The Comprehensive Spending Keview on October 20 may have been labelled '2010', but it harks back to divisive, reactionary Tory governments of the past.
The Tories under Stanley Baldwin brought us a slump in the 1930s, mass unemployment, the means test, and unparallelled social misery leading up to a massive world war.
Thatcher brought us another slump in the 1980s: the collapse of manufacturing industry and year after year of unremitting attacks on public services, along with privatisation and mass unemployNow David Cameron, with his gruesome Lib Dem assistants, is serving up another dose of recession, mass unemployment, a full-scale war on welfare and public services, garnished with massive privatisation - of local government services, health services, the post office and the few surviving profitable public enterprises.
They may call this government a coalition, but it's true blue Tory in tooth
We knew all this was coming from the day the coalition was cobbled together, with the Tories successfully locking the Lib Dems into a one-off do-or-die deal, in which the Cleggies know any serious split between them and the Tories could trigger an election - and their electoral
It was also a coalition of convenience, in which two parties which had presented a pack of lies and spurious promises to the electorate could come together and agree to ditch them all in a package of policies that nobody voted for.
This is how Cameron's Thatcherite team is leading the biggest-ever onslaught on public spending and public services: the lady herself may be flagging, but her neoliberal policies are very much the heart and soul of the new governGeorge Osborne's interim budget in June set out the stall: the poor and the working class would carry the brunt of
Cuts in welfare were at the heart of his proposals: single mothers, people with disabilities, people on housing benefit were all seen as fair game, while corporation tax was cut and f24 billion of tax breaks were given to big business and the bankers laughed all the way to the champagne bar.
After the entertaining side-show
5 during the Tory conference of token cuts to the child benefit of parents on salaries of more than £45,000 (enough to enrage sections of the middle class and create enough anomalies to ensure angry coverage in the Daily Mail and the Sun, creating the fiction that "we are all in this together" and that cuts were being "fair" in targeting the rich) the Comprehensive Spending Review was to add further cuts, towards the £81 billion
It did so - once again resuming the tull-scale offensive on the poor, the young, the disabled, the jobless, the homeless, public sector workers ... anybody but the bankers whose system ran up the debts that Osborne claims to
In fact cuts have taken the place of any attempt to tax the rich, or even get the rich to pay the tax they owe.
The list of cuts is pretty devastating: welfare cuts have been stepped up by another £7 billion to reduce the level of cutbacks in other departments. The Employment and Support Allowance, which is a replacement for Incapacity Benefit, is to be cut back for 1 million
The housing budget is to be halved, with a 60% cut in social housing. Housing associations are now expected to charge 80% of the market price for letting "affordable" housing, while housing benefit and total benefit packages are also to be cut back, forcing thousands of the poorest families to leave London and other city centres.
Osborne had the nerve to claim that his policies could lead to the building of 150,000 "affordable" houses for those on lower incomes, but the reality is that only a small fraction of this number are likely to be built because so few poorer people will be able to afford the increased rents. The National Housing Federation dismissed the Spending Review as "a devastating blow to the millions of low income families currently stuck on housing waiting lists"
Local government is another big loser, with 7% cuts per year in government funds over four years, on top of the cuts announced back in June. With the decision to remove all ringfencing of local government budgets this means that the axe could fall on any sector, from libraries and swimming pools through to social services and child protection.
Osborne claimed to be allocating an extra £2 billion for social care by 2015:
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6 Con Dems attack everyone but the bankers NHS Hospital but in fact £1 billion of this is to be sliced off the NHS budget, which - as campaigners had predicted - is set to rise by a nominal 0.1% above predicted inflation, resulting in a staggering f.20 billion quest for 'efficiency savings' by 2014, the preliminary stages of which are already triggering massive cutbacks at local level all over England.
The gap between social care resources and the growing need for social care for a rising number of frail older people is expected to increase to f4 billion by 2015, even assuming local councils do not repeat previous years' tactics and cut social service budgets to balance their
In practice the situation is likely to be a lot worse, with many councils also slashing grants and support for the very 'voluntary sector' organizations which - in the make-believe world of David Cameron's 'Big Society' - were supposed to fill in the gaps.
Public sector workers who keep their jobs face a double whammy of a rising retirement age and increased contributions for their pensions - contributing £3.5 billion towards Osborne's £80 billion target.
Students and young people are also clobbered with the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance for those aged 16+ from poor households. Student tuition fees are set to rise to £7,000 a year, while Higher Education funding is to be slashed by 40%, giving students even less actual teaching and quality education for their increased fees.
Osborne's axe has found even wider-ranging targets: he has managed to cut funding both for prison places and for probation staff to keep offenders out
But fewer offenders are likely to be apprehended in the first place, with 4% per year cuts in police forces. Those who are arrested and charged are less likely to get legal aid, and they and any witnesses are likely to have to travel much further to face a court.
Even the Border Agency staff supposed to enforce the government's restrictions on non-EU migrants, and counter-terrorism budgets are to face
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each face cuts of 6.8-7.5% by 2014, triggering fresh cuts in public services and loss of jobs.
All of the serious analysis of these cuts shows that the main victims of the ConDem plans will be the poorest 30% of the population, who will lose benefits, jobs and public services: they will also suffer most from the increased rate of VAT, up to 20% in the new year, increasing the cost of almost everything.
In total the government figures suggest 490,000 public sector jobs are to be lost as a result of Osborne's cuts: but with thousands of workers already facing redundancies, privatization or nonreplacement of vacant posts it is clear that this is a huge under-estimate.
The cuts in public sector budgets will also have a knock-on impact on private sector jobs: it has been estimated that 700,000 or more could go.
In response, ministers claim, against all the evidence that they have triggered a double-dip recession, that the consequence of their policies could be up to 2 million new private sector jobs. The public sector jobs being lost are relatively secure, well-paid jobs. Those staff are all going to find themselves in the job market at the same time, with few if any jobs available: they will wind up on the benefits that Osborne has not yet axed.
Exactly what in this new situation is supposed to trigger any form of economic
But perhaps the most worrying problem for the workers' movement is the lack of any credible opposition. Labour is compromised by its planned cuts. And now Ed Miliband's choice of shadow cabinet members shows that he is a timid Blairite, with no appetite for a fight with the Tories, and next to nothing of substance to say against the ConDem cuts.
Indeed his deliberate absence from the TUC's pre-spending review rally on October 19 showed that he has already been cowed by claims in the right wing press that he is somehow the creature of And if only the unions offered a militant enough line to give a lead to Miliband and to the millions whose very lives and livelihoods are threatened by the Tory cuts. But the TUC plods on, making dull, worthy speeches, calling a big demo ... at
As the reality percolates through, as local councils spell out their plans, universities unveil their redundancies, as hospitals and health services start to close, shed jobs and exclude more services, the phoney "consensus" which the polls appeared to show around spending cuts will begin to evaporate.
New, broad, local alliances and coalitions will be formed to fight the cuts.
The unions will be under pressure to support. It's not excluded that a new mood of militancy could develop, making the reaction to the Tory cuts more like the French strikes and protests than the Irish whimpers and glum acceptance.
So the question is: how can we best build the biggest, boldest and broadest challenge to this wretched coalition, a movement on a scale to replicate the Poll Tax movement that forced out Margaret Thatcher and could yet unseat this grim,
The starting point has to be to challenge every cut, to reject the fraudulent claim that cuts are necessary, and to reach out to all those who want to be part of a progressive challenge to a reactionary coalition.