But what they actually mean is that workers, young people and the middle-class have to bear the brunt of the economic crisis created by the bankers and speculators. Many workers have already suffered pay cuts, loss of hours or changes to their conditions under pressure from bosses determined to defend their profit margins. Now, we are expected to accept an unprecedented assault on vital public services. It is estimated that in Northern Ireland this could mean £2 billion cuts over four years, leading to an estimated 40,000 job losses. The cuts will have a devastating impact on working-class communities.
Much of the right-wing press are determined to portray public spending itself as being the problem, saying that we’ve all been “living beyond our means”. This is an attempt to legitimise the cuts. Workers should be clear that it is the bail-out of the banks and the greedy pursuit of profits by the stockmarket speculators which caused this financial black hole. After decades of telling us there was no money to improve public services, the government threw £850 billion at the banks to shore them up. These banks are now back to business as usual. Royal Bank of Scotland has returned to massive profits and paid out £1.3 billion in bonuses this year to market traders, after sacking 17,000 of its workforce. Lloyds TSB has paid out bonuses worth over £1 million each to its top directors.
Socialists reject any assertion that workers should sacrifice one job, one service, one penny to pay for a crisis which we had no role in creating. It is the bankers, big business and the super-rich who must foot the bill! As for the public deficit, who is it that the state owes this money to anyway? The vast bulk is to hedge funds, finance houses, speculators and big banks – exactly the people who are to blame for the economic collapse! Workers and young people owe them nothing.
In order to maintain and develop our public services, the £123 billion tax which the rich avoid paying every year should be aggressively pursued. Subsidies to big business should be removed to ensure they pay their share of tax. Crucially, we demand that the banks are nationalised – not to bail them out, but to nationalise their profits too – under the control of elected representatives of workers and consumers, and their capital used to invest in socially useful projects and services which would provide employment.
The Comprehensive Spending Review to be announced on 20th October will contain savage cuts. On 23rd October, workers from across the North will descend on Belfast for a demonstration to send a message to the governments in Westminster and Stormont that we won’t pay for the bankers’ crisis. There will also be demonstrations and rallies across Britain to send the message that cuts will be fiercely resisted.
The position of the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the majority of trade union leaders towards the cuts falls well short of what is required. Instead of taking a firm stance against cuts, they have called for cuts to be made at a slower pace and spread out over a longer timescale. This is an acceptance that working class people should pay for the bankers’ crisis, it is merely a question of how much and when. October 23rd should be the beginning of a real and determined fight by the trade union movement to defend all jobs and all services. The Socialist Party and the Stop the Cuts Alliance will support every action and protest initiated by the unions against the cuts but more importantly will assist workers and local communities on the ground in organising to fight the cuts.
Pop sensation of the moment, Lady Gaga, has recently topped one billion views of her videos on Youtube. Her new 10-minute music video Telephone is creating quite a stir. The video has been praised as exemplifying “liberated” female sexuality and Lady Gaga herself has been held up in the media, including by feminists, as a “feminist icon and a gender revolutionary” and “a strong symbolic figure… for the openly and secretly flamboyant of all genders and sexualities.”
The UN conference on climate change (Cop15), held in Copenhagen 7-18 December, was a fiasco. The Independent called it “a historic failure that will live in infamy”. After years of preparation, the representatives of 193 countries discussed and wrangled for two weeks. In the closing hours, leaders such as Barak Obama and Wen Jinbao (and Gordon Brown) flew in, supposedly to break the deadlock. All of them accepted the urgency of reaching agreement. Unless global warming is limited to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the planet faces catastrophe. But no agreement was reached, let alone the framework for a binding international treaty, Cop15’s original aim. Backroom discussions between the US, China and a handful of neo-colonial states (Brazil, India, South Africa, etc) produced an ‘accord’ – a brief memo of vague aims and even vaguer pledges. Completely sidelined, the Cop15 assembly merely ‘noted’ the accord. Almost immediately, China’s representative, Su Wei, announced that, as it was not a formal UN agreement, China reserved the right to repudiate even the accord.
Sinn Féin recently published it’s policy paper “There is a Better Way”, a plan for the cuts which offered a few populist measures as window-dressing e.g. a marginal pay-cut for MLAs, reduced use of business consultants and slashing bonuses to hospital consultants. But aside from these few populist policies, the document is a 100% acceptance of the cuts agenda.
We reprint a collection of leaflet, articles, press releases and letters that were produced during the campaign to stop racist attacks on Roma families on the Lisburn Road. Socialist Party members who live in the area played a key role in organising local residents to oppose racism and fight for jobs and homes.