Campaign news

Break with Austerity

7th September 2014

Break with Austerity

Articles from the LRC TUC 2014 special

Darren Williams, National Policy Forum member

As the general election approaches, the need for a break with the Coalition’s austerity programme is clearer than ever. After four years of savage spending cuts, public services are at breaking point and living standards have been driven down to the point where a million households have resorted to using food banks. Austerity has been a failure even on its own terms. As the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty recently put it, “Britons are poorer and less productive than they were before Lehman Brothers fell over and the country still can’t pay its way in the world. All hail the strongman of Europe!”

Yet the Labour leadership, notwithstanding its criticism of Osborne’s cuts as “too fast and too deep”, seems determined to continue with essentially the same approach. Ed Balls’ commitment to remain within Tory spending limits for the first year of an incoming Labour government is well-known but his deputy, Chris Leslie, went much further in a recent speech, saying that “eliminating the deficit as soon as possible will not be the end of the job – because the task of reducing the national debt in the long term will require savings to be maintained in the decades ahead.”

Some of the leading Labour-affiliated unions have previously made clear their opposition to such an approach. Unite General Secretary, Len McCluskey, said in April that Labour would be elected only if the party were to offer “a radical alternative,” rather than saying, “we still believe in an austerity programme but we won’t cut as deep or as fast”. And in June, Unison’s Dave Prentis told the Telegraph that Labour needs policies that “resonate with working people”, warning that public sector workers “are not going to continue to carry the burden” of sorting out the economy.

Yet, when the party’s National Policy Forum met in July to determine the basis of next year’s manifesto, the unions were apparently anxious to avoid expressing any public differences with the two Eds’ ‘austerity lite’ programme. Although they secured a series of minor concessions on specific policy commitments, this was almost all behind closed doors, rather than in open debate alongside CLP reps. The only significant vote taken was on a CLP amendment calling for an emergency budget to reject Tory spending plans for 2015-16 and beyond and to set out a policy of investment for jobs and growth – seemingly in line with unions’ policy, yet all of them except BECTU (and around a dozen CLP reps) voted against.

The unions may consider this merely a tactical show of unity in the pre-election period but they have lent credence to Balls’ commitment to continue the cuts. If we want an incoming Labour government to reject the Tories’ disastrous legacy, then we should be putting pressure on the party leadership now – making it clear that anything less than a clean break with austerity will put the next government on a collision course with its own natural supporters.

Background

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