WITH reference to David Crausby's letter, Your Views, September 2, could Mr Crausby explain exactly how his government is going to "help families and children rise out of poverty"?
Every policy statement and every spending decision by New Labour is designed to ensure that the coalition of forces which elected it to power remains, as far as possible, intact as economic conditions deteriorate. So while serving the interests of banking and multi national capital, Labour must at the same time keep the support of the middle class.
Further privatisation of central and local Government assets will raise £11b, handing out windfall profits and large commission fees to the City of London's financial institutions.
The Government had announced a cumulative increase in the health and education budgets of £21b and £19b, suggesting that spending in these key areas would be £40b higher by the end of Parliament. The Government's own figures show that the cash increase in the budgets is £17.2b by 2001-02 and the £40b is achieved by adding up the increase each year over the next three years. In fact, once inflation is taken into account, the real figure is around £11b, but the Government needed to comment. This fraud is to hide the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to govern in the interest of banks and multi-national companies, while sustaining the economic privileges of its professional middle class supporters. General Government spending is due to rise 28pc in real terms over the next three years, 2pc per year for the full Parliament - less than the 2.6pc of the last Tory Parliament, with most of the resources going into the two priority sections of health and education. The rest of the budget programmes will grow only by 1.8pc per year over the next three years, less than the growth rate of the economy.
Essential to this spending review is the New Deal., the attempt to force people off benefits into jobs paying poverty wages, to cut back public spending on Social Security.
The Social Security budget will grow by 1.9pc a year in real terms over the next three years, according to Government figures. But this is another accounting deception. The real rise is 3pc a year, and working tax credit is treated as benefit spending rather than forgone tax revenues. The rise in the budget will be much greater if the economy further slows down and unemployment grows. That is why the Government is so determined to force through its New Deal measures and seek other "efficiency" measures throughout the public sector to ensure that it will be the working class who have to pay.
In addition pay increases in the public sector have been based on so-called "efficiency" measures, in reality a loss of 250,000 jobs that will continue under Labour and their spending review.
As the economy slows down with manufacturing industry already in recession, even the minimal increases in public spending outlined in the spending review will eventually have to be cut back by a Labour Governement, acting in the interests of the banks and multinationals, and determined to hold together the coalition which elected it to power.
That is why the working class must break with Labour now.
Miss M A Partington
Jedburgh Avenue, Heaton
Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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