BY M. TICHELAR (NALGO)
jobs and the welfare state.
While the rich reap a bonanza, working people will be faced with hospital and housing queues stretching into the next decade. The extra few pounds gathered from income tax cuts will be eaten up within weeks by an inflation rate expected to top 17% by the end of the year.
FIRST STEP This is, however, only the first step in the Tories' hatchet job on the welfare state. Thatcher has also announced that any wage deals made with the public sector unions must be financed by even greater cut-backs in health, education and housing.
Michael Hesaltine-Tory wonder boy'-has made it clear that November's rate support grant, totalling 61% of local government spending, will not be increased to meet wage demands already in the pipeline. This simply means that the cost of this year's wage claims will have to be found in either further cut-backs on in massive rate and council rent increases.
No doubt Thatcher hopes, in this way, to shift the blame for dismantling the welfare state on the unions' shoulders. As the cutbacks bite, she obviously intends laying them at the door of excessive wage claims' in the public sector to drive a wedge among working people.
LAYOFFS Cut-backs in the public sector will not only lower living,standards, however. They will also have a dramatic effect on jobs. It was COHSE at its annual conference last month which announced that the 8% cut-back in health services NO ONE CAN ACCUSE the Tories of not punishing their enemies and rewarding their friends. Tax cuts for the rich are to be paid for by working people in a massive attack on Howe's decision to lop £4,000 million off social services means one thing. Hospitals to be run down to boost private medicine. Schools to be closed (and class size increased to bring back direct grant grammar schools. Local authority direct labour schemes to be axed to give private building firms more business. Juicy bits of nationalised industries to be sold off to the benefit of asset-strippers in the City, under the budget would mean a reduction of 39,000 jobs.
The trend for redundancies to rise will be escalated by the Tory decision that all public sector pay rises must be self-financing. By calling for jobs to be swapped for wages, Thatcher is condemning thousands of teachers, nurses, building workers, etc to the ever-growing dole queues. A taste of what she intends can be seen in her decision to freeze recruitment to the Civil Service in order to finance the CPSA wage claim.
It is no wonder that Moss Evans (T&GWU General Secretary) announced recently that the cutbacks in social services-combined with withdrawing support from school leavers employment programmes, etc-would push the jobless total to two million by the end of the year.
FIGHT-BACK The Thatcher proposals have, of course, sparked off a vigorous outcry from Labour's shadow cabinet to the TUC which has announced plans for a 'concerted campaign of action'. They can obviously sense the groundswell of feeling mounting in the public sector unions like the CPSA which has