review was “not an economic necessity but a political choice” (October 19).
There was not the remotest suggestion from leaders who spoke that there might be a real, objective global economic crisis, manifested in mountains of debt. that was driving the British state to withdraw from its post-World War II role of providing social support.
On the contrary, they said that “a lot of money can be squeezed out of the rich and the bankers”. In the face of “60% of the population believing that the cuts are necessary and inevitable”, Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers said that a campaign of education was the answer. She compared the cuts agenda with the sinking of the Titanic, in which the rich passengers got the lifeboats while the poor had no chance. Heather Wakefield of UNITE called for “a battle of ideas” and “mass mobilisation”, saying there was a need to “get political” and “challenge council officials”.
Never the remotest suggestion that it was time to get off the sinking ship of capitalism altogether and transfer ownership and management of resources into the hands of the majority in society.
Behind the claim that there is no serious debt or financial crisis and that pouring money into job creation (a total failure in the US) is the answer, lies an unstated assumption. The trade unions and working class must be kept chained inside the system of production for profit and the political status quo. Of course, if the cuts are purely “ideological” in their nature, it follows that they can be reversed or halted through pressure – within the system.
The Public and Commercial Services union has issued a popular pamphlet “There is an alternative”, which calls for resistance to the cuts and for a “new economic strategy”. Nonetheless, it says that the government should be forced to implement it. Yes, the PCS is right. We need a new vision. But the notion that the LibCons or New Labour will deliver it is totally in their dreams.
Jenny Sutton, chair of the London Region of University and College Union was the only speaker who took the bull by the horns. “We can’t wait until spring. There must be something before Christmas to embolden people – and not just a protest – we must stop that wheel from turning. There must be a real commitment to a general strike.”
Yes, real action is needed but that action must have a strategy that goes beyond resistance and protest if it is to be successful. The cuts agenda is evidence that the existing economic and political system is well and truly broken and cannot provide for the needs of the majority in society. To deny that is to bury your head in the sand at a time when it's necessary to raise our sights.
Only a truly alternative economic and political system, based not on profit, but collective stewardship, as outlined in the Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, can provide lasting answers to the cuts. Working for a Network of Peoples Assemblies on December 11 to implement these strategies is the way forward.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Time to end the profit system
The Lib-Con Coalition government’s Spending Review is an attempt to rescue an already bankrupt economy. With £81bn cuts in public spending, it is the biggest and most sustained assault on the public sector since the creation of the welfare state sixty years ago.
But the reality is that despite the ruthless measures announced yesterday, the cuts will hardly make a dent on Britain’s budget deficit, which at £162 billion is the largest of the world’s major economies.
The plan is to bring government borrowing down by £149 billion in four years. This is a 19% per cent cut in real terms, as opposed to New Labour’s proposed 12 per cent. But can this gamble succeed? The very measures intended to reduce the deficit will deepen the crisis.
The one million people who will be thrown out of work and those made homeless will need some kind of support. And whilst blighting the lives of countless citizens, especially the most vulnerable, government spending will continue to rise by an additional £38 billion over the coming four years. As Chancellor Osborne announced: “total public expenditure - capital and current - over the coming years will be £702 billion next year, then £713 billion, £724 billion and £740 billion in 2014-15.”
An additional £7 billion cut brings the total cut in the welfare budget to £18 billion so far. The poorest ten per cent of the population stand to lose the most. It is a monstrous bludgeon expected to achieve just a £5 billion reduction in the £43 billion per year interest payments.
The measures include:
• a 30% cut in funding for local authorities
• a 74% cut in the budget for house-building combined with a trebling of rents for new tenants in social housing
• insecure tenancy of council house dwellers
• the minimum possible increase for the NHS, that will leave health care struggling to keep up with an aging population and scientific advance
• ending the universal right to Child benefits
• a 3.4% real cut in education
• cancellation of major infrastructure projects, like the renewal energy from the Severn Barrage
• a 10% increase in rail fares
• a £7 billion cut in the welfare budget
• Culture Department to be cut by 42% with almost 30% cut for Arts Council
• up to 30% cuts in budgets for government departments
• 20% cut in funding for the police
• rapid acceleration in the process of adding a year to the working life of a man and six to that of a woman before they can claim a state pension
• huge and damaging reductions in the settlements for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
There is certain to be much more as the contraction of the global capitalist economy tightens its grip. The attempt to reduce repayments to the money markets will be undermined by tax revenues falling faster as the recession turns to slump. The populist gesture of £2 billion to be raised from a permanent levy on banks will surely be passed on in the form of higher costs of borrowing.
Cuts in administration of around 30% over four years will lead to a loss of an estimated 490,000 public sector jobs, 8% of the total. The effects of the overall programme confirms consultancy PriceWaterhouseCooper’s estimate of a further 500,000 jobs evaporating in the private sector as spending is reduced and contracts are cancelled.
The Coalition has issued a sinister threat with its promise that it will always be better to be in work than on benefits. It means that they’re hard at work on schemes to reduce wages across the board. No doubt employers will be rubbing their hands at the prospect of new sources of cheap labour from the enlarged European Union and beyond.
This is only the beginning. The Spending Review spells out that the capitalist state can no longer afford to fund any of the rights or life-support benefits won by unions in a century of struggle.
The intention to reduce the wide and complex range of benefits needed by millions of people suffering the effects of three decades of profit-chasing globalisation to an all-encompassing single payment, and a time-limit on the Employment and Support Allowance reflects a profound contempt for the individuals whose needs have been assessed by cohorts of public sector workers. Capitalism in crisis wants to reduce millions people to bottom-line cyphers of cost before trying to eliminate them altogether.
Calls last night outside Downing Street for “French-style” strikes are a welcome move from the total inaction of the Trade Union Congress. But even industrial action needs a political purpose. The desperate gamblers in No10 and 11 are driven by a real economic crisis of the capitalist system itself.
The solution to the debt mountain comes in the shape of action by People's Assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html, formed locally throughout the country with a view to defending services, livelihoods, jobs, and homes. Eventually a government formed from a network of people's assemblies will need to take control of the financial sector, cancel the debts and turn it into a not-for-profit service.
The global capitalist classes are watching to see the results of Osborne’s cruel experiment. It’s time to realise that we too must enter new territory.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
But the reality is that despite the ruthless measures announced yesterday, the cuts will hardly make a dent on Britain’s budget deficit, which at £162 billion is the largest of the world’s major economies.
The plan is to bring government borrowing down by £149 billion in four years. This is a 19% per cent cut in real terms, as opposed to New Labour’s proposed 12 per cent. But can this gamble succeed? The very measures intended to reduce the deficit will deepen the crisis.
The one million people who will be thrown out of work and those made homeless will need some kind of support. And whilst blighting the lives of countless citizens, especially the most vulnerable, government spending will continue to rise by an additional £38 billion over the coming four years. As Chancellor Osborne announced: “total public expenditure - capital and current - over the coming years will be £702 billion next year, then £713 billion, £724 billion and £740 billion in 2014-15.”
An additional £7 billion cut brings the total cut in the welfare budget to £18 billion so far. The poorest ten per cent of the population stand to lose the most. It is a monstrous bludgeon expected to achieve just a £5 billion reduction in the £43 billion per year interest payments.
The measures include:
• a 30% cut in funding for local authorities
• a 74% cut in the budget for house-building combined with a trebling of rents for new tenants in social housing
• insecure tenancy of council house dwellers
• the minimum possible increase for the NHS, that will leave health care struggling to keep up with an aging population and scientific advance
• ending the universal right to Child benefits
• a 3.4% real cut in education
• cancellation of major infrastructure projects, like the renewal energy from the Severn Barrage
• a 10% increase in rail fares
• a £7 billion cut in the welfare budget
• Culture Department to be cut by 42% with almost 30% cut for Arts Council
• up to 30% cuts in budgets for government departments
• 20% cut in funding for the police
• rapid acceleration in the process of adding a year to the working life of a man and six to that of a woman before they can claim a state pension
• huge and damaging reductions in the settlements for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
There is certain to be much more as the contraction of the global capitalist economy tightens its grip. The attempt to reduce repayments to the money markets will be undermined by tax revenues falling faster as the recession turns to slump. The populist gesture of £2 billion to be raised from a permanent levy on banks will surely be passed on in the form of higher costs of borrowing.
Cuts in administration of around 30% over four years will lead to a loss of an estimated 490,000 public sector jobs, 8% of the total. The effects of the overall programme confirms consultancy PriceWaterhouseCooper’s estimate of a further 500,000 jobs evaporating in the private sector as spending is reduced and contracts are cancelled.
The Coalition has issued a sinister threat with its promise that it will always be better to be in work than on benefits. It means that they’re hard at work on schemes to reduce wages across the board. No doubt employers will be rubbing their hands at the prospect of new sources of cheap labour from the enlarged European Union and beyond.
This is only the beginning. The Spending Review spells out that the capitalist state can no longer afford to fund any of the rights or life-support benefits won by unions in a century of struggle.
The intention to reduce the wide and complex range of benefits needed by millions of people suffering the effects of three decades of profit-chasing globalisation to an all-encompassing single payment, and a time-limit on the Employment and Support Allowance reflects a profound contempt for the individuals whose needs have been assessed by cohorts of public sector workers. Capitalism in crisis wants to reduce millions people to bottom-line cyphers of cost before trying to eliminate them altogether.
Calls last night outside Downing Street for “French-style” strikes are a welcome move from the total inaction of the Trade Union Congress. But even industrial action needs a political purpose. The desperate gamblers in No10 and 11 are driven by a real economic crisis of the capitalist system itself.
The solution to the debt mountain comes in the shape of action by People's Assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html, formed locally throughout the country with a view to defending services, livelihoods, jobs, and homes. Eventually a government formed from a network of people's assemblies will need to take control of the financial sector, cancel the debts and turn it into a not-for-profit service.
The global capitalist classes are watching to see the results of Osborne’s cruel experiment. It’s time to realise that we too must enter new territory.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
All bark and no bite
There was dismay and anger amongst the several thousand trade union members who crowded Westminster Central Hall; some including a large number from the prison officers union, couldn’t get in to the TUC’s anti-cuts rally. People had travelled from Lancashire, Devon, Cornwall, Northamptonshire and around London to take part in the protest meeting and lobby of MPs.
As well as the Prison Officers Association, there were big delegations from Unison, actors’ union Equity, rail and transport workers, public services unions UNITE and GMB, the National Union of Teachers and the Right to Work Campaign. Screen actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Lloyd Pack said they opposed cuts in the arts which will privilege the rich. They all shared a deep anxiety as it emerged that around half a million jobs are to go by 2015.
Tony Woodley, joint secretary of the UNITE trade union, pointed out that for every four public sector jobs scrapped by the cuts, three more would follow in the private sector. He pointed out that the Lib-Con coalition has no mandate for the cuts, and that people “did not vote for the dismantling of their schools, hospitals and communities.”
“Cuts on this scale make no sense,” he said – but they make sense to the coalition, the bankers and the IMF. It’s the survival of the capitalist system that is at stake for them.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber continued the myth that the cuts are just a political choice, not an economic necessity for the ruling class: "They want us to believe....this is economic necessity. Yet economic experts across the spectrum warn us that the cuts are too deep and too rapid.”
Dave Prentis of Unison warned that if the government doesn’t listen, “we will be back. For every one of us in this room today, we will bring a hundred more. We’ll march in our thousands and we’ll vote in our millions,” he said in a fit of demagogy. But vote for what? For New Labour Mark 2?
None of the trade union leaders have any answers. In fact they are determined to hold back any serious movement by workers in the face of the re-shaping of the entire British state. Asked why the British workers were not angry as those in France, Woodley cited the anti-trade union laws making striking difficult. But if they were serious about halting the cuts, trade union leaders would bring every member out and let the law go hang. By directing all their fire towards parliament and the next election nearly four years hence, they hope to act as a lightning rod to defuse and disarm any movement.
And where was Milliband? He was in hiding from the trade union leaders who got him the Labour leadership. The reality is a New Labour government would be doing the same – and it may not be too long before they too are co-opted into this government of desperate decline.
Today’s spending review is not the result of a nasty bunch of old-style Thatcherite Tories. It is a response to the most serious economic and financial crisis of the capitalist profit-based system. As Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, speaking in the Midlands, made plain. Deep tensions underlay discussions at the International Monetary Fund meeting last week, he said.
Global currency conflicts, particularly between the US and China, are evidence of profound disagreements about the way to deal with the crisis. A 1930s-style collapse of business activity and international trade is possible. So much for the cuts being an “ideological exercise”! They are the ruling class’ response to an uncontrollable crisis of the system.
Fighting against the cuts agenda means challenging the ruling class by working for a transfer of power, property and control to a democratically elected and accountable network of peoples’ assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html. Come to the Beyond Resistance conference on December 11 to make this come alive.
Corinna Lotz and Peter Arkell
A World to Win
As well as the Prison Officers Association, there were big delegations from Unison, actors’ union Equity, rail and transport workers, public services unions UNITE and GMB, the National Union of Teachers and the Right to Work Campaign. Screen actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Lloyd Pack said they opposed cuts in the arts which will privilege the rich. They all shared a deep anxiety as it emerged that around half a million jobs are to go by 2015.
Tony Woodley, joint secretary of the UNITE trade union, pointed out that for every four public sector jobs scrapped by the cuts, three more would follow in the private sector. He pointed out that the Lib-Con coalition has no mandate for the cuts, and that people “did not vote for the dismantling of their schools, hospitals and communities.”
“Cuts on this scale make no sense,” he said – but they make sense to the coalition, the bankers and the IMF. It’s the survival of the capitalist system that is at stake for them.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber continued the myth that the cuts are just a political choice, not an economic necessity for the ruling class: "They want us to believe....this is economic necessity. Yet economic experts across the spectrum warn us that the cuts are too deep and too rapid.”
Dave Prentis of Unison warned that if the government doesn’t listen, “we will be back. For every one of us in this room today, we will bring a hundred more. We’ll march in our thousands and we’ll vote in our millions,” he said in a fit of demagogy. But vote for what? For New Labour Mark 2?
None of the trade union leaders have any answers. In fact they are determined to hold back any serious movement by workers in the face of the re-shaping of the entire British state. Asked why the British workers were not angry as those in France, Woodley cited the anti-trade union laws making striking difficult. But if they were serious about halting the cuts, trade union leaders would bring every member out and let the law go hang. By directing all their fire towards parliament and the next election nearly four years hence, they hope to act as a lightning rod to defuse and disarm any movement.
And where was Milliband? He was in hiding from the trade union leaders who got him the Labour leadership. The reality is a New Labour government would be doing the same – and it may not be too long before they too are co-opted into this government of desperate decline.
Today’s spending review is not the result of a nasty bunch of old-style Thatcherite Tories. It is a response to the most serious economic and financial crisis of the capitalist profit-based system. As Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, speaking in the Midlands, made plain. Deep tensions underlay discussions at the International Monetary Fund meeting last week, he said.
Global currency conflicts, particularly between the US and China, are evidence of profound disagreements about the way to deal with the crisis. A 1930s-style collapse of business activity and international trade is possible. So much for the cuts being an “ideological exercise”! They are the ruling class’ response to an uncontrollable crisis of the system.
Fighting against the cuts agenda means challenging the ruling class by working for a transfer of power, property and control to a democratically elected and accountable network of peoples’ assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html. Come to the Beyond Resistance conference on December 11 to make this come alive.
Corinna Lotz and Peter Arkell
A World to Win
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)