Mobilising For Action to Oppose Austerity

“First-Person article” that I got published in today’s Leicester Mercury.

Pay cuts and misery for us… but pay rises and jollies for them? Then our leaders have the gall to repeat the lie that austerity and further public sector cuts are the only way we can save our economy.

Yet if they were to collect the evaded and avoided tax from the super rich and big business it would save £120 billion a year, according to the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS).

The real impact of cuts is more poverty.

38% of working-age households claim benefits, even though employment has increased. For the first time on record, the majority of people in poverty have at least one person working in their household (Loughborough University report). Just last year, low paid workers in the major supermarkets claimed £11 billion in tax credits.

Since 2010, 37% has been torn from the budget of councils, as reported in Unison’s “Austerity Audit” last month. Concretely this means: the number of older people receiving home care has fallen by 32%; day care places have plummeted by 66.9%; the number receiving meals on wheels has plunged by 64%; and spending on day care has fallen by 30%.

With billions of pounds of cuts in the pipeline, the Tories savagery doesn’t bear thinking about. But the Tories have no mandate for their attacks against the majority of working class people. After all Cameron scraped to power with the support of the smallest percentage of voters of any Tory government since 1918.

As ever, the only way to see off further immiseration will be to organise collectively to stake our claim to the profits that we are amassing for the super-rich.

Six million workers are unionised and could be mobilised for action. The government are well aware of this, and the positive role that unions can play in uniting our opposition. This is why Cameron and co. are so keen to impose further undemocratic restrictions on trade unions’ right to strike.

On 20 June the Peoples’ Assembly is holding a national demonstration against austerity in London. Bus-loads of people will be travelling down from Leicester, but such protests alone, although helpful, are not enough.

This is why Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union, has argued that this protest should be followed by a massive trade union demonstration in the autumn as part of a plan for co-ordinated strike action.

So let’s get busy and make history together. Get active within a union, and with the help of your colleagues lets work together to make a 24 hour general strike a reality.