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On Wednesday evening, October 20th, around 200
trade unionists, students and community activists gathered on the steps of the
Council House in Coventry in protest at the national and local cuts. Tory
Chancellor Osborne’s announcement of the cuts package was a few hours old, but
the previous day Coventry City Council had announced that it would cut £146
million over the next four years from a present budget of £809m. This would
have represented a cut of 18% but with the knock on effects of higher benefits
and lower council receipts the cuts will be far higher.
Since the launch of the Coventry Trades Union Council (CTUC)
initiative of the campaign group “Coventry Against the Cuts” participation in
local activity has been on the rise. This reflects a sharpening of the
objective situation with more and more people realising the devastating effects
that the cuts will have as well as much better organisational skills being
developed by the campaign.
Back on September 28th we held a public meeting
with about 120 in attendance with Matt Wrack, FBU General Secretary, the main
speaker. On June 22nd
just over 100 people attended a rally on the same council steps and about 70
went on to a public meeting organised by the CTUC to launch the campaign. The
increasing involvement in recent events is a reflection of the developing mood
in the labour movement that these cuts must be fought.
For the latest rally the CTUC produced a leaflet which
showed that those in the movement who believe that we should endure the pain of
cuts for a few years before returning to the mythical “land of plenty” were
living in a dream world. As the leaflet said, “The cuts agenda will last for 10
to 15 years as Tories and Lib Dems, the political representatives of
capitalism, seek to increase even more the share of national wealth going to
the rich”. And this was despite the fact that over the past “30 years the
percentage of national wealth, the GDP, going to wages has fallen from 65% to
53% and to profits has gone up from 13% to 21%. The rich are getting richer and
we, the people who produce the wealth, are getting less”.
On October 11th a delegation of three of us from
CTUC had a meeting with the leader of Coventry City Council, Labour Councillor
John Mutton. We spelled out why we thought the cuts were not necessary and why
they had to be fought. John’s position was that he is against the cuts and
would join with us in a campaign to inform the people of Coventry who really
caused the crisis but at the end of the day it was the duty of a council to
balance the budget and he would not ask Labour councillors to break the law. He
would implement a “dented shield” policy in consultation with the trade unions.
John was invited to address the rally where he once again
gave an undertaking that if jobs were lost, they would be done on a voluntary
basis after consultation and that there would be no compulsory redundancies.
This was a commitment that may come back to haunt him as the crisis deepens and
the cuts begin to bite.
Speaking from the CTUC I showed the effect that just one
aspect of Osborne’s budget, the raising of the retirement age to 66 in 2020,
will have on the poor and working people in Coventry. A health map of Coventry
shows a 13-year gap between average life expectancy in the centre and east, the
poorest areas of the city, compared to the west. In two of the most deprived
areas, Foleshill and Hillfields, the average life expectancy for men was 64 and
65, lower than North Korea, India, Pakistan and Mongolia! In the rich area of
Syvechale men on average live to 78. The Coventry Telegraph headline of October
7th said it all, “Inner City Men Die Before retirement”.
How many more working class people will suffer the same fate
with the raising of the retirement age? For capitalism you are useful when you
are working and creating value for the private owners of the means of
production to cream off and fill their pockets. When you retire, you become a
burden on society so we, the producers of wealth, have to work until we drop.
Yet there is an answer to the cuts that will protect working
class people. Unison and PCS have produced figures to show that by stopping tax
avoidance and evasion, for example, £billions more would go into the public
coffers. The question remains however as to who controls this money and how can
we get this money from the rich, the capitalists, when they have had centuries
of experience in employing tax consultants to fiddle the books.
For CTUC a drastic situation calls for drastic measures. We
gave the banking system £850bn of our money to bail them out. We want our money
back! The leaflet says, “The CTUC has consistently called for the public
ownership of the banking and finance system. Only when we control the wealth of
the country, can we begin to plan the development of services and not cuts, the
building of homes to end the 5m homeless, the creation of jobs to end rising
unemployment. When we solve people’s real and concrete needs, we can start to
undermine the racists and fascists who prey on people’s real fears and try to
drive a wedge between workers based on skin colour”. The leaflet ends, “We need one mighty movement to stop the
cuts, to protect service and jobs. But we also say that we can only provide the
money to expand public services by nationalising the banks and finance houses”.
What is happening in Coventry is being repeated up and down
the land. As the cuts begin to bite more and more will join this movement. The
trade unions will be forced under pressure from their members to take decisive
national action and we will fill the streets with millions in protest. But
there is too the political dimension. Put an end to the anarchy of capitalism
by taking over the banks as a first step to transforming society.
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