The Conservative Spring Statement, delivered by Chancellor Rishi Sunak on 23 March, continues the onslaught on the living standards of the poorest sections of the working class. Raising the National Insurance threshold from £9,600 to £12,600; cutting fuel duty by 5p a litre for 12 months and the distant promise to reduce income tax rate by one percentage point to 19% in 2024 will offset just one sixth of the tax rises introduced since Sunak became chancellor and do nothing to offset the devastating cost of living crisis for the poor. The Spring Statement came as the Office for Budget Responsibility announced that the situation is set to get a lot worse. Inflation is predicted to hit a 40-year high of 8.7% in the fourth quarter of 2022 and because this is increasing faster than wages and net taxes are due to rise in April, the OBR stated, ‘real livings standards are set to fall by 2.2% in 2022-23 – their largest financial year fall on record.’ The IFS predicts that the impact on public sector workers will equate to a pay cut of £1,800 for that year.
Year-on-year fuel bills are set to increase by nearly £1,300 after October. 10 million people in Britain are already living in ‘fuel poverty’, that is, unable to afford to meet their day-to-day energy costs. Real-term wage and benefit cuts will remain. More and more families are being forced into destitution. Meanwhile councils across the country voted in favour of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of cuts in March, removing essential support services. Between 2010 and 2020 central government grants to councils amounted to £15bn, with the poorest areas, often run by Labour councils, hit hardest. Rather than fight back, Labour councils have fallen into line, dutifully setting budgets which have cut local services to the bone, while continually increasing council tax.
2022/23 is the 13th consecutive financial year of council cuts and tax rises. However, there are few non-statutory services left to slash. Councils are going for the jugular: closing entire facilities like libraries or decimating funding for children and adult social care. Labour-run Nottingham council is shutting five of its nine children’s centres and Labour majority Wirral council is closing nine libraries. Labour-run Newcastle council is reducing the number of children in the council’s care and cutting adult social care spending by nearly £4.5m. Research published by York University in October 2021 suggests that 57,550 people died as a direct result of cuts to national healthcare and council-run health and social care between 2010 and 2014. These councils have blood on their hands.
Council cuts 2022/23
- Nottingham Labour council has cut over £300m since 2010. The council voted in favour of cutting £28m this financial year. This will be done by cutting 83 full-time staff, axing five of its nine children’s centres, reducing the number of youth workers and bus services and slashing community grants.
- Wirral council has cut £225m since 2010. It voted in favour of cutting £20m this year. This includes the closure of nine libraries, a leisure centre and two golf courses.
- Liverpool Labour council has cut £444m between 2010 and 2020 – 64% of its overall budget over the decade, making it one of the worst hit councils in the country. A further £90m is to be cut by 2026, of which £24.5m will be cut in 2022/23.
- Manchester Labour council has cut over £420m since 2010, including £40m in the last financial year. It has increased council tax by 3% and council rent by 4.1% this year. In 2023/24 and 2024/25 it will cut £36m and £57m respectively.
- Newcastle Labour council has cut £335m since 2010. There will be another £41m cut to services as well as wide-ranging job losses across all departments in the next three years.
- Lewisham Labour council voted to cut £11.8m this year.
Seven Liverpool Labour councillors voted against the 2022/23 cuts. They were suspended from the Labour Party as a result and could now be expelled for defying the whip. Labour has always been a pro-austerity party. In December 2015, then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell wrote to all Labour councils in the country instructing them to set ‘balanced’, ie cuts, budgets. The Labour Party conference in September 2016 reinforced this, changing the rules so that any Labour councillor who votes against the cuts or even abstains could face disciplinary measures. You can fight the cuts and stand with the poor or you can be a Labour Party politician and swing the axe – you cannot do both.
Labour squirts exhausted idioms
The base cowardice and career ambitions of Labour councillors requires them to cover up their onslaught with lies. As Labour leader of Newcastle council for 11 years, Nick Forbes has overseen brutal cuts, vilified anti-cuts campaigners in the press, used police and security to evict protesters from public council meetings and had one activist arrested for telling him ‘You have hung this city out to dry.’ Forbes was deselected by Labour members in February and from May will no longer be council leader. His parting gift for Newcastle’s poorest families was a three-year cuts package of £41m. True to form, he has re-written his own inglorious career, falsely claiming to have ‘picked serious fights with the government’ over the cuts, while transforming Newcastle into ‘a can-do city, a place driven by ambition, innovation and fairness.’ In reality, the city has been gutted. In an essay on Politics and the English language, George Orwell wrote: ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.’
It is clear that Labour councils will continue to cut services to the bone. Thousands of libraries, swimming pools and children’s centres will be closed. Tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. Adult and children’s social care will be massively underfunded and overstretched. There will be hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. The need to rebuild the anti-cuts movement – taking on Labour councils as much as the Conservative government – is urgent.
Mark Moncada
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 287, April/May 2022
