Britain is sleepwalking. All three major parties agree that massive public sector cuts are needed to pay the hundreds of billions that the government has borrowed to shore up the financial sector after the August 2008 banking crash.
But those cuts are being held off until after the general election and indeed the full scale of them is being hidden. While Tory shadow chancellor George Osborn and his boss David Cameron urge the need for rapid action, they are careful not to spell out the full social and economic consequences of drastic public spending cuts.
Despite claims by both major parties that they will "ring fence" health and maybe education, in fact with a deficit of this size nothing will be ringfenced. Cuts in major services are already happening. Randeep Ramesh' reveals cuts in surgical operations already made and calls to close hospital casualty departments.
Universities are getting ready to close many departments, sacking thousands of academic and support staff and culling the student intake, ditching the university dreams of many in sixth forms or already in the middle of their university courses. Local authorities are already talking about cutting 180,000 jobs nationwide, but the figures are
9 much bigger.
Schools and colleges are likely to face mergers and closures with many redundancies. And the civil service, perennial punch-bag of cutting chancellors, will face waves of decimation. If this sounds like a 1970s crisis scenario, in fact the situation is much worse and attacks on working class social and economic rights and standards far more serious. The following are likely developments:
Whichever party wins the elections, cuts will reduce purchasing power in the economy and consolidate the already-evident double-dip recession.
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10 Whichever party wins the elections, cuts will reduce purchasing power in the economy and consolidate the already-evident double-dip recession TUC Britain Jobless numbers set to rise Unemployment is likely to increase in real terms by a million in the next two years. Strenuous efforts will be made to force the newly unemployed into low-wage, part time jobs. All unemployment, social security and disability benefits will come under renewed pressure and will be much more savagely means-tested. The unemployed working class will be expected to use up its savings to support itself.
A wage freeze in the public sector and much of the private sector will be accompanied by steep increases in income tax, VAT and national insurance contributions. In short, we can expect the biggest all-round attack on working class living standards since the 1930s.
What will be the social consequences and where will resistance come from? Here the party that wins the election faces a dilemma. The public sector, which will bear the brunt of the attacks, is the core of trade unionism in Britain today. It is highly unlikely that an attack on the scale that is being contemplated could be pushed through without massive rankand-file resistance.
The ability of public sector union leaders to duck and weave, to make compromises to avoid a fight, will be highly circumscribed. awork Industrial action to defend jobs Most likely we will see a wave of public sector industrial action to defend jobs and core services; the two-day strike action scheduled by 270,000 PCS workers for mid March and the industrial action ballots by UCU university workers are just a taste of major industrial struggles to come.
But sporadic and divided action can only achieve so much. It needs to be coordinated and generalised to be effective. Trade union resistance faces formidable obstacles.
First is the extraordinary cowardice and incompetence of most union leaderships. The repeated attempts of the CWU and Unite union leaderships to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Post Office and British Airways disputes tells you everything you need to know about the quality and militancy of British union leaderships. a Tory government would bring in legislation banning industrial action in 'essential' public services; this would be particularly aimed at the RMT leadership around Bob Crow, whose ability to close down tube and rail services has irked political reaction across the board; it might also be aimed at the fire service and postal workers. Third though, and perhaps most importantly, is Socialists and militant trade unionists have to win a political and ideological fight, not only on the necessity of action to defend jobs and conditions, but also on the fundamentals of how this crisis came about the morale and consciousness of trade union members.
Socialists and militant trade unionists have to win a political and ideological fight, not only on the necessity of action to defend jobs and conditions, but also on the fundamentals of how this crisis came about. The ludicrous right-wing arguments about how we've all been through a couple of decades of excess that we now have to pay for, have to be confronted with the real story—the worldwide low wage economy that sustained consumption on a sea of debt.
The "masters of the universe"— the super rich who benefitted massively from the low wage economy—are exactly those who now want the worldwide working class to pay for their luxury, ecological destruction and warmongering. Rank and file alliance needed This means not just propaganda and individual struggles, but trying to build the broadest possible rank and file alliance across the public sector. Socialists should support all initiatives in this direction, including the National Shop Stewards network and the Right to Work campaign.
However, to be effective, co-ordination needs to move beyond the far-left and its immediate periphery, who control these two existing campaigns. Social crisis and the plunging of hundreds of thousands into unemployment and poverty are likely to create more space for both the far right and the far left. The next period is likely to be one of escalating confrontation between the fascists, both BNP and English Defence League, and anti-fascist activists, minority communities and the labour movement.
BRITAIN Environmental movement— a key player Social crisis is also likely to fuel ideological critiques of the consumerist spectacle. The idea that the environmental movement will decline is wrong, although big sections of the climate-science denying reactionary right and probusiness state apparatuses wish that it would.
For them the Green movement is a revolutionary movement because it challenges all their values. And they are afraid of it. Across the forces of resistance, among all the movements and campaigns, the traditions of unity and solidarity must be rebuilt. And the fight to establish an effective alternative to New Labour at a national political level must be renewed.
Socialists and other radical critics of capitalism must challenge the dead headed factionalism, especially on display in the main organisations of the British far left, that is a major obstacle to building a united militant left alternative.
Marxist cultural critic Frederic Jameson once observed: "A political sect...wishes simultaneously to affirm the universal relevance of its strategy and its ultimate aims, and at one and the same time keep them for itself, to exclude the outsiders and the late-comers and those who can be suspected of insufficient commitment, passion and belief"2. Radical alternatives to capitalism no longer have a sole proprietor (and really never did). The coming struggles provide the best terrain to prove it. FOOTNOTES 1 Guardian 3 March 2010. 2 Fear and Loathing in Globalization,
New Left Review 23, Sept-Oct 2003.