US COMMUNIST and civil rights icon Angela Davis famously said it was time we stopped accepting the things we cannot change and started changing the things we cannot accept.

That spirit shows forth among workers across Britain who are telling government and employers they will not accept being made poorer and seeing our public services driven into the ground.

Health unions have issued a stark warning that unless money is found for a proper pay rise we face a winter of disputes.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt claim they are forced to take “difficult decisions.” 

So for that matter does Labour’s Keir Starmer, who said last week he would make no promises on nurses’ pay — assuring health workers only that “the mindset we would take into government” would be one of “growing the economy and restoring fair pay,” a vacuous non-pledge that the Tories could make.

It’s funny how “difficult decisions” always involve the poorest being forced to make sacrifices to protect the profits of the richest.

Workers have seen pay go backwards since the bankers’ crash 15 years ago — and cannot afford further real-terms cuts when prices are soaring.

Many of these are “key workers” praised for keeping the country running during the pandemic — none more so than the health workers provoked into strike action by an ungrateful government.

Without serious funding increases, the public services we saw stretched to breaking point during the pandemic will break down. 

In many areas it is already extremely difficult to see a doctor. People are waiting months or years for needed treatment and hours even for emergency care.

The crisis affects other sectors too. The government’s failure to control energy prices means schools will have to decide next year between heating buildings and cutting staff. Firefighters and civil servants are telling bosses they cannot cope without more money.

Pay and the delivery of public services are closely linked. Starmer says that “before we get to the pay question, there’s the resource and staffing question,” but poverty pay is driving workers out of public service — raising pay is key to addressing “the resource and staffing question.”

If we want our public services to carry out their basic functions we must see higher public spending. We cannot accept cuts, so we have to change the approach.

The “black hole” in the public finances is clearly open to question, since the government would be on course to comfortably meet its debt targets if it hadn’t changed its own way of calculating them earlier this year.

But leave that aside for the moment. Contrary to Hunt’s claims that responsible management of the nation’s finances require him to be “Scrooge,” and to Starmer’s that pay rises may be impossible given the “awful economic situation,” there is money that can be made available.

This newspaper has more than once quoted the Sunday Times Rich List’s description of our post-Covid age as “a golden era for the super-rich,” and with good reason, because the mass misery stalking Britain in 2022 is the direct counterpart of the ballooning fortunes of the obscenely wealthy.

British billionaires alone increased their wealth by £290 million every day of the Covid crisis. 

Labour MPs Richard Burgon and Jon Trickett have pointed to the huge sums that could be raised even by modest one-off wealth taxes, something more recently backed up by the Tax Justice Network, which also points to the billions that could be raised by charging National Insurance to income derived from investments or by equalising capital gains with income tax rises.

Doing so might be a genuinely “difficult decision” for a government that sees the protection of the wealthy’s assets as its main responsibility. 

It’s not a difficult demand for the labour movement to unite behind though — and politicians who refuse to heed it are no part of our fightback. Tax the rich.