The coalition’s plans to achieve more than one-third of its £32 billion extra cuts from welfare payments alone are “nastier” than anything carried out during the peak years of Margaret Thatcher’s Government, Labour’s Yvette Cooper has warned. In the House of Commons she accused Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith of inflicting the cuts on society’s most vulnerable – the children of the poor – thus storing up expensive social interventions in years to come.
Meanwhile, the British Medical Association said National Health Service cuts are being introduced in a “haphazard” and “arbitrary” way which could harm patient care. BMA chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum told his annual conference in Brighton it had received evidence of jobs being lost and access to services restricted as the NHS is asked to make savings because new treatments and an ageing population are raising costs. Doctors are not being consulted, he said. Cuts to backroom roles such as administration are having an impact on doctors and nurses who have to make up the shortfall, the BMA is complaining.
New services and facilities are being either indefinitely postponed or scrapped as GPs say they face tighter restrictions over which patients they can send on to specialists. At the same time, the full extent of Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget gamble that the private sector will fill the gap created by public sector job losses is becoming apparent following a leak of Treasury data.
Between 100,000 and 120,000 public sector jobs are expected to be lost every year between now and 2015, alongside up to 140,000 private sector jobs. The Government’s calculation, according to Office of Budget Responsibility figures, is that increased economic activity in the private sector will lead to the creation of 2.5 million new jobs bringing the numbers of those in work up from 28.8 million to 30.1 million by 2015.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said that was “absurd” and extreme “wishful thinking”.Fewer Government contracts and the fall in public spending meant the Government’s job creation predictions were “a complete refusal to engage with reality”. Mr Barber predicted as much more likely 1980s-style dole queues, a deep north-south divide and widespread poverty. RMT general secretary Bob Crow told his annual conference in Aberdeen that public and private sector employees should embark on a civil disobedience campaign of all-out strikes in defiance of not just job cuts but wage freezes. He accused the coalition of “fiscal fascism”.
“Waving banners and placards will not be enough – it will take direct action to stop the Cameron and Clegg cuts machine”, said Mr Crow.
The Government has been reported as preparing to head off threatened widespread industrial action with threats to dramatically reduce the quality and terms of public sector pensions.
