As the economic crisis deepens, we are being constantly bombarded by a message from almost everyone with power - that we’ve been ‘living beyond our means’ and therefore must face massive cuts. The question is usually framed simply as what should be cut, rather than if there should be cuts.
Assault on the public sector
The government has immediately trained its sights on two groups of people - public sector workers, who provide supposedly wasteful services such as education and health, and anyone on benefits. The government have unleashed £11bn in benefit cuts, slashing tax credits and housing benefits while freezing child benefit. Meanwhile they will continue the previous government’s punitive workfare schemes, aimed at forcing the unemployed to work for benefit levels. In this assault they evoke wild tabloid tales of ‘benefit scroungers’ supposedly bleeding us dry - though recent figures show that only 1% of all benefit payments are fraudulent.
The real scroungers
The reality is that there is a group of useless scroungers to whom we’ve been far too generous. In 2009 the 1000 richest people in Britain saw their wealth soar by £77bn, a huge increase in the middle of recession. These people are bankers, speculators in currency and property, the owners of huge businesses - in short, the very people responsible for the crisis. Yet while we face wage cuts, job losses, benefit cuts, and the destruction of our public services, the only cut they’re made to bear is to the rate of corporation tax. Corporations and their leaders dodge £100-£130bn in tax a year - but rather than stop this enormous theft by the rich, the government will make it worse with huge cuts in the civil service.
Not a cure for the crisis
The cuts don’t even make economic sense. The cuts will throw around 700,000 public sector workers onto the dole, to be joined by another 600,000 private sector workers who sell products and services to the public sector. As these workers are laid off, their spending power will fall, driving down demand and causing more job losses. Ironically, spending on benefits will rise as more people become unemployed, and the fall in workers’ wages will lead to lower tax revenues, causing the deficit to rise and the economy to spiral down into deeper recession.
Resist every cut
While the cuts will batter ordinary people and do nothing to revive the economy, big business will run laughing to the bank. Bosses know that, as more and more people compete for fewer jobs, they will be free to tighten the screws on their workers, reducing wages, increasing hours, and creaming off the profit for themselves. As public spending is cut, speculators will swoop in to demand privatisation, turning formerly public services into money-making schemes.
The cuts will serve no purpose at all except to drive everything in society to conform to the brutal rules of capitalism – that nothing can be allowed to exist unless it makes a profit for bankers and speculators, and that these profits must always increase, no matter the cost to anyone else.
There is no need to tighten our belts. We’re not living beyond our means – the means are being taken away from us. Workers, the unemployed, students, pensioners, and all ordinary people need to stick together and resist every single cut, and instead demand that the cost of the crisis is paid by those who caused it - the capitalist class.
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