Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt unveiled his Spring Budget yesterday. You’d be forgiven for not noticing.
“Nuanced, quite subtle” were the delicate words chosen by one cabinet minister to describe Hunt’s plan for reviving the UK economy. In Standard British English, this roughly translates to “a whole load of nothing”; or “nowt much” if you’re from the North.
Another Tory MP concurred: “[Hunt] essentially said that he’d introduced one of the biggest tax cuts in history and nobody had noticed.”
On the back of last autumn’s tax-cutting bonanza, the Chancellor’s headline announcement was a further 2% cut to National Insurance (NI), which will cost £10bn of public money per year.
Other than that, there isn’t much to write home about – unless, like the Chancellor, you think that tossing a few crumbs to the country’s collapsing public services will save the Tories from electoral oblivion in the coming election.
Hunt’s tax-trimming was clearly a feeble bid to shore up support, particularly from the Tory right. But the Chancellor assures us that these “permanent” tax cuts will in fact “help families” and stimulate the flagging economy: “Conservatives know lower tax means higher growth. And higher growth means more opportunity and more prosperity.”
Bleak reality
For ordinary workers, however, these honeyed words are a world away from the bleak, grinding reality of life in Britain.
Research from the Resolution Foundation shows that only those who earn more than £27,000 will feel any benefit from this NI cut. Those earning less than £19,000 will be up to £500 worse off! As always, the poorest in society are being pushed further into misery.
Tucked away from the litany of headlines about this barren Budget, one BBC article reads: “I earn £1600 a month and two-thirds goes on bills.” A young worker in Selby, North Yorkshire remarked:
“I wouldn’t say we are coming out of the cost-of-living crisis. I’d say I actually feel slightly worse off than last year, but it feels like the news agenda has moved on.
“The National Insurance I pay went down ever so slightly recently, but that seems to mainly benefit the rich. I’m about £20 a month better off, which is next to nothing.”
This is the real mood on the ground: things are getting worse for us, while the billionaires reap the rewards.
Falling apart
On top of workers’ wallets being squeezed, public services are at breaking point.
The NHS waiting list for non-emergency treatment has ballooned to 7.6 million, amounting to more than 10% of the UK population. A&E waiting times have skyrocketed to 12 hours in many hospitals.
With the housing crisis showing no signs of abating, homelessness is plaguing the country. Makeshift encampments and shanty-town shelters are an increasingly common sight in cities across Britain.
In Manchester, up to 80 refugees per day are arriving in search of a home, adding to the 16,000-long queue for social housing.
Turning to the legal system, the backlog for Crown Court cases is up by 50% compared to previous years – the highest on record. It now takes over a year to process a criminal offence.
Some UK police forces have also announced that they will no longer be responding to mental health emergencies, adding yet more pressure on a strained social care sector, and potentially putting frontline social workers in harm’s way.
Alongside this smorgasbord of austerity, however, one government department that is being ring-fenced is defence. While schools and hospitals crumble at home, for want of public investment, the ruling class happily lavishes cash on bombs and missiles to destroy schools and hospitals abroad.
Local government
This week’s headlines, meanwhile, have been dominated by news of the massive austerity package being carried out by the Labour-led Birmingham Council, the largest local authority in Europe (see below).
In order to fill a gaping black hole in its balance sheet, the council has voted to axe £300m in spending and sell off £750m in assets – all while hiking council tax by a whopping 21%.
This will have a real, biting effect on the lives of ordinary people: 600 employees sacked; rubbish collections halved; all libraries shut down; social care budgets slashed; culture funding abolished. Even the street lights are being dimmed to save cash!
This all paints a dark, desolate picture of a society in decay. Ordinary people are being pushed to the brink of what is bearable. The crisis is felt in every aspect of our daily lives.
And Birmingham is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost 1 in 5 council leaders expects bankruptcy in the next 15 months.
Many local councils, egged on by the Tories’ ‘Levelling Up’ department, are holding fire sales of public land and buildings to cover their running costs. This amounts to pawning the family silver to pay the heating bill.
This insane short-sightedness and mismanagement will come back to bite the establishment, with explosive consequences.
Coffers empty
‘Sir’ Keir Starmer and his wooden sidekick Rachel Reeves may be well-versed in the art of parliamentary point-scoring. But scratch away their verbiage surrounding the Budget, and it is clear that Labour’s programme stinks just as much as the Tories’.
Starmer and Reeves are going to inherit the same crisis-ridden economy, and will set to work carrying out the bankers’ bidding the second they get the keys to Number 10. Their agenda has already been laid out for all to see: balance the books, no matter the cost.
The bottom-line is that the state’s coffers are empty. And despite the fact that everything is falling apart, public debt and the rate of taxation are the highest they’ve been since WW2.
No amount of tinkering around the edges can avoid these cold, hard facts. British capitalism is staggering around like a diseased dog, no longer able to provide the standard of life available to past generations.
“Voters will at some point have to decide what kind of pain the country would prefer to endure” comments the Financial Times, rather candidly. “More years of declining public services…or higher taxes that might begin the job of repairing them.”
In other words: workers must choose between death by a thousand cuts, or death by asphyxiation.
But there is a third option: to put this wretched system out of its misery.
City of a thousand trades faces death by a thousand cuts
Thomas Soud, Birmingham Communists
This week, on Tuesday 5 March, Birmingham City Council unleashed a devastating blow to the city and its residents, rubber-stamping the largest local authority budget cuts in history.
As previously reported, a toxic cocktail of austerity, inflation, and mismanagement has bankrupted the city.
Consequently, a monstrous 30 percent slashing of the council’s budget is now being prepared.
600 workers across the council are facing the sack. Everything from care for the elderly, to local art and culture is being reduced to rubble. A staggering £57mn is being axed from children services alone.
The lights are literally being dimmed, as darkness descends upon the city.
Social care is being gutted to feed annual interest payments of £150mn to the big banks. And £1.25bn of council assets – such as buildings, land, and services – are being pawned off and privatised.
Yet none of the establishment politicians raise the idea of seizing the property of big business or the profiteers in order to pay for the welfare of the many.
Democracy has been suspended. Birmingham is now under the de facto dictatorship of eight government commissioners, handpicked by Michael Gove.
They are here to implement the Tories’ austerity agenda. And they will receive the tidy sum of £1000 per day for their loyal services.
This is a direct assault upon the working class of Birmingham – backed by both Sunak and Starmer, in the interests of the capitalists.
The Labour Party has tried to wash their hands of this affair. But the water of a thousand canals cannot cleanse them.
Councillors bemoan the dire state of the budget and shed crocodile tears for the city. Yet they vote the cuts through regardless, doing nothing to organise a fight back. Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has not said a word.
The trade unions are beginning to organise. 400 workers protested outside the council debate on Tuesday. But without a fighting programme or strategy, one that matches the scale of the crisis, the capitalist criminals will get away with the social murder they are about to commit.
The question is, what is to be done?
We say: Enough is enough! The wealth is there, sitting in the hands of the billionaires and bankers. It’s time to seize it.
We need militant action. Occupying buildings; blockading streets; and unleashing the power of striking workers. Such tactics would resonate across the city, and across the entire country, showing that these cuts are not inevitable; that a militant struggle of resistance is possible.
Such action could lay the basis for a city-wide general strike, in order to send the commissioners packing, and to implement a bold socialist programme that makes the bosses pay.
Let defiance echo throughout the streets of Birmingham! The city of a thousand trades must become the city of a thousand struggles.
