Not the Budget Britain Needs

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.

COMMUNIST CALL: "Advance in unity not retreat in disarray"

ROBERT GRIFFITHS considers the labour movement's prospects in 2012  and calls for the line to be held on pensions.

Where stands Britain's labour movement at the beginning of 2012?

In the course of last year, millions of trade unionists in the public sector have demonstrated their willingness to resist the Con-Dem government's attack on their pension schemes.

They are angry about much else besides. They see the value of their wages being cut, while the public services they struggle to deliver are being slashed to the bone.

Like millions of other workers and their families, they see the real cost of living rising faster than the bogus picture painted by the official figures.

Housing and disability benefits are being chopped and a million young people are among the three million – and rising – who are out of work. Yet we are not even one-quarter of the way through the austerity cuts demanded by the finance monopolists in the City of London. Up to 700,000 more jobs are to be scrapped in the public sector, putting hundreds of thousands of workers out of work in the private sector which depends on public sector wages and contracts.