IT HAS NEVER been an aim of Tory governments to raise the living standards of the population. But this government is engaged in the third huge assault on the pay and incomes and services of ordinary people in living memory — and the most vicious of all.

The first of these was the programme of Margaret Thatcher, which completely re-ordered British society in the interests of big business and the rich. She also decimated the trade union movement and bragged that she had recreated the Labour Party in her own image. We are still living with the disastrous consequences of her policies.

The second big attack was launched by Cameron and Osborne, with the eager help of the Lib Dems in 2010. The economy and living standards have never properly recovered from the austerity policies they implemented. Of course, the stated aim then was to reduce the public-sector debt, which had been created by bailing out the banks and the economic damage they caused.

Yet austerity has been a spectacular failure in its own terms, with still record public-sector deficits and debt. Its actual purpose was the same as Thatcher’s claimed “monetarism” which even most rightwingers probably now accept was nonsense.

The real content of both attacks by Tory or Tory-led governments was to act as Robin Hood in reverse: to cut wages, benefits, public services and pensions in real terms (after inflation), while privatising, outsourcing and cutting taxes for big business and the rich.

We are now facing the third big assault on living standards. This time the government has no stated central purpose, such as deficit-reduction or monetarism. Instead, it simply lies to the public while carrying out a vicious programme of cuts and other pillaging of our communities.

It talks about “levelling up,” “build back better” and “a new era of Great Britain” while making those attacks. It has been amazing to me how the repetition of these lies has given them credence. There have even been people on the left who claimed Johnson was implementing the economic policies of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.

To be clear, there are no circumstances under which a Corbyn-led government would have been cutting universal credit, state pensions and public-sector wages while at the same time cutting taxes for big businesses and the banks, as this government is doing.

The current crisis was always doomed to occur, given the policy choices the government has made. Ministers like to fall back on the effects of the pandemic as to blame for the economic crisis their policies have created — but the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is now forecasting average annual real growth in the British economy of barely more than 1 per cent for many years to come. The crisis is long-term and structural and not just a short-term response to the pandemic, which the government catastrophically mishandled.

Worse, the OBR is also forecasting a prolonged fall in real household incomes after tax. This highlights the real content of their policy. Not only is growth slowing to a crawl, but the proceeds of growth are divided unevenly. So unevenly in fact, that on OBR forecasts the living standards of most people will be heading in the opposite direction to the economy.

In effect, government policy is like the Biblical warning that “for to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Billionaires in Britain are not experiencing a crisis and they are growing in number. Leading executives of the oil companies joke that they have more money than they know what to do with. That’s your money, our money. It includes the tax breaks and subsidies we give to big oil, which go straight to their shareholders, and are not used for investment as ministers repeatedly — but falsely — claim.

It is also ministers who have made the decisions to renege on the pensions triple lock, or to hit students with higher loan repayments, or to cut benefits to disabled people.

The attempts to blame the current crisis on the Ukraine war have already begun. They are false. Consumer prices began to rise significantly from February 2021, a full year before the conflict. No doubt the conflict will make matters even worse, but it is not the cause.

The reason we have inflation is because, in the same way the economies in the G7 and elsewhere failed so catastrophically to handle the pandemic, they also failed disastrously to handle a more or less synchronised decision to come out of lockdown.

In economists’ jargon, there was a global upsurge in demand when there was no corresponding rise in supply. These are textbook conditions for a rise in prices. The bottlenecks and shortages we see reflect the unwillingness to invest in supply, either in plant and equipment or in people (by training new workers).

Instead, the opposite took place. Storage and transport facilities were scrapped and across the world millions of workers left their jobs, unable to survive on furloughed or no wages.

Where do we go from here? The terrible treatment of the P&O workers shows how far some employers are willing to go to shift the burden onto working people — and while it is completely right to make demands on government, it should be clear that this government was never going to act without enormous pressure. That remains the case.

Therefore, that pressure has to be applied. The labour movement as whole needs to confront these assaults, on everything from pay and pensions, to fire and rehire, to the growth of inequalities and sweatshop labour and to outright union-busting as at P&O.

Once any section of the labour movement acts, it has the right to demand the support of the Labour Party, in opposing reactionary legislation, opposing austerity and in supporting strike action. The government is engaged in a vicious assault and we cannot respond with our hands tied behind our backs.

I salute all those in the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and elsewhere who have kept the flame alive on this issue and their efforts to offer and build solidarity. In the words of the late Bob Crow, “If you fight you won’t always win. But if you don’t fight you will always lose.”

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.