TODAY’S Autumn Statement simply compounds both this government’s economic incompetence and its inability to look beyond its free-market ideology and the short-term gains of its super-rich friends.
It began with the Chancellor talking about getting the economy back on track and reducing inflation. This, from a government that has presided over the most significant fall in living standards since the early 1800s.
Hunt went on to announce 110 “growth measures.” So successful are these measures that, once announced, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had to revise its growth forecast from 1.8 per cent to 1.6 per cent. You couldn’t make it up!
But of course, the reality of the Autumn Statement is that it amounts, as TUC general secretary Paul Nowak says, to “levelling down.” A statement full of brutal cuts to public services, piling austerity on austerity, in order to promote tax cuts which will further restrict public spending going forward.
As Daniel Kebede of the NEU pointed out on X, “Not a penny for schools! School buildings crumbling. Teacher shortages growing. Greater school cuts looming. Chancellor’s response? Big fat zero.”
Education faces the worst funding crisis of a generation and this government has literally no answers. The prospects of an entire generation will be ruined while this government sits back and does nothing.
And of course, it is not just education. Not a penny for serious investment in our National Health Service, which continues to face privatisation in all but name. Failure to invest in staffing and infrastructure has left the service dependent on an internal market, including massive wasteful spending on private facilities and agency staffing to plug gaps left by underfunding.
Not a penny for a comprehensive housebuilding programme and no controls on rents or prices, leaving private landlords, energy giants and supermarket chains free to extort massive profits at the expense of the living standards of the vast majority of the population.
And of course not a penny to invest in an industrial strategy to rebuild Britain’s manufacturing base and to save British Steel. This lack of investment in the productive economy, and the weak supply side it leads to, is a significant cause of the vulnerability of the British economy to price rises, shortages and fiscal shocks.
But the super-rich all do well out of these things. They made a killing during the pandemic (in the case of sub-standard PPE, quite literally) and their wealth has increased many times over during this cost-of-living crisis.
So why would this government offer any different? Why do anything for the mass of the population when the interests you serve are quite happy with the way things are?
We have to offer an alternative vision. And we have to win a future government to enacting that vision.
The Chancellor has made much of his refusal to give in to “unaffordable pay offers.” Yet, while we are told to tighten our belts, rent, heating and the cost of food go up. Labour must offer an alternative and must declare a significant pay rise for all working people.
Unions must not be afraid to demand above-inflation pay rises, combined with price caps and rent controls, as the only way to protect the living standards of the vast majority. And they must co-ordinate their demands — generalise individual struggles against greedy employers to a struggle against the employer class.
Now is the time to demand economic justice for our people. On December 9 when unions come together to discuss the anti-union laws, this is the context that we must set that discussion within — building a co-ordinated struggle for higher pay as a first step to working people taking control over their lives and their economy.
