THE next general election, which is now just eight months away, will be the most important to be held in this country for more than 50 years. Since the general elections which led to the great socialist governments of Clement Attlee, in fact, which from 1945-50 and from 1950-51 did so much to transform the fortunes of the people in this country after the Labour landslide at the end of the second world war.

Because the policies of this coalition government — and we should remember that the Liberal Democrats have been as culpable as the Conservatives in all this — are sowing the seeds of a disastrous future for Britain. 

They are implementing an ever more brutal “free market” for labour and in housing. 

We are seeing the creeping “marketisation” — an awful euphemism for the privatisation of a great public service — of the NHS. 

And then there are the punitive “reforms” — for which read destruction — of the welfare state, repeated raids on the wages and pensions of public-sector workers and daily attacks on the terms and conditions of ordinary working people in this country.

Decisions, taken with malice aforethought, by this coalition government have led to enormous increases in inequality, not just for the current but for future generations in Britain and will do nothing to mitigate the findings of a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which predicts that by 2060 the global economy will be stagnating with slow growth, huge and growing inequality and threatened by climate change.

We are concerned that Britain’s economic recovery is based on the fragile pillars of consumer borrowing and a dysfunctional housing market. A bubble which will, inevitably, burst. Again.

We believe that sustainable long-term growth can only be delivered by a rebalanced economy with a progressive structural adjustment programme which restores equivalence between corporations and trade unions.  

That’s why we welcome the findings of recent research carried out by the International Monetary Fund. 

It found that the “restoration of poor and middle-income households’ bargaining power” can be “very effective” in reducing the probability of another major economic crisis. 

And that’s why my union, Aslef, is backing the TUC’s Britain Needs a Pay Rise campaign — and why our members will be out in force with our banners at the march and rally in the capital on Saturday October 18.

“This demonstration deserves massive support,” says my colleague Simon Weller, Aslef’s national organiser and a member of the TUC’s general council. 

“The campaign slogan Britain Needs a Pay Rise may seem simple, but it defines an approach to the economy that can make this country a better place for all working people.”

Because getting money back into people’s pockets is essential for a proper, and sustained, economic recovery in Britain. 

“Bankers operating as if they were playing at a casino on credit led to the spending boom that caused the latest financial crisis,” says Simon. 

“People need money to spend to increase demand and boost the whole economy. We don’t want credit — we want more money in our pockets.” He’s right.

The TUC campaign has four demands: 

• A properly enforced minimum wage, because there are still many companies which are not paying up 
• Higher minimum wages for employers who can afford to pay more — it is supposed to be a minimum, after all, not a maximum 
• A commitment to the living wage rather than the minimum 
• And a crackdown on excessive executive pay which only leads to more inequality — we believe workers should be represented on all pay committees — and excessive financial risk-taking.

Basically, the TUC is calling for an increase in Britain’s pay packet to be shared out on a fair basis.

Because we know that austerity — like so many workers “employed” on zero-hours contracts — isn’t working. 

The coalition’s medicine is killing, rather than curing, the patient. 

John Maynard Keynes, one of the world’s most progressive and influential economists, explained how a government spends, rather than cuts, its way out of recession. 

This was a lesson understood by Franklin Roosevelt when he introduced the New Deal — and big public infrastructure projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam — to drag the US out of the Great Depression. FDR knew the value of “pump priming” — government spending — to get the economy moving again.

Because a worker on a public project with a dollar or a pound in his or her pocket will spend it in a shop which will order more goods and that gets the manufacturing and retailing cycle revolving again. 

It’s good economics, as well as good politics, but the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is stuck with a single-minded, and simple-minded, policy of cuts, an age of austerity and a flatlining economy that resolutely refuses to grow.

That’s why we say Britain Needs a Pay Rise. And why, next May, we desperately need a change of government.

Mick Whelan is general secretary of Aslef.