TORY Chancellor Jeremy Hunt yesterday morning admitted that the UK economy is ‘likely to get worse before it gets better’ although he went on to admit that he didn’t have a clue about when things would start to ‘get better’ for a UK economy that is crashing out into recession.
The only thing that Hunt was certain about was that the demand by workers for pay increases to meet the spiralling cost of living would only drive inflation even further, claiming that what makes inflation even worse to tackle is ‘when we have big public sector strikes going on at the moment’.
Hunt was repeating the old line pushed by the Tories and the capitalist class that wage increases for workers ‘embed’ higher rates of inflation, and that strikes must be defeated for the greater good of capitalism.
Workers must take the pain of real-terms pay cuts to defeat inflation, which the Tories portray as a ‘shared enemy’ of capitalism.
What the bosses and bankers aren’t prepared to share of course, is the pain of millions of workers and their families facing a massive increase in energy bills in the middle of a freezing winter and of not having enough money to feed their children and living constantly in fear of debt.
While the working class take all the pain, the bankers last week got their reward when the Tories tore up all the regulations brought in after the 2008 banking crash.
These regulations were promised to ‘tame’ all the gambling excesses that brought about the crash, which the working class had to pick up the bill for the billions spent bailing out the banks with austerity and wage-cutting freezes.
The printing of billions of pounds of worthless money to prop up the banks is at the root of inflation – not workers’ wages.
The annual wage growth across the entire UK economy (including the high-paid jobs in finance or tech industries) is only 6% – way below the official inflation rate of 11.1%.
For public sector workers, including NHS, firefighters, and civil servants, their pay growth is even lower at just 2%, with wages falling in real terms at the fastest rate since records began, according to the Organisation for National Statistics (ONS).
What is at stake for the Tories and the ruling class today is not just holding down pay demands to match inflation but smashing the trade unions and creating the conditions where the working class is reduced to the status of little more than slaves, forced to work for whatever pittance the bosses choose.
All the gains made by workers in the past are to be destroyed to ensure the continued wealth of the bankers.
Last week, Sunak promised to get ‘tough’ with strikers and the unions.
Yesterday, the Tories held an emergency Cobra meeting to finalise plans to use the army as a scab strike-breaking force against ambulance and other NHS workers, and Border Force staff who are due to take strike action in the run-up to Christmas, joining postal and rail workers.
Prior to this meeting, Tory ministers were insistent that there would be no negotiations on pay and they slammed the door on appeals from the RCN for any pay talks while prime minister Sunak contemptuously snubbed an offer by RMT leader Mick Lynch for a meeting to try to resolve the rail strike.
The Tories aren’t interested in negotiations, they are banking on strikes confined to one or two days exhausting the determination of workers while using the military and an army of scab agency workers and volunteers to break the effectiveness of limited strike action.
The time has come for the working class to demand that the union leaders stop all these useless appeals to the Tories to get round the table to agree a ‘just settlement’ and get on with the job of mobilising the huge strength of the working class in a general strike.
A general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and build a socialist planned economy is the only way forward.
