Responses to Stormont draft Budget…

Any responses from political parties/others to the draft Budget agreed at Stormont can go here. All welcome.

We start with éirígí who argue that:

If the political parties at Stormont, particularly those who claim to be left-wing, are genuinely opposed to the cuts being demanded by the British government, they should refuse to administer them and join the rest of us on the streets in a campaign of resistance.

“A failure to let the British government do its own dirty work and, worse, deciding where best to implement the cuts can only lead working people to conclude that what has happened over the last number of weeks at Stormont has been nothing but meaningless posturing.

“Despite the spin being put on Stormont’s draft budget, it is clear that the Six County executive has totally failed to challenge the British government assault on working class communities and on the most vulnerable in our society.

Send more and we’ll link to them in this post.

Here is the response from the Socialist Party:

Assembly Parties agree on CUTS CUTS CUTS

Join the Socialist Opposition

The cuts are coming – and the parties in the Assembly are not standing in their way – they have agreed that they will implement them, not oppose them. One after another, all the parties in the Assembly Executive are queueing up to identify where cuts can be made – cut education spending, privatise the Housing Executive, close hospitals, sell off Belfast Harbour, increase household rates for ordinary workers, cut civil service workers pay, introduce water charges…

None of the parties are prepared to stand up to the cuts agenda and demand that those who are responsible for the economic crisis – the wealthy stock market speculators, the billionaire bankers, bosses and capitalists – pay for their crisis. It is workers who are taking all the pain. 230 workers at the Bank of Ireland in the North are to be sacked yet Bank of Ireland chief executive Brian Goggin was paid over €3million last year, after receiving a massive bail-out!

The scale of the cuts will destroy at least 50,000 jobs in Northern Ireland – in both the public and private sector. £1billion will be taken out of the economy in the form of cuts to benefits alone. The cuts will hit the poorest households the most, but the richest are not feeling anything. All the parties in the Assembly are in favour of cutting tax on big business and are prepared to make extra cuts to public services in order to do so. There has been no hint from any of the politicians of making big business pay their rates in full. Big companies in Northern Ireland only pay one-third of what they should in rates. Workers are subsidising big business millions in unpaid rates, yet if we cannot find the money to pay our rates we are thrown in front of a judge!

Full Workers’ Party response to the draft budget available here

Under the terms of the Stormont Budget and that of the Con-Dems, at the very least there will be massive cuts in education, Belfast Harbour will be sold off, hospitals will close and welfare provision will become more draconian. As noted in the Irish News (16th December), the Budget is predicated on Stormont earning £540 million from the sale of public assets and this figure relies on a wildly optimistic expectation of future property prices. When this sell-off doesn’t work, the Sinn Fein/DUP Stormont Coalition will doubtlessly introduce even greater austerity cutbacks and levies.

But even as it stands, for thousands of workers this Budget will mean disaster. The pay freeze for the 12,000 civil servants under Stormont control and who earn over £21,000 is a clear attack on working class civil servants and their families and localities. In the UK as a whole 4,000 public sector managers get paid £117,000 a year or more. A pay freeze for this group of people might mean a few belt-tightening exercises but will hardly prove disastrous. For those workers earning in and around £21,000 a pay freeze will mean that they and their families will go without basic goods and services. More generally, the 29% of our people who earn less than £300 per week will be disastrously affected by cutbacks in public sector provision, while for the 25% earning £800 and above cutbacks will hardly affect them at all. Moreover, as unemployment in the public sector and related sectors increases, the number of unemployed workers will increase by the thousands. This is the class reality of the society in which these thatcherite policies will be put in place.

Sinn Fein must take special blame for agreeing on this budget. For all its talk of the necessity of spending our way out of recession, in this Draft Budget Sinn Fein has totally accepted the neo-liberal Con-Dem agenda. The Budget they signed up to affirms that “the challenge for the Northern Ireland Executive […] is to both rebuild the economy in the aftermath of the recession and to rebalance it towards the private sector in the context of the constrained public expenditure position” (2.30) and Chapter 3 of the document sets out the background to the UK deficit in terms that entirely reflect the Con-Dem austerity agenda, with its talk of “reducing welfare costs and wasteful public spending” (3.6) . Following the public consultation “a draft Economic Strategy will be developed and this will also reflect the outcome of the UK Coalition Government Paper on rebalancing the Northern Ireland economy” (2.33). The Workers’ Party, along with the Trades Unions and progressive economists believe that “rebalancing” the economy means a further move away from public provision and the public good, a further growth in inequality as the rich pocket more, and a further attack on the working class. All this depends on the people of Northern Ireland accepting the austerity agenda. Recent protests and actions have shown that many thousands of people will not tolerate it.