As of today, Britain’s 2015 public contracts regulations have come into force. These are designed to privatise and contract out more and more public services, with very limited protection of employees, services, or indeed scrutiny through freedom of information.

Unison, along with other public-service unions, has called for a delay so that there can be proper consultation and discussion.

The regulations have been rushed through just ahead of a general election to make life even more difficult for all public services, but particularly local government ahead of the next round of government-inspired cuts.

Unison has produced a very interesting public service election manifesto which provides an opportunity for real hope for public services.

By the end of the 2015-16 financial year, public spending will have been cut by £37.5 billion and by 2018-19, unless there is a change of strategy, the total cuts will have risen to £67.8bn.

This has cost 642,000 public-sector jobs to date, and by 2018 this will have risen to over a million. Local governments have been hardest hit, having their collective budgets cut by £20bn.

However, within that massive global figure there are huge discrepancies where the most deprived inner-city areas have endured cuts six times greater than the more affluent parts of the country. Since adult social care makes up some of the biggest spending areas of most councils, it is by far the hardest hit of local services.

The NHS — which the government continually claims has its budget protected — now has a funding gap of £30bn looming by 2020. This is due to increased demand and rising costs of equipment and pharmaceutical drugs.

Despite everything David Cameron claims, it means that rationing of particularly expensive drugs and of operations is already taking place within the NHS.

Behind these stark figures lies a process of profit and greed, through the outsourcing of public services, the market for which is now worth £100bn and this is expected to rise by a further £25bn in the next year as more and more councils and health authorities dash for a short-term contracting out where workers can be employed on zero-hours contracts with no job security.

This of course impacts on the quality of the work and public services provided. Small wonder then that a survey of public-sector staff found that 60 per cent of employees feel insecure in their jobs, and only 40 per cent express any real satisfaction for work.

Public-sector pay has fallen by 7 per cent relative to the private sector, and the average public sector worker is now £2,000 worse off, relatively speaking, than they were five years ago.

Outside of the stark issues of the public sector, a fifth of the working population are getting less than the living wage, and foodbanks have become the norm in society.

To drive home the coalition government’s determination to destroy the whole service, ethic and ethos, they have attacked the unions by making check-off more difficult, if not impossible, and also restricting facility time for union representatives at the workplace.

An incoming Labour government in May will have a great deal to contend with, including all of the above issues. There are two questions that must be faced now.

The coalition’s own austerity programme agenda has not worked and it has extended austerity by at least three years, as reduced wages have reduced tax income, and combined with massive tax evasion by the biggest banks and corporations, this has forced the government into even more borrowing.

Christine Legard, the non tax-paying director-general of the International Monetary Fund, might well say that George Osborne has done a good job, as he’s presided over a nation of rough sleeping, foodbanks and insecurity at work. This presumably is her aspiration for the rest of Europe.

But there has to be a real alternative, and that means not accepting Tory spending plans, and not accepting the notion that the economic salvation for Britain is to continue with austerity. Instead we must invest massively in housing, infrastructure and social protection and oppose the Tory notion that public services are a prize to be grasped by the private sector.

The second issue is the secretive and arcane negotiations surrounding the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This murky process is designed to protect private investment and to remove so-called “barriers” to investment on both sides of the Atlantic.

These barriers can be anything from environmental protection, health and safety, pension rights, and working conditions. Anyone who naively believes that national law will be protected here, need only look to the way global business has prosecuted governments including Poland, Australia, Ecuador and Argentina, or the way in which vulture funds have tried to collect cheaply bought debts owed by African countries such as Tanzania.

Opposing TTIP is not just about protecting the NHS, but also about protecting social gains that have been made on both sides of the Atlantic.

This month the local-government cuts are biting even deeper all over the country, as many stressed employees work longer and harder to cover for their dismissed workmates, and the strain creates enormous community tension.

Ukraine 'military trainers' thin edge of the wedge

Yesterday, in response to an urgent question, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was forced to concede that 75 military trainers are going to be sent to Ukraine.

He claimed that the request came from Kiev and that they will be part of a bilateral relationship with the Ukrainian government and not part of any Nato deployment.

MPs on both sides of the chamber ranging from Conservative Edward Leigh to Labour’s Dennis Skinner raised the crucial question: “If its trainers today, it will be equipment tomorrow and fighting forces the day after.”

Indeed it is worth pointing out that the US did not march into Vietnam with all guns blazing. It started with a small group of CIA advisers, who became more and more embroiled in that cold war conflict, which ended with approximately two million dead the eventual humiliation of the US

After the break up of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine, agreement was reached on the limits of Nato eastward expansion, the non-nuclear status and independence of Ukraine, and the nonaligned nature of Ukrainian foreign policy.

Nato expansion has in turn encouraged Russian rearmament and we have a rapidly developing situation in Ukraine which resembles something out of the cold war.

The losers are going to be either those trapped in the fighting in the east of the country, or those suffering a massive EU-backed austerity programme in the west of the country.

There has to be peace through agreement. Ratcheting up military involvement, economic sanctions, and isolation can only lead to a downward spiral and enormous danger for everyone in Europe. The British government is not only part of the most hawkish elements of the Nato agenda, but with this decision on direct military involvement, appears to be branching out on its own.

The Minsk agreement provides a possibility of a way forward, but this is severely damaged by what Cameron and Fallon have done this week.

At the end there has to be peace through political dialogue and respect for people’s identities and lives.

Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North.