This year’s TUC meets at a critical time. The challenge we face is whether we can step up our campaigning and forge a real movement – not just against the Government’s deep and damaging austerity drive – but for an economic alternative.
We can point to huge achievements in the past year. Most visible was the March for the Alternative. Only the TUC could have achieved that kind of turnout – not just of union members, but of thousands of people from across the country.
Union members have played their part in, or led, many other campaigns. As I write this, the battle for the National Health Service is in the headlines. Other weeks have seen other sectors speak out. Local groups and campaigns have energetically involved communities in defence of much-loved services or facilities.
Perhaps even more important has been the shifts in public opinion. After last year’s general election, ministers wanted the country to believe that we were all in this together, that cuts could be achieved by stripping out waste and that cuts would be good for the economy.
They have lost each of those debates. Majorities now think the cuts are unfair, expect to be hit by service cuts and think that they threaten the economy. Ministers may have showed no signs of abandoning their overall strategy, but they have been forced into significant U-turns along the way. Even on public sector pensions, the campaigning around June 30 showed much wider support than the Government would have expected.
But, if we are honest, we have to accept that the Government’s central argument that we need cuts because we have “maxed out the nation’s credit card bill” resonates. The enthusiasts for cuts and for a small state of the right-wing think tanks may be quite small in number, but many more, however reluctantly, see no alternative.
However, as it becomes ever clearer that austerity is not working, we now have the chance to step up our campaign and win the wider argument for an economic alternative based on growth and investment.
The deficit is undoubtedly a real issue, but it is only one symptom of what went wrong with our economy during the 30 years when the neo-liberal consensus ruled, before the 2008 crash cruelly exposed its shortcomings.
Ministers want us to think that deficit reduction should be the only goal of economic policy and austerity the sole means. But the evidence is growing that it simply isn’t working.
Even the International Monetary Fund is now saying that we need more stimulus. The figures show that the deficit reduced when Labour’s rather limited measures were still working. No one expects that to continue.
Our challenge this year is whether we can forge a campaign that can defeat the Government’s central economic case. March 26 showed what unions can do when we work together, plan ahead and pool resources. What we need now is an even more ambitious objective of building a real movement, not just against the self-harm of austerity, but also for positive policies for investment and growth.
