Don't buy the 'dirty lie'. There's plenty of money to end austerity

Labour MPs on £91,346 basic salary will vote to further fatten the profits of energy multinationals – who already amassed a grotesque £470 billion in profits since 2020 – rather than protect a modest universal benefit to the elderly, which for many is literally the difference between life and death.

They will have blood on their hands; the cold blood of pensioners who die of hypothermia this winter.

READ MORE: Rachel Reeves pleads with Labour MPs not to rebel over Winter Fuel Payment cut

Before Covid, or the war in Ukraine, or Liz Truss’s economy-trashing budget, there were 46,000 excess deaths of people aged over 65 in the winter of 2017-18, because they couldn’t afford to keep warm. Levels of hyperthermia rocketed a further 82% last winter.

This cull of the elderly by a Labour Government – whose leading Scottish apologist Anas Sarwar infamously asserted “Watch my lips, there will be no austerity” – is all for the sake of “saving” £1.5bn.

It’s a pitiful sum within annual government expenditure of £1,220bn, and pitiless in its human consequences.

And nobody can be in any doubt: “things can only get worse”, to quote Starmer.

With mock shock horror at the sudden “discovery” of a £22bn black hole in government finances, Labour have declared “tough choices” and “unpopular decisions”, a new bout of austerity, with daily doses of doom and gloom to soften up the population for both tax increases and spending cuts in their October Budget as they uphold the rule of the rich.

First Minister John Swinney's government is also bringing in cuts (Image: Andrew Milligan/PA)

But am I alone in being heartily sick of the same mantras about “tough choices” and “difficult decisions” which are also being uttered by John Swinney, Shona Robison, and the SNP Government?

It’s true – to quote Labour’s Wes Streeting when he tried to justify cuts by the devolved Welsh Labour government – that “all roads lead to Westminster”. Imprisoned in the straitjacket of devolution, and told they must balance their budget, the Scottish Government faces a stark choice: compliance or defiance.

They either meekly carry out the orders of Westminster and devolve devastation, or they build a mass resistance movement of the Scottish people to win back some of the £5bn which has been stolen from Scotland by Westminster governments in the last decade alone.

To their eternal shame, successive Scottish governments – including three years of SNP/Scottish Green Party coalition – have bowed the knee to Westminster austerity, and thereby also undermined the confidence of many in the case for Scottish self-government.

READ MORE: Four key things the SNP could do instead of cutting £500m from public services

The SNP Government’s announcement of £500 million public sector cuts spells disaster for many frontline services, jobs, and investment in climate action. And they have followed in the footsteps of Starmer’s Labour by claiming they have “no choice” but to means-test and remove the Winter Fuel Payment from most pensioners.

But do they really have no other options? Even within the limitations of devolution, the Scottish Government has power over local authority funding and could vastly boost the public purse by one simple measure. For 25 years, the Scottish Socialist Party has persistently campaigned for abolition of the regressive, unfair Council Tax, and its replacement by a progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax, which we have proven would cut household bills to 75% of the population, but by taxing the very rich would literally double funds for local jobs and services.

As I elaborated in a previous column for The National, the latest figures show funding would be increased from £2.7bn in Council Tax to £5.3bn through the Scottish Service Tax. No more current “black hole” of £1bn in Scottish Government revenue, but scope for vast improvements in wages, public transport, education, social care, council housebuilding, etc.

Furthermore, instead of capitulation to Labour’s austerity, the Scottish Government should spell out and popularise a programme of life-changing reforms – on wages, job creation, health, education, free public transport for all, conversion to green energy production – broadcast the extra funds required to implement these positive reforms, and then mobilise a mass movement of the Scottish people to win back the necessary funding from Westminster to implement these plans.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said things will get worse (Image: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA Wire)

Such a defiant stance by a Scottish Government originally elected on an anti-austerity ticket, backed up by a mass movement of the people, would put a Westminster Labour government elected on the false prospectus of “change” right behind the eight ball.

Labour’s central assertion is that “there is no money”, so they must make “tough choices”.

But they’ve chosen to attack the social wage of public services, rather than redistribute the vast wealth sloshing about in profits and the personal riches of the 1% – those on a minimum of £180,000 a year.

While Starmer tells working-class families to accept that “things can only get worse”, Britain’s richest 100 families increased their wealth by 50% in the last five years, to a total of nearly £500bn.

The richest 350 people – a number hardly enough to fill a village hall – have a mind-blowing combined wealth of £795bn. That’s almost 20 times as much as the entire Scottish population receives in the block grant from Westminster under devolution!

READ MORE: I won’t play the SNP and Labour’s game on these cuts ... we can do much better

While Labour preach the dirty lie that we must choose between protecting jobs and even modestly “increasing” wages to workers on average £10,700 worse off than prior to the 2008 banking crash, the chief executives of the FTSE 100 biggest companies are now on average earnings of £5,000,000 each. Five million!

There is plenty of money, but it’s in the pockets of a minuscule minority and the profit accounts of big capitalist enterprises.

The banking sector is enjoying record profits. HSBC’s leapt 80% to £31bn; Lloyd’s saw an increase of well over half to £7.5bn. And these cash mountains are dwarfed by the profits of the planet-trashing, job-cutting energy multinationals, such as Shell (£279bn) and BP (£189bn).

The real “tough choice” that should be made is to tax the wealth of the obscenely rich and socialise the profits of big business, through democratic public ownership _ including the energy companies, banking, major manufacturing, and giant supermarkets.

If Labour were socialists – which I’ll grant you is an absurd fantasy – and doubled corporation tax to the 52% it was in the early days of Maggie Thatcher’s 1979 Conservative government, that would raise an absolute minimum of £85bn in a year – well over twice Scotland’s annual block grant from Westminster.

Margaret Thatcher saw corporation tax at 52% (Image: PA)

Imagine the impact on the provision of jobs, public services and decent pay.

Taxing the rich and big business in the interests of wider society is one part of an alternative to Labour’s savage austerity.

However, you cannot plan and control what you don’t own. You cannot fully utilise the fabulous natural, human, and manufactured wealth of the nation without public ownership and democratic control of the production of that wealth.

There’s no excuse for wages, pensions and public services being decimated, given the oceans of wealth within our reach. But that is what we face under Starmer’s and Sarwar’s Labour, unless the unions and socialists combine and wage a determined struggle for genuine socialist change.

Things can only get better if we fight for the future we want: a socialist society where people and the planet we live on are protected, not the profits and privileges of a plundering plutocracy.

Richie Venton is the Scottish Socialist Party's national trade union organiser