HOWE'S budget has been presented by the press as a policy to 'set the nation free. The income tax cuts are supposed to give 'incentives' to get the economy back on its feel.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In the first place for working class families the cuts in income tax are totally overturned by the increase in VAT duty on cigarettes and the price rises these create. In fact millions of people living on the lowest incomes will actually be worse off as a result of the budget.
The only people who will gain will be a small service. number of the highly paid.
The huge cuts in public spending will attack living standards directly by cuts in social services. Tens of thousunds of workers in the public sector will be made unemployed in addition to the 22,000 jobs the Tories have already "frozen' in civil The selling of state assets in public firms is also a major attack on the working class. Income from the profitabile parts of public industry will be lost to private hands. It immediately threatens Jobs as the private asset-strippers get to work. jobs The British economy is already moving into a major slump in 1980. The only way to get out of that is a major programme of public spending and a whole series of nationalisations under warkers" control to guarantee investment and safeguard The Tories are now putting hundreds of thousands on the dole queues through cutting public spending and denationalising industry.
This is not a budget to free the nation but one that will imprison milliens more of its people even further into poverty and unemployment.