DEMONSTRATIONS by teachers, civil servants, transport workers and others striking on Budget Day tomorrow will promote the political alternative denied us at Westminster.
The sheer scale of industrial action shows that workers refuse to be poor any more — yet our political system has stopped its ears to the surging demand for change.
Within the last decade the Jeremy Corbyn movement and the Brexit vote upset the apple cart in British politics. Both were in different ways assertions that enough was enough and that trust in our political elite had reached rock bottom.
From the left we had proposals for a radical economic reset, a programme of public ownership and a planned green transition, a major redistribution of wealth and the liberation of organised labour from decades of anti-union legislation.
But even the right could not admit it stood for the status quo. First Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to announce an end to austerity and cuts.
The latter pledged massive public investment and “levelling up” for working-class communities alongside its Get Brexit Done message to win the 2019 election. The Tory majority government’s recourse to massive intervention in the economy during the pandemic raised further hopes that the era of blind faith in the market had come to an end.
A few years on, how miserably the horizons have shrunk.
The Westminster front benches work daily to lower expectations of the future.
A properly funded, publicly owned universal health service? Unrealistic in the 21st century.
Adequately resourced schools with qualified teachers? Don’t get your hopes up. Proper pensions? Unaffordable.
The same applies to pay rises that would keep real earnings stable just this year, let alone make up for the wage value lost during the longest pay squeeze since the Napoleonic wars.
This cross-party narrative serves the interests of a plutocratic elite who are hoovering up an ever greater share of the country’s wealth.
The same country that supposedly cannot afford a nurses’ pay rise is in what the Sunday Times Rich List terms “a golden era for the super-rich.”
Champagne shipments to Britain last year broke all records to reach £5.3 billion, a figure the French producers’ association expects to rise further this year. Luxury goods firm LVMH, owner of top champagne brands Veuve Clicquot, Dom Perignon and Krug, talks of a new “roaring twenties” age of decadence like that of 100 years ago.
Obscene wealth at the top and mass immiseration at the bottom are directly linked.
The Unite union’s invaluable new study Profiteering Across the Economy – It’s Systemic shows that FTSE 350 profit margins, which Unite found in 2021 had risen 73 per cent on 2019 levels, rose even further last year to 89 per cent up on 2019 in the first six months (full figures for 2022 are not yet available).
Amid all this, the Chancellor says his priority is a “back-to-work Budget”.
Is his plan to address the exodus of teachers, nurses and others from public service through proper pay rises and recruitment drives to plug crippling shortages?
Apparently not. It is to lower tax on private pension pots above £1.07 million, raise how much over-55s can put into pensions they are already claiming to £10,000 a year and launch a new round of fit for work tests targeting the disabled and chronically ill.
Jeremy Hunt’s plan is to discourage early retirement and attack social security — because labour shortages risk increasing workers’ bargaining power and therefore their pay.
His justification will be tackling inflation. But it’s a lie. Pay rises are not the cause of an inflationary crisis driven by supply disruption and corporate price-gouging.
They are in fact the only way to protect people from that crisis. Tomorrow politicians must be left in no doubt that workers in their millions are insisting on a change of course.
