The Western Mail yesterday proclaimed in its headline "Darling Squeezes the Rich" but how hard is he squeezing them really? It looks to me more like he's gently, carefully shielding them - especially the bankers - from the worst of our protests.
It's true the ferocity of the anger against the super-rich has pushed the political parties that represent them into supporting some minor steps against the most blatant excesses - the increase in income tax for the highest earners to 50%, for example. But are they really feeling the pain in the way that the 46,000 people - the highest number since 1995 - who lost their homes last year, or the two and a half million people out of work at the moment? After, all, for much of the 70s the top rate of income tax was 83% and that was in an era when inequality wasn't as stark as it is today. One report from the Rowntree foundation found that things haven't been as unequal in this country since the Victorian era, when - not uncoincidentally - working class people didn't have a political voice.
The consequences of this are shocking:
"IN ENGLAND, [and there's no reason to think things are different in Wales] people living in the poorest neighbourhoods, will, on average, die seven years earlier than people in the richest neighbourhoods. Even more disturbing, the average difference in disability-free life expectancy is 17 years. So, people in poorer areas not only die sooner they will also spend more of their shorter lives with a disability."
The gap in infant mortality rates, the report says, has widened to 25%.
These are the conditions that the main political parties have allowed to develop in Britain today - and that's during the boom period! Now, ordinary people are being asked to shoulder the full burden of the recession. Darling called yesterday for an extra £11 billion worth of cuts in public services, and post-election there'll be even more. The super-rich, who have enough private wealth not to need to depend on public services, made trilions in profits over the last decade while the rest of us languished. It's like being asked to pay for a party to which you weren't invited.
The budget also announced further "progress" on selling off the family silver - privatisation of public assets. Students - like the BA cabin crew, RMT signallers and maintenance workers and civil servants organised by PCS, will find the agreements they signed ripped up as the government sells off student loans to private companies. Already, the CBI is calling for high, market rates of interest to be applied to student loans.
But the most pitiful measure - embarrassingly inadequate - was Darling's crusade to provide a bank account for all, including the 1.75 million currently without one. Now, the reason I can't win an Olympic swimming event is not that I haven't got a pair of speedoes - it's because I haven't got the body to go in them. People have to have money to put in bank accounts to make them worthwhile, and with the programme of pay cuts and job losses supported by the main parties will take more out of our pockets to protect the profits of big business. The problem isn't "financial exclusion" - it's poverty and inequality.
Darling and Labour, along with the Liberal Democrats and all the other main parties agree that ordinary working class people should pay for the crisis by swallowing job losses and cuts to the services upon which they depend. Otherwise, obtaining credit from the world financial sector will become more and more difficult, economic problems will spiral out of control and public services as a result will suffer anyway. But why should we allow a finance sector which OUR MONEY bailed out to hold a gun to our head? If the finance sector is too important to be allowed to collapse then it's too important to be left in the hands of those who, by playing the economy like a casino, brought the recession down on our heads. We should nationalise it, put it under democratic workers' control and management and use it to do something useful in society instead of waste wealth in unproductive enterprises during the boom and periodically destroy wealth in the recession.
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