Tax cuts for the rich 1% – Endless cuts for the 99%

Rage against cuts and austerity is palpable amongst millions at the actions of Cameron and Osborne’s millionaire government. The last months, have seen more of the same, in terms of the budget, laying out cuts and more cuts for the foreseeable future. Only 15% of the Con Dem’s £81 billion planned cuts have been made. Yet another £10 billion of cuts to the welfare system come at a time when unemployment is creeping up to 3 million.

Added to this diet of bitter austerity, Osborne brazenly used the budget to reward those responsible for the economic crisis with tax breaks and reductions for the super rich and big business. Taking from the poorest to make the rich richer, the government declared war on the living standards of the majority.

A recent poll in the Telegraph newspaper showed 92% of the public want the rich to pay more tax. Clearly the government are not listening!
The budget’s reduction of the top rate of tax on earnings over £150,000, losing the state £5 billion in revenue up to 2015 will allow millionaires to keep up to £40,000 more a year.

Tax on the largest corporations was also reduced with the ConDem coalition promising the UK will have the lowest tax rate in the western world for big business by 2015.

The bosses claim they need these tax breaks so they can invest to create jobs. Even before this latest cut in corporation tax, Britain had one of the lowest rates among G20 countries, but investment was falling as the capitalists can’t see a quick return in terms of profit.

Britain’s largest firms are sitting on £700 billion in cash reserves lying idle while millions fill the dole queues.

Clues as to who has the ear of this cabinet of millionaires were revealed days later as the “come dine with me, cash for access” scandal broke. If you’re a CEO of a major corporation, a banker or simply filthy rich and are willing to dig deep in your pockets for the Tories you can expect regular favours from the Tories.

While champagne corks popped in the city, public sector workers looked down the barrel of the threat of regional pay bargaining, families are losing child benefit and working families tax credits, pensioners losing tax allowance and even the lunch-break fare of millions of workers, the Greggs pasty, got more expensive.

There isn’t even a hope or consolation that through austerity the economy will recover.

Cuts and more cuts are not digging a way out of the crisis. Pay freezes and attacks on pensions and benefits are cutting consumer spending further, as will the threatened 880,000 public sector job losses by 2017.

For the 2.8 million unemployed, a million of them young, there was nothing in the budget, and no prospect of economic recovery in sight.
We need to build a new party for the millions, prepared to speak-out and organise a fight back against this savagery.

All the main parties are implementing the Tory cuts. Both Labour and the SNP have gone along with the austerity agenda and won’t reverse the cuts.

The SNP want to cut corporation tax even further than the Tories, leading to even more reductions in public spending in a future independent capitalist Scotland.

That’s why it’s important that we build an alternative. Socialists, trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigners have united together to form the Scottish Anti-Cuts Coalition. We are standing in the May local elections against the cuts in Scotland, as well as in England and Wales as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.

This is an important step towards the goal of the creation of a new party for the working class. One that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the millions and rejects the policies of the millionaire politicians.

This system, capitalism, cannot be made fairer. We need to oppose all the cuts but also fight to transform society to socialism, a system geared towards the needs of the majority.