By Richard Brenner

How dare Tory Chancellor George Osborne claim his budget is ‘progressive’ and that it ‘protects the poor?

It is a savage attack on the living standards of working class people and a huge redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Interim Labour leader Harriet Harman drew loud cheers – and roars of anger from the Tories and Lib Dems – when she denounced the budget in Parliament as an attack on the poor, and attack on jobs, and a betrayal by the Lib Dems of their pre-election promises. Brendan Barber of the TUC publicly attacked the Tory budget too.

But now the leaders of the labour and trade union movement need to go beyond words and call united action to stop Osborne’s daylight robbery and stop the Tory-led coalition from making working class people pay for the economic crisis we didn’t cause.

Just look at the Tories’ vicious package:

• 25 percent cuts in every government department except health and international development over the next four years, and starting this autumn. This means a quarter of all provision for the elderly, for children and countless other services will go. Just think of the poverty and suffering this will cause, let alone the jobs that will go.

• VAT goes up to 20 percent– a step the Tories denied before the election and which the Lib Dems campaigned against even though they will now vote for it! As even leading Lib Dem Simon Hughes admitted – before the election of course – VAT rises hot the poorest hardest. VAT is a flat tax which doesn’t rise or fall depending how much you earn, so now the government will add a fifth to all prices working class people’s incomes will go down much more than the better off.

• Massive cuts in benefits to save £11 billion over four years. This includes really savage cuts like capping housing benefit at £400 for a four bedroom house. Tories don’t think low paid, disabled and unemployed claimants should have high ceilings or back gardens – just think how much disruption, homelessness and misery it will cause forcing already struggling people to move to cheaper, smaller flats and houses in the private rented sector.

• Child benefit is to be frozen; new tests will be brought in for incapacity and other benefits, all to make it harder to qualify and for less.

• A pay freeze in the public sector for anyone earning more than £21,000 a year: with inflation pushing 3 percent again this is a pay cut in all but name.

At one and the same time, this millionaire Tory Chancellor, fully backed by his fellow millionaires Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, dares to claim he is being progressive. But a close look shows what a breathtaking piece of cynicism this is:

He says he’s cancelled income tax for the lowest paid but the benefit cuts and VAT rise will more than make up for it. He has also refused to cancel the rise in National insurance that workers have to pay: even though the Tories campaigned against it.

He says he’s brining in a bank levy but rich businessmen get massive tax cuts:

• A one percent cut in corporation tax every year for four years, to give Britain what Osborne boasted would be the lowest rate of tax on large companies of any advanced country
• A rise in the level at which rich people get the lower 10 percent ‘entrepreneur’s rate’ of Capital Gains Tax (CGT) from £2 million to up to £5 million, benefiting more super-rich people
• The main rate of CGT was supposed to go up from 18 percent to 40 percent to match higher rate income tax, but Osborne raised it to just 28 percent.

And all this is only the start. Osborne smiled as he said the Tories will cut a staggering £61 billion in the next five years.

It should now be clear to every working class person that the Tories and Lib Dems’ claims of fairness are lies. The right wing press is trying to make out that this was unavoidable and that the weak are being protected – both these ideas are deceptions.

There is an alternative to this bosses’ daylight robbery – it is to take over the wealth of the super-rich corporations and banks, nationalise them under workers’ control without compensation, bring in swingeing taxes on the rich, and have a socialist planned economy where we all work together for the common good, systematically abolishing inequality by taking the means of production into the hands of the working class.

Osborne says he had to bring in this budget to satisfy the bond markets – a cabal of billionaires who lend money to countries. If we didn’t make these savage cuts, he says, we would end up like Greece, with riots on the streets.

But the strikes and marches in Greece are against massive cuts in jobs, pay and services just like the ones Osborne and Cameron are bringing in now. Never mind not ending up like Greece =- Greece is here!

So let’s show the Tories we won’t take it! Let’s rise up like the working class in Greece!


• The TUC and Labour should call a one day general strike against the budget
• The public sector unions should ballot now to a national indefinite strike to bust the pay freeze and the cuts
• Claimants, tenants, and service users should form Anti-Cuts Committees in every town and city, linking up with delegates from the unions and Labour constituency parties

• We should occupy services marked for closure
• We should act with the official labour and union leaders where possible and without them where necessary
• We should defy the anti-trade union laws if the biased judges and bosses try to ban our actions
• We should convene a huge national delegate conference of the whole working class movement o plan an emergency programme of action to smash the cuts and bring down this Tory-Liberal robbers’ government!