Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party, on how the 2012 Budget is just another slap in the face for working people.
Chancellor George Osborne has done it again. He's used yet another Budget to attack workers, the unemployed and benefit claimants and to enrich still further big business and the super-rich.
As before this Con-Dem regime claims that its overriding priority is to close the deficit between what the state and central government spend and what they receive in taxes.
This, we are told, will give private enterprise and the "markets" the security and incentive to invest in economic growth.
Yet the government's policies of slash, burn and privatise have so far halted economic recovery dead in its tracks.
By destroying 270,000 public-sector jobs last year and allowing the dole queues to lengthen they have paralysed economic growth and the extra tax revenue that would come with it while increasing the unemployment bill.
No credibility should be attached to the latest forecasts of higher growth, peaking unemployment, falling inflation and a steeper decline in the financial deficit.
The forecasters were wrong before and during the post-2007 recession and have been wrong again since.
Chancellor Osborne boasted in his Budget speech about cutting the deficit still further between now and 2017, but he's done so by grabbing the £28bn of assets in the Royal Mail pension fund.
And in order to make our postal service more attractive for privatisation the government has also nationalised the £37bn liabilities that will become due later.
Although he offered a range of new tax allowances and subsidies to exporters, private house-builders and enterprise zone businesses, these fell well short of even the modest $787bn (£497bn) stimulus introduced by US President Obama in 2009.
That package has helped produce 24 months of continuous economic growth and brought US unemployment down below the 8.4 per cent rate in Britain.
Its equivalent here would be a stimulus worth £77bn, including £27bn of job-creation measures and £22bn in extra spending on social welfare programmes.
Instead the Con-Dem government is on course to slash public spending by £203bn by 2015, with Osborne signalling on Wednesday a further £10.5bn reduction in welfare expenditure.
Yet only last month another £50bn could be conjured up overnight by the Bank of England to oil the wheels of the City of London.
That brings to £325bn the amount of public money conjured up so far to pay for "quantitative easing" to help the financial institutions and their markets, with an additional instalment likely by the summer.
At the same time we are told that libraries, youth centres, day-care facilities and Remploy factories must close while workers' tax credits and disability allowances are chopped.
Britain has a fabulously rich capitalist class. According to the Office of National Statistics just 10 per cent of the population own at least £4 trillion in personal wealth in Britain - 44 per cent of the national total. That excludes the vast amounts stashed away in secret.
A modest 2 per cent wealth tax on this super-privileged minority would raise twice as much as the Chancellor's five-year austerity programme without any spending cuts or tax rises at all.
Nobody should be fooled by extra stamp duty and less tax relief for the wealthy, or a tightening of measures against tax avoidance.
This Budget, like its predecessors, will make no serious inroads into the largely ill-gotten gains of the super-rich.
Instead it sets its sights on those who produce our society's wealth, including public-sector workers.
They face postcode pay cuts which will further deflate the economies of whole regions and nations of Britain.
For the first time ever, reinforcing regional wealth inequality could become official government policy.
This Budget confirms that the austerity and privatisation programme of this Con-Dem Cabinet of multimillionaires is about boosting the profits of the City of London, the capitalist monopolies and their top directors and shareholders.
That's why the 50p top rate of income tax is being phased out in stages.
That's why corporation tax on monopoly profits is being reduced even further below the levels in the US, Japan, Germany and France.
Even raising the level at which income tax begins will help the rich most, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The austerity cuts are to ensure not only that the Treasury and Bank of England can honour bonds issued to financiers in the City, but also that even more funds are available for future bail-outs.
The pot of gold at the end of the capitalist rainbow is the privatisation of what remains of the public sector.
Health, education, the Royal Mail, trunk roads and motorways are enormous sources of potential profits for giant monopolies from taxpayers, patients and motorists.
For the public the results of privatising the Royal Mail, for instance, are likely to be the same as those of other privatisations: mass redundancies, rising charges and deteriorating services, mostly at public expense.
In announcing the privatisation of new motorways and trunk roads both the Chancellor and Prime Minister held up the privatised water industry as a possible model.
Here privatisation has entailed rocketing prices, soaring profits, underinvestment and, as a result, emergency anti-drought measures this spring in seven water authority areas across eastern England.
In Latin America, Asia and Europe central and local governments are renationalising their water services in order to stop the racketeering and secure vital investment for the future.
On the eve of the Budget Roads Minister Mike Penning cited the M6 toll road and the Dartford and Severn Crossings as successful examples of privatised investment. His advisers should have told him that the M6 venture has just announced a £50 million loss for 2011, while yet another round of Severn Crossing toll increases are infuriating domestic and business motorists.
We need a Budget for workers and the people - not yet another for big business and the rich.
A People's Budget would...
- Restore the cuts on social and welfare spending
- Cancel the cuts in working tax credit
- Cut VAT
- Boost capital spending by local and central government, including a massive public-sector house-building programme
- Impose price controls on the energy utilities
- Levy a wealth tax on the super-rich
- Charge a windfall tax on energy, banking and retail monopoly profits
- Introduce a financial transactions tax
- Increase the higher tax rates on dividends, bonuses and pension windfalls
- Close all tax havens under British jurisdiction
- Raise the top rate of council tax
- Unfreeze the local business rate on big business
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