Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. Milton Friedman
Behind its increasingly tatty rhetoric about us all being "in it together", government is perhaps the most ideologically driven group of class warriors ever to hold power in Westminster. Clegg and Cameron are sufficiently contemptuous of their own electorate to reduce the rate of tax for the wealthiest 1 per cent in society, on the grounds that the very rich were too clever at dodging the 50p in the pound being asked of them. Instead, they announced in the same budget that they intend to take more from pensioners. In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein identified the source, set out the economic programme and predicted the strategy that David Cameron's government would implement three years later: "Friedman predicted that the hundreds of thousands of people who would be fired from the public sector would quickly get new jobs in the private sector, soon to be booming thanks to Pinochet's removal of 'as many obstacles as possible that now hinder the private market.'" Milton Friedman was the intellectual architect of neo-liberalism. At the heart of his theories was the idea that the role of government was to make the rich richer by implementing privatisation, cuts to public spending and deregulation to push back the redistributive role of the state. As part of the challenge to the post World War Two Keynesian consensus, he developed the idea that the best time to force through huge attacks on the majority of people in a society is in a time of real or artificial crisis. This can be the aftermath of the Sri Lankan tsunami, the invasion of Iraq or a crisis of the speculative banking system. To be effective, they insist that so many attacks are launched simultaneously on the working class and poor that they teel too beleaguered to act decisively in their own defence. It's clearly foolish to say that Cameron and Clegg are as repressive and murderous as the Chilean dictator. However, all three are heavily indebted to Friedman's ideas. A quick survey of some of the most egregious assaults on the working class and poor in Britain show the extent of their ambition: • They are imposing a £500 per week cap on benefits. This will drive thousands of families out of inner London. • Pay freezes, pay caps and pension contribution increases will result in public sector workers taking an average 16 per cent real terms wage cut by 2015, says the TUC.
7 *Britain • They plan to force down public sector salaries still further by introducing regional pay. This is on top of a predicted 710,000 job losses in the public sector. • The academy and free school programme is a fast track for schools from the state to the private sector. • The NHS has been converted into a cash cow for the private sector. The same is planned for roads and policing functions. At a time when at least 2.7 million people are out of work, the government is penalising the unemployed and millions of people who rely on benefits to survive. A couple with children, one working 20 hours on minimum wage, will lose £74.34 a week, almost £4,000 a year. Even senior Tories are now saying that their government looks like it's run by rich people for rich people, an impression that was strengthened by their treasurer being caught on camera saying that policy could be influenced by donating £200,000 to £250,000. The subsequent defence, which could be distilled to "we're not corrupt but we do tell lies for money", was a reminder that political influence is a commodity more accessible to the rich than anyone The paradox is that, despite the fact that every working class family now feels worse off and more insecure, the resistance has not been on a scale to match the attacks. The major organisations of the far left are committed to a strategy of building their
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8 own fronts. Labour, while having a modest lead in the polls nationally, is not offering a clearly differentiated set of options. It created much of the legislative framework which is permitting schools and the NHS to be sold off. Its councillors are implementing cuts and workers taking action to defend their pensions have received no support, other than that from a small number of left wing MPs. George Galloway's astonishing election victory in Bradford is clear proof that, even among Labour's core voters, there is an appetite for more angry rejection of austerity while the election of Leanne Wood as leader of Plaid Cymru shows that resistance stretches beyond Labour's base. Our editorial in this edition explores the With the unions the situation is far from encouraging. UNISON, under Dave Prentis' "leadership" tried to wreck the multi-union campaign on pensions. While the PCS and some teaching unions remain committed to a fight to protect their members' pensions, their determination seems to lack that displayed by the Con Dems. A government that announces its willingness to break a strike by bringing in the army, as this one did with tanker drivers, is one which is not afraid of class war. The complacent and ineffectual leaderships at top of the majority of unions simply lack the same resolve and are hampered by a reluctance to initiate industrial action, because of their link with the even more timid Labour Historical analogies always need to be heavily qualified. Nevertheless, the depth of the Friedmanite offensive we are witnessing in Greece invites comparison on the economic level with Pinochet's coup in Chile. It is a foretaste of what is planned for the working class in the rest of Europe, including Britain. Unless and until working people have a sense that a political and economic alternative is a real possibility, the neo-liberals will have the upper hand. 1 Preface to Capitalism and Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 1962