In a speech today David Cameron indicated his proposed cuts in spending would ‘unite rather than divide’ the people of this country. An interesting analysis from our esteemed Prime Minister and a point of view I am confident will come to haunt him for many months to come.
According to Cameron the current National Debt is all the fault of the last Labour government and had little or nothing to do with global recession. By any stretch of imagination this is preposterous. Is he truly expecting us to believe that the collapse of the banks in the UK had no effect of our national finances? Is he honestly expecting us to believe that the consequences and current demise of globalisation had no effect on British industry? Apparently so.
In his speech he indicated the current budget deficit is 11% of GDP, amounting to approximately £770bn and would mean that if left unaddressed, interest on this debt would amount to £70bn – more than we would be spending on climate change, transport and schools. However, let’s break these figures down a little. The last Labour government spent £85bn on education (of which schools was a part and under a Labour Government, real spending on education was due to rise by an average of 2.5 per cent a year from April 2009 to March 2011), just under £25bn on transport and just recently the Department of Energy and Climate Change confirmed that after Osborne’s cuts their budget will be £1.05bn. Now, I am no mathematician ... but when all these figures are added, they do not make £70bn.. so is Cameron trying to con us?
The Lib Dems are not much better. Before the election they were talking about gradual cuts for the next year to allow the economy to grow, but now they are sucking up to the Tories they have changed their mind. Now they are saying things are really bad and we must act immediately. Interestingly, if we take Cameron/ Alexander’s figures reported today of interest repayment being £70bn and a national debt of £770bn, it rather begs the question of why the Con-Dems were so desperate to implement departmental cuts of £6bn. If their figures are to be believed, Osborne’s cuts amount to a minor ripple in a huge lake. In other words – they were a cosmetic political ploy to trash Labour’s economic strategy whilst emphasising how they would solve the economic trials of this country. Cheap by any standard!
The simple realities are clear and have been stated in other entries in this blog, but let me briefly reiterate. In 1945, the national debt stood at 216% of GDP and in 5 years the Labour government built a welfare state, established a National Health Service, free at the point of demand and established a major rebuilding problem to address the chronic housing shortage as a result of several years of bombing. Conversely, today the national debt stands at 11% of GDP and yet Cameron wants to implement harsh savings in government spending.
These cuts will bring back the austerity years of the Thatcher era (a point obviously recognised by some Lib-Dems) and will result in substantial increases in the number of people unemployed, along with more houses being repossessed, more individuals and businesses forced into bankruptcy and a significant decline in front-line services.
The Labour Party must be at the forefront of the fightback to defend these services and should work co-operatively with the trade union movement to develop a clear strategy to support public service workers in their defence of our services. In parliament we should expect that Labour MPs resist every attempt by this reactionary government to cut hard-earned services offering critical support to the weak, the needy, the sick, the old and the unemployed.
At the same time, activists should join together to lobby MPs, match on demonstrations, support the People’s Charter and the Right to Work campaigns and petition Cameron to end these savage cuts.
The question is – have we become so apathetic that we sit and watch the Tories savagely decimate our services, or will we stand and fight?
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