05.12.2002
Brown's pre-budget and the firefighters
He is the best chancellor Maggie Thatcher never had. With far more brains and balls than Lawson and Howe put together, not to mention his visceral disinclination towards the euro project, Gordon Brown has served British capital very well since Labour's election victory of 1997. Operating for most of the time against a benign economic background of steady growth and low inflation, he could claim the monetary and fiscal moral high ground, as if these circumstances were somehow the result of his famed 'prudence', rather than the fortuitous effects of an economic cycle fuelled at this juncture by the profits of swiftly accelerating globalisation and the accompanying worldwide stock market hike. Blair, ably assisted by his mate next door, was basically Thatcher in trousers. Budgetary strength, combined crucially with a trade union and working class movement still atomised and quiescent (in the wake of Tory and New Labour assaults), provided the backdrop that gave Blairism its political confidence. Last week's pre-budget statement reveals the cracks in Labour's strategy. In the last budget Brown made a big show of boosting his 'socialist' credentials by announcing a massive escalation of expenditure on public services up to 2004. The idea was that this politically vital move would assuage people's concern about hospitals, schools, transport and the rest of it, all the areas that we know from personal experience are falling apart. The money for this would come not from fresh taxes, but from incoming revenue. But, thanks to the global downturn, from which the UK was supposedly immune by virtue of his own interventions, the revenue has failed to materialise. The chancellor is now faced with the task of raising the money to fulfil his pledges of yesteryear. How? Certainly not by taxing businesses or rich individuals, since that would spell a return to old Labour's ways, in the days when the party at least notionally represented the interests of the working class. No. The answer is to borrow money on the bond markets and to use the firefighters' dispute as a good, old-fashioned way of having a go at the working class to boot, just as Maggie taught him. By next March the public sector borrowing requirement will be £20 billion, reaching £24 billion by the following financial year - roughly double what Brown and his treasury mandarins told us to expect. They got their sums wrong, but what does it matter to a minister or a senior civil servant who earns more in a couple of years than any worker could hope to make in a lifetime of hard graft? Brown tells us solemnly that the firefighters' wage claim would be "inflationary", but fails to mention the fact that our wonderful, democratically elected MPs, who supposedly devote all their waking hours to furthering the interests of their voters, quietly awarded themselves a 40% pay rise, not to mention the associated perks. Wouldn't you want to employ your nearest and dearest to lick a few stamps, calling them a 'secretary', and get a good few grand in your back pocket for the privilege? But leave the surreal world of Westminster, with its subsidised bars and restaurants, where 'our' elected misrepresentatives feast themselves, and look at the reality. Who can actually afford to live in London? Certainly not the nurse, or the firefighter or the teacher, on whose work the basis of society actually depends. The housing market has reached the point where all rational values long went out of the window. As the estate agents (among the parasites who keep the system ticking over) must themselves dolefully conclude, the game is up and a crash is just around the corner. Or take the bankers, who are currently in trouble themselves, thanks to the dodgy loans they lashed out in the 'good' times. Their own liabilities, in terms of unpaid credit card debt, estimated at unprecedented billions, have to be taken into account. The country is living on tick. When Gordon Brown said that he would do nothing to risk Britain's long-term stability, while setting aside a down-payment of £1 billion for the war against Iraq and keeping £30 billion (yes, £30 billion) in the kitty for future PFI scams, our dear chancellor omitted to mention that he could settle the firefighters' dispute with small change by comparison. Here are men and women who daily have to confront sights that would give the rest of us nightmares. Have you ever seen them trying to deal in a dignified and composed way with the after-effects of a motorway smash-up, something that lives with them for years afterwards? And when it comes to money, they could probably earn more driving a mini cab. Does anyone, by the way, remember Andy Gilchrist's attitude to the FBU's approach to the question of democratising the political fund last summer? Events move on. One thing is clear though: Gordon Brown's pre-budget statement, with its explicit denunciation of any attempt by the firefighters or any other sections of the working class to press their demands for decent wages and conditions of work was a challenge to all of us. Maurice Bernal
Worker