George Osborne's budget speech on 22 June announced the biggest cuts in public expenditure in over a generation. There is no alternative, he said. But there is: cut the war in Afghanistan, scrap Trident, bring the troops home. Then there will be no need to cut welfare services or increase VAT.
By Robin Beste
Stop the War Coalition
22 June 2010
Cutting with glee (illustration by Martin Rowson)
We don't know the details yet, but the scale of the cuts in Britain's public services announced in George Osborne's budget are breathtaking. He plans to cut 25 percent over the next five years.
We'll learn later in the year how schools, hospitals and other services will be affected.
One specific figure Osborne did give was his plan to cut £11 billion from the budget for welfare services -- that is the funding to support the unemployed, disabled, homeless, very young and elderly -- in short, the services for the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
To give one example of what this will mean for the poorest families with babies; they will see a cut in income of £1293 a year.
For those dependent on housing benefit, the charity Shelter, says: "By ripping out this support from under their feet it will push many households over the edge, triggering a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness."
The £11 billion reduction in welfare is particularly striking because it is the official figure released recently for the cost, over the last nine years, of the futile and unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
Currently, the cost of keeping 10,000 troops in Afghanistan -- to kill and increasingly to be killed -- is around £4 billion pounds a year.
On top of this, Osborne announced in the only mention he made to defence, the operational allowance for soldiers in Afghanistan is to be doubled to nearly £5000.
The maths is simple. Bring all the troops home and there will be no need to cut a single pound from the budget for welfare services.
And here's another striking comparison. Osborne's announced a twenty per cent rise in VAT.
The Herald spelt out what the impact of such a rise would be: "Pensioners on low fixed incomes and the poorest families are hit hardest... Such a rise would add more than £30 a week to the average household expenditure, forcing some parents to choose between a warm home and a hot meal."
But all Osborne is interested in is the extra £13 billion a year the VAT rise will put into the government's coffers. In a five year parliamentary term, that would be a total of £65 billion.
This produces another notable comparison: this is virtually the same amount the government plans to waste on renewing the Trident nuclear missile system. Again the maths is simple. Scrap Trident and there will be no need to increase VAT.
Everyone knows the Afghanistan mission is a fiasco. British soldiers are getting killed presently at a rate of around one every two days - two more were reported even as Osborne was making his budget speech. And for what? As the Independent said recently, "peddling the same old comforting fairy tales about the purpose of the Afghan mission" has to stop.
"The old argument that British and American troops in Helmand are protecting civilians in London and New York is not only incredible, it has made it much harder to pull troops out."
There's a job here for the anti-war movement. We have to mobilise the 76 per cent of the British public that opposes the war so that an irresistible pressure is put on David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and the MPs supporting their warmongering, forcing them to do what most people in this country want: bring the troops home now.
A core part of that campaign will be to contrast the deepest cuts in public services seen in over a generation, with the government's commitment to waging unnecessary and unpopular wars, and to funding horrendously expensive military projects such as Trident.
