OVERWHELMING support for nurses should they be forced to strike for higher pay this winter shows Tory austerity propaganda is falling flat.
The nurses are not an outlier. Polls have shown high levels of public sympathy with workers striking in other sectors.
This will give heart to the rail and postal workers who have voted to continue industrial action, and to the university workers and civil servants Britain-wide who will soon be joining them.
People understand that whatever the Conservatives say about debt targets, households cannot cope with more real-terms pay cuts.
That’s because of inflation, but is also the legacy of a long-term trend. The Institute for Fiscal Studies forecasts that by 2028 British workers will earn almost one-third less in real terms than they did at the bankers’ crash of 2008, a staggering decline in the purchasing power of the working class.
Twelve years of Conservative economic failure, says shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. Yes and no.
What “austerity” has done is accelerate a decades-long trend, whereby wages have fallen as a share of economic output ever since the 1970s while the share going to capital in profits, dividends and rents has risen.
The party of capital will not see that as a failure. And it is this conflict of interest between capital and labour that must be recognised if we are to stop the wage theft.
Hunt’s income tax policies are regressive. While applying the top rate of tax to incomes above £125,000 instead of £150,000 is positive in itself, the bigger picture — the part that will hurt — is the decision to freeze thresholds, meaning the vast majority of workers will be paying more tax.
This when profits at the biggest non-financial companies are up 34 per cent on pre-pandemic figures and when billionaires have increased their wealth by 22 per cent since Covid struck, as Unite leader Sharon Graham points out.
Austerity round one was a con — rather than a collective national sharing of the pain it was a forced transfer of wealth upwards.
Austerity round two will be the same. Tory grumbling about tax rises should not obscure the picture.
The wealthy are being left alone while the rest of us are being hammered — but worse, the swelling fortunes of the rich are a direct cause of ordinary people’s pain, since rising profit margins are the biggest single factor driving double-digit inflation.
A quarter of the population have no savings at all, a legacy of chronic low pay that leaves millions at risk of destitution. Tory claims that things will get easier if we can get the economy growing again should cut no ice: even when GDP grew over the past decade wages flatlined, as bosses ensure we do not get our share. In any case, attacks on pay and public spending during a recession are no path to growth.
But rather than chasing growth statistics that mask the massive accumulation of wealth by the few, our focus must shift to solving real problems that face people now.
Raising pay to stop inflation causing mass impoverishment, for one. But it is also a scandal that caps on social care costs have been kicked into the long grass again.
A health service on its knees needs more funds and more people.
Devastating floods in Scotland remind us of the increasingly unpredictable weather — and how little has been invested in protecting our infrastructure and dwellings from climate change, let alone delivering the energy and transport revolution we need to slow it down.
The world is changing. Every decision by this government — every debate at Westminster — shows up a system incapable of meeting that challenge.
Pay strikes are part of a confrontation with a whole economic order that must be brought down.
