LABOUR’S decision to keep cutting the Fire & Rescue service budget is ominous.

It reveals two things about this government which the trade union movement needs to change.

One: austerity is not over. Labour’s Budget last year was mixed, including some increases in funding for the National Health Service, local government and devolved nations. It has raised the minimum wage, and settled a number of industrial disputes with above-inflation pay awards.

But these modest steps forward will not satisfy workers unless they are built on.

Public-sector pay has declined sharply in real terms since the bankers’ crash, with wages in nursing or teaching having shrunk by about a fifth. By reducing workers’ bargaining power this has a depressing effect on private-sector wages as well. British workers are poorer than they were a generation ago and reversing that means committing to restoring pay over time, not something that can be done with continually reduced budgets. 

That is not just the case in the Fire & Rescue service. Teachers’ pay offer for 2025 — at 2.8 per cent well short of anything that would constitute progress towards restoring pay to 2008 levels anyway — is not funded. This piles additional financial pressure on schools.

While ministers talk of overall inflation figures, working-class people are hit harder by the rising cost of essentials. 

Wages need to rise significantly if people are not to feel poorer because of looming hikes in their water bills, due to rise by an inflation-busting 36 per cent. Energy bills doubled from 2021-23: they are extremely high compared to what people are used to. The government could protect living standards by controlling prices as well as by raising wages, but it isn’t doing that either.

Raising pay, because it affects recruitment, retention and morale, is an important part of improving public services. But if budgets are not raised overall then progress is undermined by cuts elsewhere. 

Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s demand for 5 per cent “efficiency savings” in government departments is a euphemism for cuts: and they are coming after years and years of cuts. 

The fire and rescue service is a case in point, having lost almost a third of its funding since 2010. The number of firefighters has fallen by a fifth. 

Treasury bean-counters might see headcount reductions as “efficiency savings”: but they have not delivered a more efficient service, merely a weaker one, which takes longer to reach fires on average and is so understaffed in some areas it would struggle to tackle large blazes. Lives are put at risk by these cuts.

Which brings us to the second thing that needs to change about government. It is in denial. It does not recognise the gravity of the crises facing our country and the world and it is not doing anything about them.

Climate chaos is upon us. We see ever more destructive wildfires sweep every continent. We see more violent storms, more frequent serious flooding. Britain is badly affected, with floods hitting food production hard enough to reduce farmers’ income from produce by a fifth in a year.

Adapting to this new reality means investment, not least in the dedicated service that has to tackle fires and floods. We need more firefighters. We need more resilient systems, not ones pared to the bone that stop functioning whenever anything goes wrong.

Labour can try to meet these challenges.

Or it can take its cue from the hard-right US president: pretend climate change isn’t an issue and demonise immigrants rather than try to address the actual issues making life harder and less sustainable year after year.

It is evident which of the two paths it currently chooses. If that continues, this is a government that, just like its predecessor, will leave this country poorer, more unequal and less capable of meeting basic state responsibilities than when it came to office.