THE Conservative Party’s victory in the election was quickly followed by a Budget that was sold as part of a strategy to rebrand the Tories as the “party of working people.”

The centrepiece of that claim was the announcement of a new “national living wage,” which certainly caught many off guard with the speed of its adoption.

While it will undoubtedly benefit many low-paid workers, any rise in pay next April will be more than wiped out by cuts being planned to tax credits.

But as policy crystallised into the legislative programme of the Queen’s Speech, the threadbare camouflage has fallen away and the full venom of a victorious Tory Party has taken shape.

The government is now set to strike at our education, health and care services with a cuts programme that will deepen funding losses across public services to £50 billion by 2020.

It’s set to lash out at support for the low-paid, the unemployed, the young, the ill, the disabled and the vulnerable with a £12bn axe to welfare provision that will see many families on the national minimum wage stripped of over £1,000 a year through tax credit cuts.

And it’s set to stab at the living standards of public-sector workers with a 1 per cent pay cap over four years that would slice £2,400 from the value of average wages.

To carry those attacks through, the government has assembled one of the most aggressive laws seen in the post-war period against working people.

The clauses of the Trade Union Bill are coiled around the neck of the union movement to squeeze our funding supply and cut off the ability of workers to resist assaults on pay and terms and conditions.

But standing together to resist attacks lies at the very root of the trade union movement, and Unison will fight every step of the way to draw the teeth of the legislation, mobilise against the blatant injustices of pay policy and expose the wreckage left by the austerity agenda.

The injustices are clear. How can it be right that public-sector workers are expected to accept a 1 per cent pay cap when the economy is growing at 2.4 per cent, corporate profits at 7 per cent, and the chief executives of Britain’s biggest companies are enjoying pay rises of 21 per cent?

How can it be right that the privatisation of ever greater swathes of the public sector leaves us with examples of skilled support workers for disabled adults losing 40 per cent of their take-home pay, plus slashed rights to sick pay and annual leave?

And how can it be right that over half a million workers directly employed in local government are still paid less than a living wage, alongside almost a million more in the mainly privatised field of adult social care?

The introduction of a “national living wage” is undeniably one positive development on the horizon to be welcomed, but even here injustices creep in.

The new national minimum wage structure will create five wage tiers, with the “national living wage” applying to workers aged 25 and above, but four lower rates for the young and apprentices.

And there’s an element of deception in the naming of the new rate as the “national living wage,” given the long-established role of the Living Wage Foundation in defining Britain’s living wage rate.

The foundation’s rate acts as a much truer indicator of the living wage as its calculation takes into account changes in the cost of living in a way that the government’s rate does not.

It’s to be hoped that the government’s theft of the living wage label does not undermine the immense success achieved over recent years in persuading employers to sign up to the real living wage.

The damage caused to the economy and the standards of public services by the austerity agenda is equally clear. What justification can be made for ploughing on relentlessly when even official governmental analysts have acknowledged that the cuts have squeezed demand in the economy so hard that they have taken billions out of the value of economic growth, leading such orthodox voices as the International Monetary Fund to urge an easing off of the cuts?

What justification can be made for singling out public-sector workers for restrictions on pay rises when employers are sounding the alarm across the NHS and local government about their inability to attract the staff they need and morale is set to slide to the point that it is easy to foresee a rupture in the standards of public services?

And what justification can be made for the human cost of the cuts, with nearly a third of NHS clinical commissioning groups implementing or considering restrictions to services this year?

Meanwhile, Age UK reports that 168,000 older people have stopped receiving help with essential tasks such as eating, washing and getting dressed as a result of cuts.
We are told that we have to get down the deficit, and communities the length and breadth of Britain simply have to accept the toll.

An estimated 467 libraries, 361 police stations, 578 children’s centres, 33 fire stations and over 300 youth centres were forced to close over the last parliament. And more misery beckons over the next five years.

So how is the government doing on reducing the deficit? It’s risen by over £500bn since it came to office in 2010, and is now £1.5 trillion.

As we stand at the beginning of a new parliament under a Tory majority, it is clear that a storm is ready to break.
But unions have been through many long battles in the past to emerge stronger. Unison is determined that this battle shall be no different.

Dave Prentis is general secretary of Unison.