THE rising cost of living and the wages and earnings crisis is pushing more and more people into financial uncertainty, with many households facing the very real prospect of having to choose between eating or heating. Some won’t even have that choice as they face absolute poverty.

This unacceptable state of affairs is increasingly on display for all to see in an economy owned and run by corporate interests, as wealth created by workers flows to the already wealthy or is extracted by external investors.

Like so many workers across Britain, our members in the CWU are having to take industrial action over falling pay and attacks on their terms and conditions. Our members are currently in the fight of their lives to ensure our 500-year-old postal service isn’t chopped up, sold off and turned into a gig-economy shell of the industry we have all cherished and relied on.

We know this struggle isn’t just in the CWU. It is across whole sectors. Companies are making huge profits, rewarding themselves with big bonuses and payouts to line the pockets of their shareholders, many of them offshore.

They are robbing us all blind — stripping away what we hold dear. Inequality has never been starker, and austerity is here to stay — unless we persuade the public that there is hope and prove that there is an alternative.

We don’t need to see more and more workers forced to turn to foodbanks in desperation. We don’t need to stand by and see our services and wealth taken away. We don’t have to watch as communities suffer greater setbacks and deterioration.

The few continue to get very rich off the back of our labour while we are expected to settle for mere scraps from their table. This casino economy just isn’t working for most people. Enough is enough.

Against this grim backdrop, we here in Scotland can implement a real alternative — one that will empower communities and workers, and support citizens to live in security and dignity. Industrial battles will continue, but in a system so biased towards capital’s interests, we in the labour movement need not just talk about the alternative but build it.

This will involve not just the redistribution of wealth from a lopsided economic model, but changing the model itself, restructuring production and consumption and democratising ownership and control. An economy that is owned and governed by the local community will serve that community rather than funnel wealth to distant corporate interests.

Rectifying the imbalance in ownership and control of wealth is a critically important means of rectifying the deep imbalances in our economy. Through Community Wealth Building we at the CWU can see a mechanism to start doing that — helping local councils and communities to shape and secure their collective future by building and retaining wealth, and ensuring it is shared, with workers’ and communities’ voices right at the heart of their local economies.

The 2022 Scottish Labour Party conference saw the party agree to champion Community Wealth Building. Now we need to be seeing Labour council groups across Scotland ensuring that more of our economy is democratically and socially owned; using the economic levers available to their local authority and other “anchor institutions” to support their economies to grow.

We need Scottish Labour Party politicians in Holyrood and council chambers across the country to work with the CWU and the labour movement to develop a radical programme of Community Wealth Building.

We arrive at the Scottish Labour Party conference this weekend a few weeks on from the SNP government launching a consultation on a proposal for a Community Wealth Building Act in the Scottish Parliament. A consultation launched at the same time as the SNP government decimates local government budgets with more cuts.

That’s not Community Wealth Building — that’s community wealth extraction. It’s the loss of your locally owned assets, less support for local businesses and below-inflation pay rises for workers.

But a radical Community Wealth Building agenda, a Labour Community Wealth Building agenda, would offer solutions to the problems the SNPs cuts will create, and ultimately demonstrate to voters there is something new, exciting and different available to them.

Look at Scotland’s first Community Wealth Building council, North Ayrshire, it didn’t accept the status quo, it was ambitious — and its investment in council-owned renewable energy will generate millions of pounds of income for the council that can be reinvested in the local area.

Bringing town centre assets back into council ownership allowed it to take back control of local high streets, creating hubs of social activity and socially owned businesses, converting empty commercial properties into council housing.

Instead of having a fire sale of council-owned assets, it was working in partnership with communities to invest in them and put them to productive use.

Over the coming weeks, councils will be setting their budgets, faced with dealing with the SNP’s cuts to our jobs and services once again. That’s why CWU delegates are heading to the Scottish Labour Party conference this weekend to call on Scottish Labour to get on with developing a real Community Wealth Building agenda and to push our MSPs and councillors to get on with the job of defending our communities and delivering the change we desperately need.

Craig Anderson is CWU regional secretary for Scotland.