Chancellor George Osborne delivered his fourth austerity budget on Wednesday, March 20, sticking to the “plan A” of austerity, which even on the government’s capital-centred terms is failing, while tinkering with the details and handing out a few sops, if they can be called even that. His budget does nothing to get the economy moving again, in a direction that ensures the rights of the people are guaranteed; rather, it does the exact opposite. It is a budget taking the economy even further in the wrong direction. It further elevates budget accounting as an absolute which is supposed to determine political policy, in this case a neo-liberal ideology and programme. It is based on putting the entire state treasury at the disposal of the rich, the financial oligarchy and the monopolies. It raises their claims to the level of political principle, and does not even consider the claims of the people and the public good as the responsibility of a modern government.

George Osborne’s budget is aimed at further paying the rich through cutting funding for social programmes. The main rate of corporation tax is to be reduced to 20%, “making the UK [corporation] tax system the most competitive in the G20,” where it will be the joint lowest. It is easy to see why Simon Walker, director general of the Institute of Directors, said: “We applaud this budget. The Chancellor has stuck to his guns and held his nerve – which is exactly what we wanted to see... Businesses will be glad that George Osborne has also continued the downward pressure on corporation tax.”

Growth forecasts have been slashed to a mere 0.6% and speculation is rife, particularly with renewed crisis in the Eurozone, that Britain will enter a third period of recession. Quite regardless of the hysteria generated around this “worst ever recovery”, which merely underscores the irrationality and impracticality of their pragmatism, and further disorients people, the experience of the working class is unemployment, increasing disparity between wages and prices, and ever more cuts to social programmes. The take-home message of the budget was that there is no end in sight for this situation.

Departmental spending is being cut by £2.3bn over the next two financial years. It is stated that the budgets for health and schools remain unchanged, but this is on top of the other massive cuts that have been and are being made along with other devastating attacks such as the Health and Social Care Act. In addition, the 1% cap on public sector pay awards is to be extended to 2015-16, plus other limits on pay increases. Detrimental changes to pensions are also being brought forward.

Whose Economy? Our Economy!
Reject the “Austerity” Programme!
The Rights and Claims of the People Must Come First!

Workers should reject the terms of the debate that frame the budget and develop their own independent thinking on the economy. The budget represents capital-centred thinking all along the line, according to which claims of the working class in the form of pay, conditions and pensions and the claims of society as a whole in the form of social programmes are considered unnecessary costs and the claims of the rich in the form of debt repayments and deficit reduction are taken as read. On this capital-centred view, a “balanced budget” covers the latter costs by cutting the former and raising income mainly through individual taxation, anti-social taxes on the general population such as VAT and further borrowing, eroding self-reliance in the economy by perpetuating the bondage to finance capital.

The debate on the budget is in this way reduced to one of balancing the claim of this or that department to a “slice of the pie” and ignores what determines the size of that pie: the value added by the working class versus the claims of capital taking value out of the economy.

From the perspective of the working class, a balanced budget means more is put into the economy than is taken out. It means analysing what are the claims on the added value created by the working class, putting the claims of the workers and society in the first place and restricting the claims of capital. It means that investment in social programmes, in the economy and in the people’s well-being and public services must be put in the first place as the primary principle of an alternative economic programme.

One cannot speak of balancing a budget when disequilibrium reigns in the economy. There is a need for a balanced economy, balanced in favour of the working class and society as a whole. From the standpoint of capital, the government claims that the public sector is too large as a pretext for privatisation. Disharmony between production and consumption also raises itself, taken up in this budget in the form of market stimulus initiatives such as the currently debated “help to buy” programme, which further try to distribute what has not been produced, in this case in the housing market.

The ongoing crisis, exacerbated by continued austerity, is seriously hampering the economy from getting back into motion. Osborne is therefore also attempting to stimulate capital-centred “growth” through, for example, providing funding towards the creation of an Aerospace Technology Institute, which further channels money to the monopolies related to that industry as well as being linked to militarisation of the economy. Announcements such as the increase in transport and infrastructure funding of £15bn by 2020 ring quite hollow given that it is the very programme of the ruling elite that is wrecking economic growth. Workers should reject capital-centred “growth” in favour of their own view of growth: the need is to get the economy moving again in a new direction to develop a self-reliant economy that is not parasitic on the rest of the world.

Workers should also discuss the direction in which the governance of the economy is being taken and condemn the decision to widen the remit of the Bank of England. Through increasing the power of the Bank to direct the economy, the government is attempting to wash its hands of responsibility and is further offloading key decision-making power to this technocratic body. This includes increasing their scope for further “extraordinary” measures as permanently low interests rates and quantitative easing begin to run out of steam. One need only look at Cyprus to see that nothing is out of bounds, not even people’s life savings.

On the basis of their own independent thinking, workers need to discuss practical proposals to find a way out of the crisis in the immediate sense, without succumbing to the pressure to solve the crisis for the capitalists, a pressure multiplied by the relentless media debate around the budget. Workers need to question the fundamentals, and refuse to accept the argument that the deficit has to be reduced and the debt has to be paid without a full enquiry into the nature of these claims and without demanding that the claims of the working class and society take precedence.

To begin to resolve the economic crisis, an organised Workers’ Opposition would demand that the government stimulates demand through increased workers’ wages and investments in social programmes and taking measures to improve job security. It would demand the government raise money at the point of production, rather than through individual taxation of whatever kind and end the burden on income created by continually paying the rich. It would set forth its own plan aimed at self-reliance in the economy through developing production, as well as ending the militarisation of the economy, and other measures and arrangements that restrict the assumed rights of the monopolies.

Civil servants staged a Budget day strike, hitting courts, government departments, museums and driving test centres in an escalation of a bitter dispute over pay, pensions and working conditions. The strike was designed to kick off a three-month programme of action.

The Public and Commercial Services union said that almost 200,000 of its members joined the 24-hour walkout, followed by a half-day strike on April 5 and other forms of industrial action.

Picket lines were mounted outside government offices, museums, galleries, the Houses of Parliament and the Office for National Statistics in London where the latest unemployment figures were published.

PCS members handed out leaflets which said the dispute was the most serious ever faced by the union.

"We must take action to force the government to negotiate," said one of the pickets.

The union said the strike affected business in the Welsh Assembly, closed museums in parts of the country, hit government departments as well as border control areas at airports.

Up to 200 people joined a rally outside parliament as Chancellor George Osborne was delivering his 2013 budget.

(PA; AFP)

PCS Union – March 18, 2013

In the face of the overwhelming evidence that austerity isn't working, and mounting public opposition to chancellor George Osborne and the UK government's disastrous handling of the economy, the Public and Commercial Services union is stepping up its campaign for the alternative with a three-month programme of industrial action and protests. This will start with a strike involving almost 250,000 of the union's members on budget day on 20 March. The campaign is designed to put pressure on the government that is refusing even to talk to the union that represents the majority of its staff.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: "This is not a one-day protest, this is the start of a rolling programme of walkouts and disruptive action to put pressure on a government that is refusing to talk to us." The union has announced that almost 250,000 members who work in government departments and its related bodies will hold a half-day walkout on Friday, April 5, the end of the tax year, and that will be followed by a week of campaigning against tax avoidance and evasion.

http://pcs.org.uk/budgetrelease

PCS has been fighting austerity since 2010, when the union published “There is an alternative: the case against cuts in public spending”. The pamphlet called for job creation to boost the economy and cut the deficit; for investment in socially useful areas such as housing, renewable energy and public transport; and for a serious clampdown on tax evasion and avoidance.

http://pcs.org.uk/alternative

In 2012, this was followed up with “Austerity isn't working”, which picked up on these themes and showed how those at the top of the income scales were still doing well, while those in the middle and at the bottom were seeing their living standards decline.

http://pcs.org.uk/alternative2

In February, 2013, PCS published “Britain needs a pay rise” that showed that since 2008 more than £50 billion (7%) has been cut from wages in the public and private sectors and, at the same time, there has been a 5% drop in consumer demand. The report also showed that, when set alongside direct comparators in the private sector, civil service pay lagged behind by more than £1,200 a year. At some grades the difference is 10%.

http://pcs.org.uk/paybritain

The changes to the welfare system that were introduced on April 1, particularly the “Bedroom Tax”, have been categorised as “brutal, ruthless or cruel”. The imposition of the changes to State Benefit were instigated by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. Criticism and condemnation has come from all sections of society, including from the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, and the Church of Scotland, who joined together to criticise the measures as unjust.

The biggest shake-up of the welfare system for decades will also see low income households in many parts of England begin paying council tax for the first time.

Duncan Smith, demonstrating the capacity to show no mercy or pity, has given the thumbs down to responses by people faced with problems. He dismissed a question flippantly, like a Roman Caesar, when asked if he could live on £53 a week, in response to a question posed by a working benefits claimant. Such was the popular response that a Change petition demanding he live for a year on £53 a week received 460,000 signatures in no more than a few days. Duncan Smith was deliberate and remorseless about causing pain or anguish as he spoke from his privileged position.

Faced with such lack of compassion, the Labour Party opposition responded that the situation was “unfair”, whereas Duncan Smith insisted it was “fair”. Despite the acutely unpleasant physical and mental discomfort experienced by somebody who is violently struck by poverty or homelessness, Duncan Smith spread the fascist notion that equalising the situation of low paid workers and non-working claimants at the lowest level was implicitly “fair”. Liam Byrne, shadow secretary for work and pensions, said, "Today is a day of big winners and big losers – you've got millionaires who are getting a whopping great tax cut of £100,000 per year and everyone else is taking a hit to tax credits. We think that basic strategy is simply unfair.” The notion of “fair play” is the central political argument as to where the battle should be played out according to the agreed criteria of the main parties in Westminster. In other words, as New Labour has long demonstrated, there is no principled difference in policy and programme to be found in the Westminster parties. Everything for them is reduced to “fair” or “not fair”, according to the rules of the game.

How can the issue of the divisive tactics of Duncan Smith or the cringing and servile response be the sole setting for playing out a struggle? It can only result in the working class becoming weakened or compromised in the face of such an attack.

From Monday, 660,000 social housing tenants who will be deemed to have a spare room begin to lose an average of £14 a week in housing benefit, the "bedroom tax" – which will take more than £700 a year off some of the poorest people.

Labour themselves suggested that 97 per cent of those affected by the change had nowhere else to move to. So with the prospects of not being able to afford rent or worse still face homelessness, how can the response to violence be simply to whine that the situation was “unfair” and leave it at that?

It has been estimated that two million low-income households will pay more as a result of changes to council tax benefit. The benefit is being replaced by council tax support and responsibility for it is being moved from central government to councils, but with 10% less funding. Each council has had to decide whether to pass on the reduction to residents – most are to increase bills for low-income families.

Meanwhile Duncan Smith is actually abdicating responsibility for the well being and welfare of the people by localising the problem and shifting the responsibility for implementation of certain measures. It is all being done to further the illegitimate and fraudulent austerity programme.

With such oppressive measures being piled upon working people by draconian changes to the state welfare and the government striking out, working people have no option but to resist. Last weekend's protests against the bedroom tax are a reflection of the working class response. The working class and people face the necessity to organise to defend the rights of all, to change the direction of this pay-the-rich system, and to defeat the “austerity” programme through unity in action.

The following are the changes to the benefits system which will affect the vulnerable and the poorest households, as itemised by the charity Crisis. For full details, see the Crisis website at: http://www.crisis.org.uk/pressreleases.php/540/bleak-april-of-multiple-cuts-will-increase-homelessness

• Bedroom Tax will affect 660,000 households in social housing, with average losses of £14 per week. Two thirds of those affected are disabled, and a lack of smaller properties to move in to will mean an increase in homelessness. Many households need their ‘spare’ room due to disability 

• Crisis Loans and Community Care grants are to be abolished. In 2011/12 over 1.7 million of these grants and loans were awarded, providing a lifeline for people in financial crisis due to, for example, needing essentials when moving into a new home. They form part of the Social Fund, which is to be localised, creating the danger of a postcode lottery for people on the brink of destitution 

• Most of the 3.7 million low income households that receive Council Tax Benefit will see a reduction. The pot will be reduced by 10% and devolved to local authorities, some of which will ask poor households to cover up to 30% of council tax 

• The overall benefit cap set at £500 per week, or £350 for single people, will be introduced to selected local authorities, rolling out nationally later in the year. Nationally 56,000 households will be hit, with an average weekly loss of £93. The majority will be families with children 

• Non-dependent deductions uprating will see 300,000 households in the social rented sector lose between £13.60 and £87.75 per week from housing benefit payments for any grown-up children living at home. If their children decide to leave, parents will instead be hit with bedroom tax 

• Uprating benefits by a below-inflation 1% over three years will have a cumulative effect, impacting 9.6 million households. By 2015/16 the average out of work household will lose £215 per year and the average in work household affected £165 per year. 60% of households affected are in work 

• Uprating Local Housing Allowance (housing benefit received by people in the private rented sector) by the CPI measure of inflation rather than in line with average rents could affect the 1.36 million households that claim – particularly those in areas where rents are rising fastest. In the two subsequent years LHA will be increased by just 1%. Claimants will be forced to make up the growing difference by cutting back on essentials such as food or heating, or getting into debt. If you live a one bed flat in Inner South East London, for example, LHA will £32.37 a month (or 4%) lower than if it had been uprated by market rents 

• Disability Living Allowance will be replaced with the new Personal Independence Payment. 3.2 million people currently claim DLA, but by 2015 500,000 fewer people will receive PIP. There are serious concerns that the assessment process for the new benefit will exclude many disabled people who need support 

• Welfare advice to be entirely taken out of the scope of Legal Aid funded advice along with most housing issues. 135,000 people seek legal aid funded welfare advice each year 

• 1,500 people in the North West are to take part in the Universal Credit pathfinder, with many organisations concerned about its implementation

Photo: Andy Worthington A rally was called by the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and supported by NHS campaigners from all over England on March 26. Some 300 campaigners participated outside the Houses of Parliament, prior to a lobby and meeting in a packed committee room of the House of Commons. The rally also had the backing of Unite the Union.

A number of militant speeches and calls were given outside the Parliament buildings, including from Dr Louise Irvine, chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, and Lucy Reynolds, a researcher who has exposed in detail the nature of the Section 75 Regulations, and their devastating effect on the NHS as a public service. Students from Goldsmiths College staged a telling and humorous mock auction of the NHS to the lowest bidder, concluding with the militant call: Whose NHS? Our NHS!

The demonstration outside Parliament was followed by a powerful and rousing meeting of 150 inside the Commons, featuring the Green MP Caroline Lucas, the Labour MPs Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Heidi Alexander, and the Labour peer Philip Hunt (Baron Hunt of Kings Heath), and Dr. Brian Fisher, a GP from the London Borough of Lewisham, and a key player in the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign.

Photo: Andy Worthington Although 350,000 people recently signed a 38 Degrees petition opposing the plans, and Lib Dem minister Norman Lamb promised that the key regulations on competition in the NHS would be rewritten, the rewritten regulations have barely changed, and they still oblige the NHS – and, specifically, the Clinical Commissioning Groups of GPs who have responsibility for 80 percent of the NHS's budget from April 1 – to put almost all NHS services out to tender, allowing private companies to begin to devour the whole of the NHS or face legal challenges that they will probably lose because enforced competition will have been made into a key component of the provision of NHS services.

The need to oppose the implementation of the Section 75 regulations is hugely important. There is until the third week of April to campaign that this delegated legislation should be struck down. The struggle is being carried through to safeguard the future of the NHS, saving hospitals such as Lewisham from disintegration, and overall for a new direction for the NHS.

(Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, Andy Worthington)

RCPB(ML) video of the Lobby

Photo: NUT Delegates at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference in Liverpool, taking place from March 29 to April 3, took up serious discussion of the curriculum through its Priority Motion on the National Curriculum and Motion 43 on the Primary Curriculum. This is a significant aspect of the opposition to Education Secretary Michael Gove’s programme to dismantle the education system.

In particular, they are opposing what NUT’s Alex Kenny described as “a curriculum in which the learner is completely absent, or just a passive consumer of information or knowledge”.

Photo: Owen Liddle Gove’s so-called core knowledge curriculum is being imposed – “consultation” notwithstanding – in ten subjects at secondary level. Its backward-looking, highly structured content and method of fact learning is exemplified by what delegates have called its “history of kings and queens”. This is a prescriptive list aimed at giving a narrative to British history that embodies the official set of values and preconceived notions. The forced internalising of these facts presents history as something disconnected and serves to block the youth who grow up within such a system from questioning this history as presented and taking control of their future on their own account.

As Ealing delegate Martin Allen described it, it is a “know your place curriculum” aimed at “social control”, which does not promote critical thinking and problem solving.

In this context, the discussion brought out the narrowness of the curriculum, its backward character, anti-creativity and its “desperately ill thought out” irrationalism.

Photo: Owen Liddle Regarding the primary curriculum, the motion notes the “excessively detailed lists of spellings and grammar, arithmetic procedures and scientific facts will lead to cramming and rote learning and leave little scope for enquiry, critical thinking, creativity and experiential learning. It will dumb down children’s learning and thinking, and reduce primary education to a narrow Nineteenth Century elementary school model.” In opposition, teachers present their alternative based on “an emphasis on the education of the whole child” and “recognition of the diversity of children’s needs”.

The NUT also passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in Gove, following a similar near-unanimous motion by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers a week earlier. It was the first such motion of no confidence in the latter union’s history. The NUT motion pointed to Gove’s “dogma” and “misleading rhetoric” and called for his resignation.

It is significant that teachers, along with dealing with attacks on funding, pay and conditions, are taking up issues of the form and content of education itself, related to who education serves. In this way, they are not only safeguarding the future, defending education for teachers and children as the theme of the conference stated, but also opening up the path for an alternative future for education.

Ralles against government attacks on the education service and teachers. All teachers, parents and governors welcome.

NUT NASUWT agree joint strike strategy - press release

18 March 2013

The two largest teacher unions, NUT and NASUWT, representing 9 out of 10 teachers, are today announcing the next phase of their jointly coordinated campaign to Protect Teachers and Defend Education.

Following the refusal of the Secretary of State to genuinely engage with the NASUWT and NUT to seek to resolve our trade disputes with him, plans are in place for the next stage of industrial action which will include:

• continuation of the current action short of strike action instructions;

• national rallies across England and Wales in April and May;

• escalation of the national action short of strike action;

• a rolling programme of national strikes commencing with local authority areas in the North West of England on 27 June; and

• unless the Secretary of State responds positively to the unions’ demands, a rolling programme of strike action will continue into the Autumn term and will include a one day all-out national strike before the end of the Autumn term.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said:

“The time has come for the Secretary of State to listen to the concerns of teachers and school leaders.

“He has recklessly pursued a relentless attack on the profession and teachers’ patience has been exhausted.

“The Secretary of State still has time to avoid widespread disruption in schools by responding positively and quickly to the reasonable demands we are making.”

Christine Blower, General Secretary of the NUT, said:

“We have already rejected the new pension arrangements and the proposed deregulation of teachers’ pay.

“The attacks on pay and pensions in combination with increasing workload is making teaching an unsustainable option for many.

“The resolution to all the aspects of our dispute with the Secretary of State is in his hands. He can respond positively engage with us to seek a way forward.

“If there is no positive response to our reasonable demands, the joint strike action we are announcing today is inevitable.”

(National Union of Teachers)

David Cameron’s recent press conference in Govan, Scotland, highlighted once again the urgent need for an anti-war government, as well as for an economy that is people-centred rather than capital-centred and based on the interests of the big multinationals and financial institutions. It also highlighted the need for the people of Scotland to empower themselves, defend the sovereignty of Scotland, and decide the nature of the Scottish economy as part of their own modern nation-building project.

David Cameron’s presence in Scotland was to champion Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, such as Trident-missile-carrying submarines, as well as to praise the armaments manufacturing multinationals located in Scotland. His visit occurred in the same week that the government was congratulating itself on the part it had played in securing the UN Global Arms Trade Treaty, a treaty that has already been widely seen as favouring the big armaments monopolies.

It was therefore fitting that Cameron should choose to hold a press conference at Thales UK, currently Britain’s second largest armaments monopoly, a conglomerate of Racal, Shorts Missile Systems, Thomson CSF and others and a major supplier to the MoD. In fact Thales UK is itself a part of the Thales Group, French-based and part-owned by the French government, which has a global reach and is said to be the world’s eleventh largest armaments monopoly.

According to David Cameron, Britain should possess nuclear submarines and other weapons of mass destruction, what he referred to as “an independent nuclear deterrent”, because “the world we live in is very uncertain, very dangerous”. It is certain that the absurdity and hypocrisy of this remark was not apparent to the Prime Minister, since the Westminster government and its allies are the chief creators of the danger and instability in the world, through their interference in the affairs of other sovereign countries throughout the world. These are the war criminals that carry out military invasions, assassinations and regime change, and that incite global conflict in the economic and geo-political interests of the big monopolies, as recent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Mali have shown. At the same time, they demand the right to maintain a state of nuclear superiority and blackmail over the entire world and wish to deny others, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, for example, the right to have what Cameron refers to in regard to Britain as “the best insurance policy”.

As was evident from Cameron’s remarks in Govan, the government advances the argument that war preparations and therefore the production of weapons of mass destruction are beneficial for the economy. He therefore spent some tine outlining the new weapons that the MoD would purchase in the short term, including a replacement for Trident. According to Cameron, this is the case not because monopolies such as Thales realise billions in profits but because jobs are provided for thousands of workers. In regard to the Scottish economy, Cameron argued that the workers of Scotland were fortunate that Britain has the fourth largest defence budget in the world (£33 billion), since this means that the MoD can provide lavish subsidies to armaments monopolies such as Thales, a situation that might not exist in the event of Scottish independence. In this manner the government seeks to justify its war preparations and the
Demonstration against G8 at
Gleneagles in Scotland, July 2007fact that the whole economy, education, apprenticeships, taxation, the NHS, is geared to serving the interests of the rich, and in particular the armaments monopolies and financial institutions, and competing in what is referred to as the “global race”. At the same time, the government is shamelessly attempting to blackmail the workers of Scotland.

As David Cameron pointed out, the production and export of weapons of mass destruction, military strength, the membership of warmongering alliances such as NATO are all connected with being a “front ranked player” in the world and making sure that “Britain has a proper standing in the world”. In other words, it is rooted in making sure that military might is placed in the service of the big monopolies and serves their global interests. In this connection Cameron also wished to explain how Britain’s extensive “aid” budget was also linked to these interests, especially in Africa, but he found it difficult to publicly explain the connection between military might, profit and alleged government philanthropy.

The workers and people of Scotland as well as other parts of the British Islands should be under no illusion that the government is at all concerned about providing employment. Rather it is determined to make the economy and all aspects of government policy serve the interests of the big monopolies. The government is set on a course of warmongering and war preparation that must be opposed. The workers and all democratic people must redouble their efforts to establish an alternative people-centred economy and their own anti-war government.