THE PCS trade union yesterday accused the bankers’ Prime Minister, Gordon Brown of ‘beginning a bidding war on who can cut the most.’
The bidding war is, of course, to pay off the bankers’ debts, and get back the £850bn that the government has put at their disposal.
The PCS added that following the advice of Sir Peter Gershon, 100,000 civil service jobs were cut! It added that even he had conceded that he had gone to the limit and that ‘going further than the “efficiencies” he outlined would damage the delivery of frontline services’.
The union went on to accuse the government of holding the ‘sale of century’ as it planned a fire sale of key assets and agencies.
The FDA described as ‘irresponsible’ the Government’s proposal for a cut of up to 20 per cent in the size of the Senior Civil Service (SCS).
In his haste to make his ‘savage cuts’, Brown yesterday launched a demagogic attack on public sector workers, seeking to whip up something akin to a lynch mob, saying that overpaid public sector workers would be ‘named and shamed,’ and thousands more civil servants moved out of London, as a form of punishment no doubt, for achieving reasonable pension terms.
In fact, public sector workers are as a rule low paid and all wages and pensions, including those of the FDA elite, have been negotiated and agreed for the last ten years with his three Labour governments.
Civil servants are not like Brown’s MPs. These were able to pocket tens of thousands in expense claims over many years. Among them there were champion house flippers and prodigious gardeners and cleaners. Even Brown felt that he had to repay £10,000 back to the exchequer.
In the pre-Budget report, Chancellor Darling is expected to confirm annual borrowing will top £175bn – a lot of it cash that was gifted to bankers, which the government has promised to halve within four years, at the expense of the working class.
In his speech in central London, Brown said ministers had identified £3bn in additional efficiency savings since the Budget in April.
He was not referring to the abolition of bankers’ bonuses!
He was talking about putting a modern spin on savage cuts and austerity measures.
He said: ‘We need to do what households up and down the country do to prioritise the necessities and postpone the things we can do without.’
He paraded his grandiose vision saying ‘We want new services that meet, for example, the growing needs of older people, supporting them at home – where they wish to remain whenever possible. And helping people in middle life who can find themselves struggling to balance work with meeting responsibilities towards their ageing parents and their young families.’
Here he is actually talking about ending hospital care for the elderly and giving their middle-aged children the job of looking after them at home, at the same time as they are struggling desperately trying to pay their kids’ university tuition fees. Brown feels that this is what modern society is all about!
The truth, however, does manage to emerge when he states: ‘Such profound changes must now be managed in the context of an unprecedented global recession, as governments confront the need to plan to unwind deficits necessitated by action to save the global banking system.’
His brave new world is all to do with plans to pauperise the working class and middle class in order to secure the £850bn that he has provided to support the banking system.
To help with this he names and shames the public sector not the bankers! The Welfare State and the NHS are to be privatised and wound up to pay the bankers’ debts.
There is an alternative to Brown’s slash and burn policies. That is to nationalise the banks and the major industries under workers control to put an end to capitalism and go forward to a socialist planned economy and socialism.
