These are the bastards that are doing it to us

Yesterday the Tories and the Lib Dems announced their plan to cut pretty much everything decent in Britain, transforming our society into a bleak vision of a grey hell hole conjured up by the imagination of Charles Dickens affected by low serotonin. With £81 billion coming out of stuff you rely on, cuts no longer seems like the right scale of wound to talk about what’s happening here. The government’s spending plans which they revealed yesterday won’t just leave public services cut, they’ll look more like a crater. A gigantic fucking open cast mine.

Over the next couple of days we’re going to try and bring you a few different articles looking at the way the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review will specifically make things crap for youth. But in the meantime, let’s recap about exactly what’s going on here.

I know I’ve posted the above film before, but I think it pretty well sums up the situation we’re in, and is worth watching again. The Tories fundamentally have a philosophy of a dog eat dog world, one where society does nothing to help people with problems, whether they’re poor, young, old or disabled. Because to do that would make us lazy, you see. Their idea is that everyone should have to fend for themselves, because if we do we’ll work hard, and we’ll be too scared to stand up to the people with money who are making us work.

They also know however, that their viewpoint is an extreme one, one that will always lose the argument if discussed honestly with the majority of people. Most people think it’s fair enough that we pay taxes so that if someone is too ill to work, or is homeless, or is old and needs help to get by, we do something to help them.

So to get what they want, they have to sneak it in by confusing us. The lie they’ve been pumping us all full of is that Britain must pay back it’s debts now, and so there’s no alternative to cuts. As anyone who has been paying any attention by now knows, that’s total bollocks. Something else we’ll bring you over the next few days is the ideas we could use to get more people in work, give everyone better quality of life and deal with the massive social and environmental problems affecting our society. But the Chancellor George Osborne doesn’t want to know about those. According to him “there is no Plan B.”

The simple fact of the matter is that the Tories ideas are the ideas of the rich. The rich don’t want to accept the fact that their wealth fundamentally comes about because they have robbed the rest of us. So their philosophy is that if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. They hold the poor in total contempt. Which is why yesterday they announced government plans that will hit the poorest in society absolutely the hardest. Here’s some of the ways:

-As we already reported a couple of days ago, about half a million public sector workers will join the dole queue.

The government's vision for the future of job seekers

-Welfare: £7 billion is being cut from the welfare budget. That’s on top of £11 billion already announced in the emergency budget back in the summer. It’s going to get really hard to access benefits, with more means testing. There’s about 1.8 million people who will lose a grand because of this. If you’re on incapacity benefit, after a year you’ll lose £50 a week. They’ll also crack down on what kinds of conditions mean you’re certified as unable to work, because if they say you can work then you’ll only get benefits for a maximum of a year. People with partners in work face losing their benefit, depriving them of their only independent income. This is taking money away from people who may be in actually hellish personal situations, by a bunch of heartless fuckwits.

The unemployed are going to be made to work for their benefits under the government’s new ‘Work Programme’. This means you can be forced to do a lot of the same stuff as people on community service, except you’ll have to more work than they’re legally allowed to! This, of course, will all be delivered by private companies who’ll be making a profit out of the welfare system and getting workers under virtual slave conditions.

If you’re on Jobseeker’s and Housing Benefit, after a year your housing benefit will be cut by 10%.

-Pensions: By 2020, the government want us all to be working an extra year before we retire. I’m going to do a separate post on why this is so spectacularly a shit idea, but for now let’s just restate the obvious: the more well off you are, the longer you live. The poor die younger, and are being forced to spend more of their finite lives working, instead of the retirement that society promised them.

Can I retire now please?

Public sector workers are also going to be made to contribute an extra £1.8 billion to their pensions, meaning they’ll have a shorter, poorer retirement and less money now. Nice one.

The government has also changed the way it’s going to measure the rate of inflation when working out how much to increase pensions year to year. No prizes for guessing they’re changing it to a method that means less money, put on a jumper if you’re cold etc.

-Housing: Instead of calculating housing benefit by the average level of local rents, it’s now going to be 30% of the average. In other words, a massive cut, which will make potentially millions of people homeless. As Shelter in Scotland put it:

“This is at a time when nearly half of claimants are already making up a shortfall of almost £100 a month to meet their rent. 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.”

They’re also going to build 270,000 less new homes for social housing, leaving literally millions of people on a waiting list desperate for somewhere to live. Housing is one of the areas where what they’re up to is most clear: they want people out of being provided for by the state, and into the private market at the mercy of landlords. To do this they’re going to end tenancies for life.

For single people under 25, the level of housing benefit was already really shite. Now they’re extending that shite level to 25-34 year olds as well, meaning the age it which you can be discriminated against for being young just went up 10 years!

-EMA: In England, they’re abolishing the Educational Maintenance Allowance, money that gets paid to you by the government if you stay on in school after 16. The idea of this is to allow people from poorer backgrounds to be able to afford to stay on rather than have to leave and get a job. The government already want to make it harder for working class youth to go to uni by raising tuition fees, now they want to take that option away altogether from many by making it impossible for them to stay in school and get the qualifications they need to do so.

Although this isn’t happening in Scotland yet, don’t celebrate. The SNP government have announced they’re going to be reviewing EMA in December, to see if scrapping it would be a way of saving money. Edinburgh council (a renowned bunch of tossers from many reasons, such as trying to shut schools, not pay their own workers properly and ruin the Old Town) have already announced that they’re not sending out forms to apply in January because it might not exist by then.

Threats to EMA are an area where SSY needs to stand up and be counted. Check out the SaveEMA campaign.

-Train fares are going to be allowed to go up at 3% over inflation, meaning companies like First and Stagecoach are rubbing their hands, the rest of us will be walking more.

These are just a few of the ways that the cuts are going to make your life worse, we’ll be bringing you more details the more chance we’ve had to digest the enormous plate of shit stew that was served to us all yesterday. But it’s important to realise why this is all happening. As I pointed out already, the first part of the reason is that the Tories and the other Tories Lib Dems want to shrink the state and leave us fending for ourselves. The other part of the reason is that they don’t like the fact that there’s whole areas of life that no one is making a profit from. They’d like to take services like the NHS and hand them over to private companies, usually run by some of their own close chums, in order for them to make a lot of money.

The NHS is one of the places you can see this most clearly. The government claimed that NHS spending would be “ringfenced”, i.e. it can’t be touched. But like most of the things that come out of their disgusting mouths, it was a lie. In fact more and more NHS services are going to be contracted out to private companies, meaning they’ll be making a profit out of us, and the standard of service will fall, with dirtier, unhealthier hospitals and unhappier workers.

The multinational corporations in charge of healthcare in the US know that everyone in America who can afford it has health insurance. For their business to expand, they need to be allowed into the market for healthcare in Europe, but who will buy from them while the NHS is free? That’s why the Tories ultimate goal is to get rid of the NHS, piece by piece.

A lot of this stuff doesn’t affect Scotland directly yet, because it’s stuff that’s administered by the Scottish Parliament. But don’t worry, they haven’t forgotten about us! We just get to have cuts next year when the parly budget is set. When you add it all up Scotland is losing about 3 billion quid as a result of yesterday’s announcement. Both Labour and SNP, while saying this is rubbish, have no concrete plan to deal with it, and whichever one of them gets in to government here after the election next year is set to pass on the Tory cuts in the budget they set. Just one of the major ways we can fight back against the declaration of war made by the Tories and Lib Dems yesterday is to make sure there are socialist voices who will really stand up to the cuts in the Scottish Parliament next year.

But more immediately than that, if you’re not planning on going the national Scottish demo against cuts on Saturday, then drop whatever else you’re doing, go here to find out about a bus from your area, and get in to the streets to let the Tories and Lib Dems know they can’t get away with this shit.

Souter en route to count his millions in a Scrooge McDuck-style tower full of YOUR CASH

Brian Souter, one of the richest arseholes in Scotland, has just won a court battle to get more taxpayers money for his Stagecoach travel empire.

Shares in Stagecoach have surged in value after it was announced the UK Department for Transport will be forced to pay him subsidies this year rather than next for operating trains into London.

Not many people realise that the although the rail industry is privatised, this doesn´t mean the taxpayer doesn´t pay for it. The rail network was publicly owned for decades and run as a public service, and many routes have to be run this way because they won´t ever make a profit.

So, rail companies throughout the UK receive huge amounts of public cash in order to keep them afloat. Souter is one of the richest men in Scotland, and his empire is set to see £100 million of public cash as a result of this judgement. He also successfully argued that the cash that Stagecoach makes from charging people to use their station car parks shouldn´t be included in the calculation of their revenue.

Souter branded the Department “deceitful” during the dispute, and correctly predicted that “we will end up with a very large cheque.”

He´s a man we´ve written about on here before, as one of Scotland´s premier knobheads. He´s used to getting his own way, such as when he gave the SNP half a million quid just before the last election. The SNP did have a  policy of reregulating the buses, which would have meant that Souter´s gangster style business practices of driving rivals out of business so that he can charge extortionate fares on the routes he controls, would have been brought to an end. However, shortly after he gave the SNP a big fat cheque, this policy mysteriously disappeared. Hmmm.

One thing that Souter didn´t get all his own way on was his attempt to impose his raging homophobic born again Christian bigoted views on Scotland. He bankrolled the Keep the Clause campaign, which tried to get people in Scotland to vote in a private referendum to keep a bizarre law outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality” in Scottish schools. The public ignored him and the clause was repealed, showing Scotland is not as bigotted as the millionaire transport baron.

Souter is so hungry for profit he´s trying to replace ferry services at Yoker with amphibious buses. This is actually true!

This latest judgement has to make us wonder why the fuck anyone would support the ridiculous system we have since the privatisation of the railways and the deregulation of the buses. The SSP has long campaigned for the whole transport industry to be brought back into public ownership, and for all fares to be abolished. Free public transport for all is not only possible, but necessary as a major measure against poverty and climate change. It´s been tried and succeeded in the Belgian city of Hasselt, and in various parts of the USA.

The good news is that support for this idea is spreading. The PCS union, which represents civil servants, recently backed their idea at their conference, and are in the process of setting up a UK wide campaign demanding free public transport, which the SSP and SSY will obviously thow our weight behind as much as we can. Hopefully, PCS members who work for the Department for Transport will have their determination boosted after being branded decitful and dysfuntional by someone who´s making a killing out of the current (dysfunctional) system.

First Bus wankers!

Bus fares went up AGAIN in Glasgow today, with First Bus introducing fare increases well above the rate of inflation.
For most standard fares, this means an increase of 10 pence – just a year after a similar increase – while others services are facing price rises of up to 34%.
Glasgow has a very low level of car ownership, meaning most people rely on the public transport system to get around – especially the service provided by First Bus, given that the subway system barely leaves the city centre, and the limits of the suburban rail network.

The increase is totally unjustified – last year, First Group announced record profits of £134 million, while at the same time freezing the wages of staff and cutting services.  We’re always being told that opening up public services to ‘competition’ and the ‘free market’ gets better value for money, drives down prices and improve services… yet it’s been proved time and time again that leaving public services in the hands of people who only care about making profits is absolute insanity. First Group couldn’t care less about a family in Possil who rely on the bus to get in their messages. They don’t give a shit about debt-laden students who rely on the 44 to get into college every day, or people who need it to get into work.
Bus fares in Glasgow used to be capped – that is, they were regulated to keep them affordable for ordinary people and prevent the runaway fare increases we’re so accustomed to now – but two years ago this was removed in the name of ‘competition’. Predictably enough, bus fares skyrocketed almost immediately, rising some 25%, and this has gone on unstopped since.
Glasgow SNP MSP Anne McLaughlin last week lodged a motion in parliament calling on First to ‘reverse its decision’. While this is all very well, it’s a totally flawed strategy: no amount of appeals or petitions is going to change the fact that First are in public transport to make money, and if this means hitting ordinary Glaswegians in the pocket, then so be it.
Indeed, the Scottish Parliament has far more sweeping powers when it comes to buses. In 2006, the SNP’s annual conference voted to back a policy of reregulating the bus network, which would give local authorities control over bus routes, rather than private companies. However, one year later, a certain Mr Brian Soutar, millionaire owner of Stagecoach and all round knobhead, gave a £500,000 donation to the party. Oddly enough, this policy of bus reregulation was dropped from their election manifesto a month later – though the party refutes any allegations that these events may be linked! So instead of taking real action to lower the cost of public transport, they’re now forcibly reduced to the level of populist posturing and token appeals, none of which is ever going to get anywhere. The SNP: don’t say we didn’t tell you they’re a fucking joke.

The SSP offers a radical alternative to the mainstream when it comes to buses: let’s make them all free. And trains. And ferries. If we can find billions to spend on bank bailouts and trident renewal, we can surely afford the less than £1 billion a year it’d cost to run Scotland’s entire public transport network  for free. Not only would this dramatically reduce the number of cars on the road – meaning less emissions, faster travel and less road accidents – it’d be the biggest pro-environment policy enacted by any government anywhere, ever. And it’d be a hell of a lot better than the privatised, delayed, outdated, chaotic mess of a public transport ’system’ we have at the moment.

There’s loads more on the SSP’s free public transport policy here: www.freepublictransport.org