‘Never Again’ can I suggest that you ‘never again’ read the Tory tabloid comics who feed you this nonsense?
50% or so of our current debt was caused directly by irresponsible lending and the greed of our financial institutions – the same financial institutions, incidentally, who provide more than 50% of the Tory party’s finances.

Whether or not you include the banks’ share of our debt as truly part of our debt, the debt we have, expressed as a percentage of GDP is a very long way from the highest debt ever inherited by a government – so whay are the current unelected coalition behaving in the way that they are?

The answer is simple – to protect the rich. Has anyone seen a schedule of repayments from the banks for these ‘loans’ we gave them? No – me neither. Instead, we are seeing a wholesale, ideologically-driven attack on our public services (as if they were to blame), whilst more tax loopholes for the very wealthy are opened up.

Don’t imagine for a moment that there will be tax cuts for ordinary people when the debt is paid off – the government have already indicated that their priority in terms of tax-cutting is a removal of the top tax rate of 50% and a reduction in Corporation Tax – neither of which will filter down to ordinary working people.

But what baffles me most is this: the willingness of ordinary workers to lay the blame at the door of other groups of ordinary workers. I have great sympathy for those in the private sector whose greedy employers underfunded their pension schemes when the going was good, and subsequently closed those schemes, but what do you gain from forcing that misfortune on other workers, whether private or public sector?

And where were you when your employers were deliberately undermining your pensions? – why were you not organising and protesting, rather than spitefully envying those that are protesting now?

And before any Tory supporter trots out the myth that Brown ‘raided’ these schemes, he didn’t. He simply stopped giving tax relief on company contributions, principally becuase they were no longer contributing, and so had no need for tax relief!

It might surprise some of you to know that more money is spent each year on tax relief for individual private pension schemes than is spent on the entire public sector pension provision.

We can afford to continue funding the very modest public sectior pensions we provide (typically only £7000 per annum on average). Changes were made a few years ago to reduce the long-term cost of these and the costs are due to reduce as the workforce get older, despire the lies Francis Maude was caught out telling on Radio 4 last week.

We’ve yet to see the massive job losses to be caused by the government’s cuts – with half a million expected in each of the public and private sectors. These will surely drive us formally back into recession. Even their own ministers admit that as a direct consequence of their policies tens of thousands of people will be made homeless.

It’s time to leave the Sun and the Daily Mail behind, and wake up to what this government are about, and where their interests truly lie.

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