Defy Labour’s austerity with a people’s Budget here in Scotland

Labour’s Budget was a masterclass in deception, more easily done after the appalling suffering inflicted by relentless Tory austerity. People yearned for “change”, as promised by Labour’s election campaign.

However, most lived in faint hope rather than expectation, after Labour’s first 100 days: attacks on ten million pensioners’ Winter Fuel Payment; continuation of the Tories’ two-child benefit cap that keeps an extra 500,000 kids poor; the escalating threat to the benefits of sick and disabled people, and the two-year delay in implementing their diluted “New Deal for Workers”.

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So what did Labour’s Budget really signify? Any socialist would welcome measures that appear to modestly improve workers’ incomes, invest more in our NHS and education, and slightly raise taxes on capital gains.

But behind the fog of grandiose claims about “making work pay”, “fixing our NHS” and the right-wing tabloid frenzy about “the return of tax-and-spend Old Labour”, the reality is this was another Budget designed to reassure the moneybags trading for profit on the markets.

The fact the International Monetary Fund and chief capitalist journal the Financial Times both praised Labour’s Budget is the strongest possible verdict that shows this was no threat to the capitalist class or their profits!

Welcome as an increase in the minimum wage from £11.44 to £12.21-an-hour for workers over 21 is, drowning in a sea of unpaid bills, it’s still brutally inadequate. The entire trade union movement (in common with the SSP) has for three years demanded a £15 per hour minimum wage to tackle the real cost of living.

At two-thirds male median earnings, it’s hardly asking the earth – especially when the average FTSE 100 chief executive is on around £4 million!

Increasing investment in the NHS by 3.4% over two years is better than the average 2.8% under Tory rule. But it’s not even returning to the “normal” average of 3.6% annual increase since 1955. And the Budget didn’t mention what looms large in Labour’s NHS plans: rampant privatisation.

Behind the blare of bugles surrounding the Budget, Labour’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting quietly sold Wiltshire Community Health to Virgin for £1.3 billion; a foretaste of profiteering from sickness under Capitalist Labour.

They want to slash £4.3m from sick and disabled people’s benefits. And as teachers’ unions highlighted, increasing schools’ investment by £6.7bn goes nowhere near reversing the £40bn lost since 2010.

The promised concession of 1.3% to government spending is nullified by Labour’s demand for 2% “savings” in every department. For “unprotected” departments like local government, the austerity will be even more savage – to pay for increased war expenditure.

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Even increasing employers’ National Insurance Contributions is not as progressive a taxation of the bosses as it might first sound.

Rather than the boasted £45bn transfer into public hands, the Office for Budget Responsibility warned 76% of the total (£34bn) would be taken back off workers through wage cuts and price increases.

In a capitalist society where profit is treated as sacrosanct, this is the consequence of fiddling round the edges, instead of properly taxing the rich and taking the core assets and sources of wealth production into democratic public ownership. grotesquely rich employers simply launch a crusade to keep their profits safe by reducing real wages, adding threats of a net loss of 50,000 jobs.

For all Labour’s reliance on “growth”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts none beyond the anaemic uptick of the first two years, threatening another £9bn in tax increases just to stand still.

And, taking all Budget measures into account, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates the average household will lose £770 each and every year of a five-year Labour government. We weren’t wrong to brand Labour as the Continuity Conservatives!

So what should the Scottish Government do? What would a genuine government of the working-class majority in Scotland, a socialist government, do in response?

The SSP is determined to combine with other trade unionists, community activists, student campaigners and others to demand a Scottish People’s Budget on December 4 that begins to genuinely change, rebuild, “create a fairer society for the next generation” – to reference a few of the false claims made for Labour’s Budget.

Instead of capitulating to real-life austerity, wage cuts and job losses, we need a Scottish Budget that stands up for the people – not the two richest families who own more wealth than 1.1 million Scottish people combined.

The SSP demands that John Swinney, Shona Robison et al grow a collective spine and expose the sham radicalism of Keir Starmer, Anas Sarwar and the rest of Labour with a battery of genuinely radical, life-improving measures in the Scottish Budget.

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They should reinstate universal Winter Fuel Payments to Scotland’s pensioners (cost: £160m); scrap the two-child benefits cap that deprives 90,000 Scottish kids of food; and compensate the 335,000 Waspi women in Scotland – born in the 1950s, robbed of tens of thousands in their pensions, one dying every 13 minutes still without an apology or compensation – by at least £10,000 each, without delay, and then vociferously demand back the funding from Westminster, which inflicted this atrocity.

Instead of making do with the paltry £12.21 adult minimum wage, and continued age wage discrimination with a 20% lower rate for younger workers, The Scottish Government should also declare an immediate Scottish minimum wage of £15 an hour for all aged 16 or over.

Yes, the statutory minimum wage is a reserved Westminster power, but the Scottish Government can implement a “living wage” of £15 in every public sector body – which employs 605,000 workers – plus use contract compliance, whereby no private company will be granted public sector contracts unless they pay that rate.

The Scottish Budget should declare nationalisation of Grangemouth, without compensation to the shark billionaire owner, Jim Ratcliffe, and immediate investment in an alternative plan of alternative green production, led by workers’ expertise, saving every job.

It should set out a plan to insulate and retrofit every home free of charge, generating jobs and income tax, by hiring big teams of council workers to systematically go into each district – and start building 100,000 eco-friendly council houses for affordable rent.

The Scottish Budget should genuinely tax the rich – with far higher rates for the small minority of people on over £100,000 a year, and in particular levy a wealth tax on all resident billionaires and millionaires. Even a modest 5% wealth tax on all millionaires would generate about £22bn for Scotland.

If the Scottish Government was to do just one thing on December 4 – and there’s no earthly excuse why that’s all they can do to resist Labour austerity – the SSP demands they should abolish the Council Tax and replace it with the SSP’s income-based, progressive Scottish Service Tax. We’ve shown this would mean 75% of people paid less, but taxing the very wealthiest far more would literally double funding for Scotland’s 32 local councils to £5.3bn.

In The National’s excellent Axing the Tax series, the readers’ poll has given 55% support to the Scottish Service Tax as the best alternative – well over three times the percentage supporting readers’ second choice. And that’s without the SNP government uttering a word in its defence.

Alongside reversal of cuts to councils and education, such a battle plan would inspire tens of thousands of workers, communities and young people to take collective action in support of a Scottish People’s Budget – using whatever real-life concessions are granted by Westminster through the Barnet consequentials, but where necessary demanding back more of the £6bn stolentaken from Scottish funding by Westminster since 2020 alone.

Labour has thrown down the gauntlet. The SSP demands the Scottish Government pick it up with a radical People’s Budget that begins to tax the rich, take wealth into public hands, and give our people a decent future.