30 MILLION people in Britain will be unable to afford a decent standard of living in the coming year according to a study published this week by the New Economics Foundation (NEF).
Spiralling increases in the price of food, energy and rents alongside projected increases in unemployment plus the drive to inflict cuts to pay through below-inflation levels of wage increases will mean abject poverty for millions of working class households.
The NEF warns that 43% of these households will not have the money to put food on the table, buy new clothes or provide any ‘treats’ for their families.
90% of single parents and 50% of workers with children will fall below a minimum income standard.
The scale of the mass poverty that the Tories are determined to inflict on workers and their families might be shocking, but it comes as no surprise.
The Tories and the ruling class are determined to drive the working class back to the days of the 19th century before trade unions were built and when workers faced starvation wages or the poor house.
This is not some ‘choice’ by capitalism but an absolute necessity to keep up the massive profits of the bosses and the shareholders that they demand as their right.
This is what is meant when Tory ministers claim that pay increases to defend workers from raging inflation are ‘unaffordable’ – unaffordable by a capitalist system collapsing into recession and determined that the working class should suffer to keep the bankers and bosses in luxury.
The slogan of wage rises being unaffordable for capitalism has been slavishly taken up by the Labour Party with Labour leader Keir Starmer on Monday once again threatening disciplinary action against any Labour MP standing on picket lines supporting the strike of the 40,000 rail workers who came out yesterday at the start of four days of action this week.
On Sunday, Labour’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, used the pages of the Telegraph newspaper to denounce the BMA doctors union as ‘hostile’ for its opposition to Tory ‘reforms’ to force GPs to work intolerable hours to try to cover up the health crisis created by 12 years of savage austerity attacks that have slashed the health budget.
Streeting insisted a Labour government would take on the unions and support the privatisation of the NHS under the guise of ‘reforms’.
Workers will be in no doubt where the Labour Party stands – shoulder to shoulder with the Tories to inflict economic catastrophe on the backs of every worker and their children.
They stand full square with a Tory government that has thrown every attempt by the trade union leaders to negotiate a compromise on pay and conditions back in their faces.
Yesterday, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch emphasised that the union ‘wants to get a deal but at the moment, there is no deal in sight.’
The RCN, representing hundreds of thousands of nurses, had the same experience when their general secretary Pat Cullen left a meeting with health secretary Steve Barclay condemning the ‘belligerence’ of Barclay and the refusal to discuss pay on the eve of the two days of strike action this month.
The RMT, the RCN, the CWU postal workers and the entire TUC must be forced to face up to the fact that there will be no negotiated settlements, no deals even when the unions signal their willingness to compromise over above-inflation pay increases.
The unions must grasp the stark fact that the Tories, with the support of Labour, are preparing to fight it out with the working class and its organisations and that the time for talking is over.
The working class is prepared to fight, as the massive strike wave amply demonstrates.
Workers will not be driven into the acute poverty predicted by the NEF study. Instead, to win this war against the Tories, they must force the TUC to call out every union in an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a Workers’ Government that will nationalise the banks and major industries, placing them under the control and management of the working class, going forward to socialism.
This is the only way forward.
