"Are you going to poke me the next time you're on or what?"
Hey Kids! Guess how cool and funky the ConDem government can be?! They’re going to ask YOU on Facebook about what you think should get cut from our public services! Neat, huh?
Do you often think about how your local leisure centre is a waste of money? How about all those lazy disabled people that need care at home, surely they could do a bit more for themselves, right? What about libraries, who needs boring old books when we can all go on FACEBOOK and get connected with the Tories!
This new era in justifying government policy super cool direct democracy is the result of a deal that’s been struck between the government and Facebook. They’re planning to set up a “spending challenge channel”, that’ll come up when you login, inviting you to make suggestions on where the government should make spending cuts.
The idea behind it is to con people into feeling that they’ve been given a say. But if this was really democratic, you’d have the chance to say you don’t want ANY cuts, something that won’t be an option. In fact, the whole thing is about making everyone believe the lie that the cuts are an inevitable and inavoidable part of reality, like a rainy day, instead of what they are: a calculated attempt by the rich to make themselves even wealthier at our expense.
Britain's rich
Chancellor George Osborne, writing in the home of sound economic thinking, The Sun, says: “As every family knows, when you’ve got less money you have to spend it better. That means getting your ideas.” Talking about Britain as a family goes along with the Tory slogan of “We’re all in this together,” implying that we’ll all be sharing the pain of the new age of austerity.
This of course is bollocks, as the millionaires, including most members of the government, continue to stack the cash while they make the poor majority pay more tax, get less benefits and have more of their essential needs ignored. If Britain is a family, it’s a fucking dysfunctional one where some fat cousin we barely know has turned up and started spending all our money on himself while the rest of us starve.
Not only is the option that most people want (no cuts) not going to be included, even the crappy Labour Party argument that “We need cuts but not just yet,” won’t be included either. The Facebook PR move by the government won’t open up a debate about if we need cuts, or even when they should be made or how deep they should be. It will simply be about what you think you could live without. It’s like giving a prisoner on death row the choice of which execution method they’d like.
Shortly after turning a baseball cap back to front, Prime Minister David Cameron said: “We are really excited about having Facebook involved in the spending challenge. There’s enormous civic spirit in this country where people want to take control and do things in a different way. We are giving people an opportunity with Facebook and I am sure that they will take it.” Of course, he didn’t add, “take just enough control to make the people who are really in control look good.”
26 year old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg (one of the youngest billionaires in the world thanks to the amount of time you spend logged into his website) was also loving the government linkup.
“The government’s willingness to reach out and engage with Facebook users is going to go a long way because I’m sure that all the people using Facebook in the UK have a lot of great ideas on how they could do this,” he gushed.
“It’s really innovative to open up policy making and engage the public in this way to try and create more social change.”
His enthusiasm isn’t surprising when you realise that the people who own and operate Facebook have got a political agenda themselves, one that fits quite well with what the Tories are trying to do to the UK. Zuckerberg and friends are all members of neoconservative right wing groups that want to see a total free market, no government support for the poor and complete global capitalism. They are super rich venture capitalists themselves, who have made themselves billionaires thanks to your use of their services, such as Facebook and PayPal. Now they’ve got an ally in the UK government, and together they’re teaming up to try and make us cut our own throats.
We’re still waiting to see how exactly the finished “spending challenge channel” will look, but make sure you tell everyone you know to refuse to take part in it, and refuse to endorse the lie that we must make cuts. If you are going to post a suggestion, here’s a few that perhaps the government ought to consider, but never will:
By Andrew McPake, additional writing by me, blogging fae Athens on today’s demonstrations protesting the Greek parliament’s vote to bring in destructive “austerity measures” in the wake of Greece’s near-financial collapse.
PAME demonstration of around 10,000 in central Athens
Athens is a city that is acquiring a reputation for itself. When a taxi driver asked where we were headed with our suitcases, our response prompted him to ask “Athens? Will you no get caught up in they riots out there?”. It would seem that the combination of constant reporting of Greece as overtaken by bomb-strewn madness and the main Scottish reference point when it comes to riots – the Poll Tax Riots – has given people a distorted view of what’s really going on here. The fact is, the IMF are being sold Greece under the table by the ‘Socialist’ government (Read: Greek version of the Labour Party), and their conditions for giving Greece money to bail out its failed banks is that the Greek government goes about systematically destroying any vestiges of a welfare state. It’s understandable why the people are angry. But they are expressing it in a way that is altogether more concise and class conscious than any pictures of anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails at riot police while stray dogs look on cooly can convey.
What we attended today was not a Poll Tax riot. No banks were burnt down, no statues were defaced. What we attended was an eye opening experience that allowed us to see two things:
The diversity and competence of the Left in Greece
The sheer extent of the unbalanced and jaundiced way in which the international press have reported this situation.
Pensions might seem an odd topic to write about on the Scottish Socialist Youth blog. It’s surely decades until SSY members’ need to start worrying about retirement, right?
But the fact is, if the UK government have their way, we’ll suffer when we’re older in a way that hasn’t really been seen since the establishment of the welfare state. For local government workers today, they can look forward to living on an average of £4000 a year. But it gets worse than that – when you take out the fact that men still earn more than women, you realise that women get just £2600. That’s just £50 a week!
The situation for people who work for a private business is even worse. The vast majority of private companies have in recent years got rid of any kind of decent pension scheme for their workers. Most don’t provide anything at all. This is because their workers haven’t been able to be organised enough to defend their rights, and company directors have seen pensions as an easy target as they to try to make their businesses more profitable, and themselves more rich. Their workers are forced to survive on the basic pensions provided by the benefits system, barely enough to survive.
Workers in the public sector have been slightly more successful in defending their rights, because they have more powerful unions to represent them. But, as you can see from the figures above, it’s still a poverty ridden old age they have to look forward to, and in fact unions negotiated reductions in pension entitlements under the previous Labour government.
The ConDem government is determined to make those of us who are working today get less when we’re old. To do this, they’ve tried to make people believe that public sector pensions are in crisis, and that the state can’t afford to pay people what they’ve been promised as they work hard keeping schools open, rubbish off the streets or supporting vulnerable people. Workers have paid into pensions with their own money. The government wants them to pay more, receive less for their money, and work longer.
“Women are bearing nearly three-quarters of the Tory-Liberal plans, while men are bearing just a quarter. This is despite the fact that women’s income and wealth is still considerably lower than men’s.
Even more significant, this doesn’t include the impact of public spending cuts. As women make up more of the public sector workforce they will be more heavily hit by the public sector pay freeze and the projected 600,000 net public sector job losses… Women are more affected by the cuts in things like housing benefit, cuts in upratings to the additional pension, public sector pensions or attendance allowances, and they benefit less than men from the increases in the income tax allowances.”
A gender audit of the budget showed that more than 70% of the revenue raised from direct tax and benefit changes is to come from female taxpayers. The analysis looks at a net total of £8bn raised by 2014-15 through direct tax and benefit measures. It includes the effects of raising the personal tax allowance, the increase in capital gains tax, the freezing of benefits and the changes to pensions. Of the income to be raised by the recent budget, men will pay £2.2bn while women will pay £5.8bn.
It is well known in Britain that women are already more affected by poverty than men – government statistics show that almost half of all women have total individual incomes of less than £100 a week, compared with less than a fifth of men.
Instead of millionaire families like the Camerons, the Cleggs, and indeed Cooper and her husband Ed Balls – it’s going to be poor families and single mothers that are going to pay for the crisis in capitalism.
It’s also important to note, though, that this study hasn’t come out of a sudden commitment to women’s rights or fighting poverty by Cooper and the Labour Party, but it is an opportunistic move to make the Tories and Lib Dems look bad, and to trick us all into thinking that things would be better if only we had a Labour government – which, of course, they wouldn’t. Labour were just as committed to making cuts, and ANY cuts will always impact those at the bottom of society first – and that means disproportionately affecting women. If Yvette Cooper really gave a shit about women in poverty, she wouldn’t be in the Labour party.
As the government has decided to decided to make cuts of 25% to many essential services, new research by SSY has suggested that at least £220 million could be saved by cutting the monarchy. Why should we have to suffer so that a few select people can live in luxury?
Not only is she living in luxury she is living a more expensive lifestyle than the other monarchies in Europe.
Why does she need £41.5 million, I MEAN MATE! Thats what she cost last year, Come on, thats a little bit greedy isn’t it? And that doesn’t include security, their properties, the cost of the army marching by them for random reasons and Prince Charles’ posh biscuits.
The Danish and Swedish monarchs cost four times less than ours. Why does our queen need so much more, surely they are expensive enough, as they are clearly not poverty stricken.
Luxembourg and Spain pay less six times less for their monarchs. Think about how it could be put to better use….. Then again I guess it’s a great idea to pay a very large fortune for a woman to stay in a very fancy house, it wouldn’t go to better use on education or health. Which would be something everyone can enjoy
SSY’s team of analysts have come up with some other ways we could have spent this money more effectively
It would be more than enough to pay for free school meals for all children in Scotland for four years. There would still be a nice wee sum left over.
It would go half way to pay for free public transport in Scotland.
For the cost of just one Queen we could the basic state pension for 13141 less expensive pensioners.
We could buy 58,000,000,000 bags of Wethers originals and subscribe to the peoples friend for 22,000 years.
Or 22,000,000,000 penny sweets.
The Queen wants to take this nice old man's sweeties
And most importantly we could pay for my cigarettes and alcohol for 1 month.
I think it’s clear we need to ban the monarchy as we have so many better options for spending this colossal sum of money.
Yesterday there were general strikes in Greece and the Basque Country. Last week workers in France and Italy walked out as well. Across Europe the working class is waking up to the threat posed by the attacks of European governments, but in the UK the response has still been quite muted.
SSY has been involved in building opposition to the ConDem cuts over recent weeks, with our members taking part in last Saturday’s street rally against the “emergency” budget for instance. But it’s clear that if we really want to stop the neoliberal assault on our rights, we need to learn a thing or two from our friends in Europe.
George Gideon Osborne prepares to shoulder the burden of the economic crisis by cutting down on fancy waistcoats.
At the same time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Osborne, was announcing the pile of rancid shite that forms his Emergency Budget, it was also revealed that at least 23 out of the 29 coalition cabinet members are millionaires.
So while Osborne and Cameron and Clegg and their other filthy rich pals are telling us that we need to tighten our belts and “share the pain” of the brutal cuts to public services and benefit payments, plus tax hikes, they’re taking champagne baths and laughing into their gold encrusted Cornflakes.
Our very own Prime Minister David Cameron is worth £4 million, his wife SamCam gets £300,000 bonuses for fannying about with some stationary occasionally, and he’s set to inherit a whopping £30 million from his parents when they kick the bucket. Death represents a gigantic bonus for these rich families, and we’re sure the equivalent of winning the lottery several times over does take some of the sting out of bereavement for them.
The richest member of the cabinet is the Leader of the House of Lords, that undemocratic old folks home for senile ex-politicians and descendants of the chums of dead kings, Lord Strathclyde, who hordes at least £10 million all for his greedy little self. Don’t let the name fool you, I doubt he comes fae Glasgow like.
Axeman Osborne himself is worth at least £4.6 million, including a £2 million stake in his daddy’s “luxury wallpaper company”. Yet, we know he’s rubbish at wallpapering. We’ve been in his house and he’s got big bulgy bits, plus he spilt paste all over the carpet.
It’s not just the Tory cabinet members that are trousering gigantic wads and waiting breathlessly for mummy and daddy to die and leave them all their gold, the “real alternative” Liberal Democrats are a bunch of political cash cows too. Deputy Prime Minister/Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Clegg is currently worth an estimated £1.9 million, and is the son of a multimillionaire City banker.
Danny Alexander is upset to find out he's not worth £1million.
Of those 6 cabinet members that aren’t worth at least £1 million, there’s the likes of BARONESS Warsi, who is surely still worth a pretty penny, and Beaker from The Muppets Chief Secretary of the Treasury Danny Alexander. Boo hoo Acne Alexander, boo hoo for you.
It’s worth remembering that all of these figures are quite conservative (with a small ‘c’) estimates and don’t take in to account the vastly inflated salaries these parasites receive from the public purse. And what with the reputation of Tory bigwigs like Lord Ashcroft for cheating the system with scarily high levels of tax evasion, who knows what these chumps have got stashed between the Nazi gold in Swiss banks?
What makes this multimillionaires business all the more offensive is that yesterday they chose to unleash an economic blitzkrieg on the vast majority who don’t stuff their sofas with £50 notes like they do. The UK is in the midst of going through a course of severe economic shock therapy. The budget was called an “emergency” to make us think that what it contained was inevitable when in fact it is just the realisation of long-held Tory sadistic fantasies about what they’d like to do to the working class.
Here are just a few of the many ways you are getting fucked by the “emergency” budget:
"Hi everybody, I work for the DWP!"
Disability Living Allowance - It’s going to get even harder to receive this benefit. To qualify for DLA currently, you already have to go through a medical assessment to prove you really need it. The government’s announcement that they will “introduce a medical assessment for Disability Living Allowance from 2013 for new and existing claimants“. What this actually means is that they’re going to make it even harder to pass the assessments made by the quacks so-called “doctors” they employ to try and trick the vulnerable out of what they need to survive. Those responsible for this are not doctors, violating the first rule of medicine, do no harm. The government has decided that being a disabled person living on meagre benefits is such a laugh riot, that to restrict slightly the hedonistic lifestyles of these publicly funded wheelchair racers they’ll have to pass an exam in how sick they are first. These assessments are humiliating, frightening and about as useful as a statement of medical fact as a Harold Shipman death certificate.
VAT - Value Added Tax is one of the unfairest taxes that can be raised from ordinary people. It’s basically a cut that the government takes out of the price of essential things we all have to buy at the shops, and so the government’s raising of it to 20% will hit the cost of living for everyone. Instead of raising income taxes or others that proportionally work out how much you need to pay based on how much you actually have, they’ve deliberately chosen to raise the one that hits the poorest hardest and leaves the super rich like themselves relatively unscathed. Raising VAT at the same time as chucking people off benefits is the ultimate Tory wet dream, condemning many to the borderline of survival.
A single parent struggles to cope with the increase in VAT
Corporation tax -- Meanwhile, no surprise that the tax on the ultra rich mega corporations is getting cut to even lower levels. If you want to know who’s really in power in the UK, look at who’s done the best from the budget. Companies like the Gulf poisoners BP, merchants of death British Aerospace and public money vampires Royal Bank of Scotland. The tax they pay will be lowered to the scandalously tiny rate of 24%, less than half what they paid under the Thatcher overlordship (56%).
Parents - It’s going to get much harder to have a kid under the ConDems. Ultimately they want to scrap child benefit, one of the few remaining universal benefits. In the meantime, they’re freezing it for the next three years. People with babies will no longer be eligible for child tax credits, perhaps justified by the fact that babies are clearly the most self reliant of all children. And a grant that was previously paid to pregnant women to support them and cut infant mortality is to be withdrawn. Lone parents will also be forced to look for work as soon as their kids start school. There’s only one clear conclusion to draw: the government hates children.
George Osborne hard at work
These horror stories are just a flavour of the vicious hacking you’re going to get from the Tories’ rusty knives. The “emergency” budget is just the start of the cuts agenda -- everything except health and international aid is being cut over the next 4 years. So the real level of disaster they’re going to inflict on us is yet to be seen. In Scotland, we’ll be hit by a double whammy in the next Scottish Parliament budget, when we get two years worth of cuts in the budget of one.
For a full breakdown of the full economic violence we’re being subjected to, check out the upcoming issue of the Scottish Socialist Voice, which will feature in depth analysis from socialist economists. It’ll be available to buy on anti-cuts actions throughout the country, such as the street rally against the budget taking place this weekend in Glasgow. On Saturday people will be taking to the streets from 12 noon, on Buchanan Street, to protest the fact that it and other financial institutions have been kept profitable with our money, whilst the poor majority are face cuts and tax hikes.
In the meantime, check out the alternative budget produced by the SSP, outlining the many simple ways these cuts could be prevented. The fact of the matter is that the government is desperate for you to believe their cuts are inevitable, but in fact they are politically motivated policies aimed at making the rich richer at our expense. To see how things could be done differently, such as our plan to recoup a whopping £120 billion in evaded taxes by rich cunts, have a look here.
Above is exclusive future footage of Scotland just four years after the release of the “emergency” budget
"Skiing or horse riding this weekend, I just can't decide!"
On June 22nd the ConDem government will release its emergency budget, plunging us into a nightmare of cuts and job losses. In a speech today Posh PM David Cameron gave some hint as to his real economic agenda.
He said:
”How we deal with these things will affect our economy, our society – indeed our whole way of life. ‘The decisions we make will affect every single person in our country. And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps decades, to come.”
When he says our way of life is going to have to change, the way of life he’s referring to is the right of public sector workers to have a job that pays them enough to live on, or the right of people thrown out of work by capitalism to receive some support to keep them alive.
King William IV's shagging about produced, 5 generations later, our current PM
You can bet he doesn’t mean his own way of life. He and his wife have a combined wealth of £30 million. He’s a direct descendant of King William IV and his mistress of the time, making him a fifth cousin of the Queen. Everybody knows he went Eton ‘Hogwarts for Bastards’ College, which costs over 24 grand a year in fees. No doubt some of his vast stack of cash makes a big contribution towards his stated hobby of horse riding, alongside other jolly fun outdoor pursuits that the rest of us don’t have time or cash to pursue.
Then there’s tosspot deputy PM Nicholas William Peter Clegg, worth personally £1.9 million. This horsefly enjoys walking near his expensive home in the Peak District. Growing up, when he wasn’t at his own uber-posh Westminster school at the cost of around 2o grand a year, he had access to his rich Daddy’s multiple homes in London, the Chilterns and skiing chalet in the Swiss Alps.
Or Chancellor and axeman in Chief George Gideon Oliver Osborne, who through the trust fund that owns a 15% stake in Daddy’s company is worth around £4million. Some of this goes on his personal love of skiing and wintersports. Nothing says posh like the names he’s chosen for his kids: Luke Benedict Osborne and Liberty Kate Osborne.
Whatever happens to the rest of us, these chaps are going to go on enjoying the great outdoors, horsey fun and hitting the alpine slopes, while the rest of us are forced to live with the miserable consequences of their cuts.
Cameron’s speech predictably enough made lots of noise about “the crisis is much worse than we thought”, “we’re going to have to cut more than ever” etc. etc. Translation: we’re in power now so we’ll say all the things we tried to hide from you during the election campaign.
Clegg takes an afternoon stroll. WHILE YOU'RE AT WORK.
In fact what all this chat about the way of life means is a warning from our right wing government. They are using this crisis as an opportunity to push through things we would never accept in normal times. It’ll start with cuts and job losses, then move on to attacking and dismantling the NHS and privatising the post office. The ConDems have a clear, classic, neoliberal agenda for transforming the UK into a place where what remains of our public services are gone and we’re forced to slave for basic survival.
They want to sneak this all through while we’re still in shock, convincing us that there’s no choice. But they are making a choice: a political choice to smash up the services that keep the poorest in our society going. It’s time to get active to stop them.
Tory Chancellor George Osborne lets the capitalists know where he stands
Today was the announcement of the first round of cuts by the UK government, with £6 and a quarter billion coming out of public spending. It’s been a busy day for SSY, as we took direct action at several points throughout the day to oppose the ConDem savagery. But first, let’s have a look at what’s been announced.
Posh boy Chancellor George Osborne, and his Lib Dem henchman, the former senior banker at JP Morgan and Barclays, and current Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, were as chummy as the two rich pals they are announcing the cuts.
There’s lots of attempts to buy people off with headline grabbing measures like removing chauffeur driven limos for ministers (although even then they can still get one if needed for “security.”) But in reality things like this will be a drop in the ocean of the cuts announced today, which themselves are just the first taste of the brutal axe that the ConDems plan to take to public services, wages and benefits.
One of the biggest pieces of news is that child trust funds are to be scrapped. This was a scheme that gave all children born after 2002 an account with £250 in it to be saved and invested, that belongs to the child and can’t be touched until they turn 18. The idea behind it being that it gave an opportunity to people from lower income families to have a little bit of the advantage that rich kids have when they go off to uni or want to buy a house etc. It’s being phased out and scrapped entirely in January. No doubt private school boys like Cameron or Clegg won’t be that bothered, having plenty of Daddy’s money to back them up.
The PCS union for civil servants has condemned the proposed freeze on recruiting more people to work in the civil service. PCS members have been forced to repeatedly strike already against the huge attacks they’ve faced from Labour, and now their jobs are set to get even harder. The union has agreed to mount a major national campaign against the cuts, arguing that the money can be found from other sources, like making the rich pay their fair share of tax. General Secretary Mark Serwotka said:
“We have serious concerns about the staff in many government agencies who will have read in the media at the weekend that their jobs could be at risk, but have been given little information since.
“We do not accept that huge spending cuts are necessary or desirable, and we do not believe it is credible for the government to say it can protect public sector jobs and services while taking the axe to departments in this way.
“A recruitment freeze now, when tens of thousands of civil service posts have been cut in the last few years, will further add to workloads and put at risk the services our members provide to the public. We would welcome the opportunity for a full and honest debate about the public sector and its role in the economy, but the government appears intent on short-circuiting that by cutting first and asking questions later.”
In further attempts to make what they were up to look not that bad, the ConDems also have pledged not to cut “frontline services” in this round, for example by leaving out schools. However, for education this means that the cuts have hit hardest in further education. There’s going to be 10,000 fewer places at unis available this year than was previously planned, at a time when demand has skyrocketed by 16.5%. It’s going to get harder for young people to get into education, increasing the numbers forced to survive on benefits. Overall £200 million is coming out of higher education.
Where the ConDems send you with your UCAS form
Something that will hit the most vulnerable people in society the hardest is the £1.2 billion cut to local government grants. This is politically helpful for the ConDems, because local councils will be the ones that have to make the choices about which services that people depend on will be axed. But the people who depend most on the services provided by local councils are overwhelmingly the poorest and most vulnerable.
They’re also axing the future jobs fund, which helps people on job seekers get a job for six months on the minimum wage. It’s far from perfect, and can force people into a pretty crap job compared to what they could be doing, but it is at least the minimum wage. What will come next will be workfare – forcing the unemployed to work for their pathetic dole money, at far below the minimum wage. In other words, slavery.
There’s other stuff too, such as the decision to seriously delay the building of a major centre for medical scientific research in London. We’ll update you with more info as it becomes clearer.
In Scotland, the actual cuts are deferred until next year. That doesn’t mean we’ve escaped unscathed though. The Scottish budget is losing £332 million, but it will be next year’s budget that the Scottish Parliament will be asked to axe, because this year’s has been set already. If the SNP Scottish Government was serious about standing up to cuts, they’d say they intend to resist this reduction, but we won’t hold our breath. The need to elect socialists to the Scottish Parliament next year has never been greater, to try and push for defiance of cuts imposed by a UK government that wasn’t elected in Scotland.
The ConDem government is composed of the parties that came 3rd and 4th in the last election. They have absolutely no mandate to attack the poorest Scots in this way. That was the message that SSY and SSP members took to the streets to spread today. We’ve already reported about our successful banner drop this morning, that was seen by thousands of rush hour commuters, and drew a lot of appreciative honks from drivers.
Later in the day, SSP Red Shirts took direct action to show our anger that an unelected government feels it has the right to ruin Scotland. We were inspired by the actions of the poor and working class in Thailand, who have faced the full force of the military as they demand the resignation of an unelected government. We decided to do the same in Glasgow.
SSP Red Shirts outside Robert Brown's office
Unfortunately, the only real public premises of either of the ConDem parties in the city centre is the constituency office of Lib Dem MSP Robert Brown. While he isn’t personally part of the UK government, he is a public representative of a party that is propping up the Tories. Without Lib Dem support the Tories wouldn’t be in a position to take power, and we think that all Lib Dems shouldn’t be allowed to forget their complicity in government butchery.
SSP organiser Richie Venton, who helped make the protest happen, said:
“In faraway Thailand an unelected dictator, educated at Eton school for the very rich and privileged, is facing determined opposition from the urban and rural poor, organised as the Red Shirts movement.
Meanwhile, an Eton-educated Tory Prime Minister who was rejected by 85% of Scottish voters is out to rule and ruin Scotland without a mandate.
Cameron plans to commit carnage against public sector jobs, workers’ pay and pensions, and the vital local public services they provide. He is only able to launch this Tory butchery because of Lib Dem treachery.
The Lib Dems posed as an anti-cuts party during the general election and conned a minority in Scotland into voting for them; now they have formed the Twin Tory government that will cut taxes on the rich and big Corporations, whilst slashing up to 100,000 Scottish jobs.
The Scottish Socialist Party is determined to unite workers and communities to resist, defy and defeat these cuts. At noon, the SSP Red Shirts marched into the offices of Glasgow Lib Dem MSP Robert Brown to conduct a polite, peaceful dialogue with him, putting him on the spot about the treacherous role of the Lib Dems in propping up the vicious Tory government.”
Robert vs Red Shirts
To be fair to Robert, he took the whole thing mostly in good humour, although when we told him we were the Red Shirts his crack that we’d “get shot” rang a bit hollow considering the Lib Dems, through their membership of the international Liberal Alliance, support the violent, pro-monarchy, anti-democratic Yellow Shirts in Thailand. He also at one point got into a bit of fairly heated debate with James N, telling the SSP’s Glasgow Central candidate to “shut up.”
Apart from the cuts, and our refusal to accept his assertion that the Lib Dems would make sure they were “fair” when they refuse to tax the rich, and make the poor pay the cost, we also took up a few other issues. We demanded he explain why the Lib Dems, who won so many votes by pretending to be against nuclear weapons, are now part of a government that will replace Trident and build new nuclear power stations.
And we also challenged him on the Lib Dem claim to have ended the detention of the children of asylum seekers, just after Nick Clegg and Liberal ministers stood by and allowed Sehar, and her baby Wania, Shabaz to be deported back to Pakistan on Saturday, where they face violence and ostracism. Whatever happens to them there is on the hands of the ConDem government. Robert claimed the government was “making progress” on the issue, but the progress only seems to be families progressing down the motorway in the back of a van to incarceration in Yarl’s Wood instead of Dungavel. He might call it progress, but to us a baby in a private prison is still unacceptable, whether the prison is in Scotland or England.
Once we’ve edited them we’ll update the article with the video highlights of our exchange, so keep checking back. As you’ll see, we remained respectful and peaceful, and left without having disrupted his day’s work too much.
In the big picture, the cuts today were carefully handled by the ConDems. The politics behind today’s announcement was all aimed at proving to the rich and the international markets that they have a government in Britain that is unequivocally on their side. Their plan clearly was to try and make a small amount of their overall planned cuts today, trying to minimise it to the public while showing their bosses and colleagues in the financial elite that they’re serious about making the poor pay for the rich’s mistakes.
Expect as the months go on for them to slowly bleed us with cut after cut, until we’re faced with hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, benefits and services. For us, today’s actions were only a beginning to a rolling programme of resistance. The ConDems are desperate to make people believe there is no alternative to making us pay for a crisis we didn’t create. But there is. The huge wealth of the banks and the super rich is what should be used, not money taken from the poorest and most vulnerable. That’s the message we’ll be taking again and again to the streets and picket lines. One of the biggest next steps will be building action against the emergency budget, due to be announced on June 22nd. Watch this space!
The resistance to today’s announcement of £6 billion worth of cuts in the public sector by the new ConDem government got off to an early start today, with SSY members in Glasgow storming a multi-storey car park at a busy city centre junction for a rush-hour banner drop.
The SSP red shirts will be engaging to anti-cuts actions throughout the day – watch this space!
A gender audit of the budget showed that more than 70% of the revenue raised from direct tax and benefit changes is to come from female taxpayers. The analysis looks at a net total of £8bn raised by 2014-15 through direct tax and benefit measures. It includes the effects of raising the personal tax allowance, the increase in capital gains tax, the freezing of benefits and the changes to pensions. Of the income to be raised by the recent budget, men will pay £2.2bn while women will pay £5.8bn.
As the government has decided to decided to make cuts of 25% to many essential services, new research by SSY has suggested that at least £220 million could be saved by cutting the monarchy. Why should we have to suffer so that a few select people can live in luxury?
Yesterday there were general strikes in Greece and the Basque Country. Last week workers in France and Italy walked out as well. Across Europe the working class is waking up to the threat posed by the attacks of European governments, but in the UK the response has still been quite muted.
“We do not accept that huge spending cuts are necessary or desirable, and we do not believe it is credible for the government to say it can protect public sector jobs and services while taking the axe to departments in this way.
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