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George Osborne's every blow falls on those with less not more

With his autumn statement, the chancellor has declared class war: a Tory assault on the public sector and the poor


Class war, generation war, war against women, war between the regions: George Osborne's autumn statement blatantly declares itself for the few against the many. Gloves are off and gauntlets down, and the nasty party bares its teeth. Here is the re-toxified Tory party, the final curtain on David Cameron's electoral charade. No more crocodile tears for the poor, no more cant about social mobility or "the most family-friendly government" or "we're all in this together". Forget "vote blue go green", with this mockery of husky-hugging. Let the planet fry.

Exposed was the extent of pain for no gain, exactly as Keynesian economists predicted, a textbook case. Things are "proving harder than anyone envisaged", says Cameron. But precisely this was envisaged by Nobel-winning economists. Extreme austerity is causing £100bn extra borrowing, not less, while everything else shrinks – most incomes (the poorest most of all), employment, order books and exports. Pre-Christmas shopping – already discounted – heralds more imminent company collapses, and the only high street growth is in pawnbrokers, charity shops and Poundlands filling up the black gaps. For all the flurry of small announcements to kickstart business, infrastructure doesn't create jobs fast enough to replace the 710,000 more public jobs to go. The iron envelope of public spending is unchanged. Osborne learns nothing from experience.

What was missing from his list? Not one penny more was taken from the top 10% of earners. Every hit fell upon those with less not more. Fat plums ripe for the plucking stayed on the tree as the poorest bore 16% of the brunt of new cuts and the richest only 3%, according to the Resolution Foundation. Over £7bn could be harvested with 40% tax relief on higher pensions, while most earners only get 20% tax relief; £2bn should be nipped from taxing bankers' bonuses, but the bank levy announced was nothing extra. There was no mansion tax on high-value properties, though owners don't even pay their fair share of council tax, and property is greatly undertaxed compared with other countries.

Worse still, two-thirds of properties worth over £1m now change hands while avoiding all their 5% stamp duty, by using offshore company accounts. But not a word passed Osborne's lips on tax avoidance and evasion. Another 12,000 tax collectors are losing their jobs while some £25bn is evaded and £70bn avoided. In a time of national emergency, Osborne had no breath of rebuke about the responsibility of the rich not to dodge taxes, no threat to curb the culture of avoidance. Despite the High Pay Commission report on out-of-control boardroom pay – which even the Institute of Directors has called "unsustainable" – the chancellor said nothing. How adamantly he ruled out the Tobin tax on financial transactions, called for by those dangerous lefties Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

Instead came the great attack on public sector employees on the eve of the biggest strike in memory. This was a declaration of open class war – and war on the pay of women, 73% of the public workforce. After a three-year freeze, public pay rises are pegged at 1% for two years, whatever the inflation rate. That means this government will take at least 16% from their incomes overall. But the plan to abolish Tupe – the rule that ensures public workers are not paid less if their service is privatised – is outrageously unjust, and will lead to mighty resistance to all privatisation from senior as well as junior staff.

As bad is the plan for reduced public pay rates in poorer regions. What draws good teachers and doctors to work in hard places is the same pay with a lower cost of living. Cut public pay in the north-east or the most impoverished places and their economies will plummet, making them poorer still. This will drive a yet deeper divide between north and south.

But the direct assault on the poor is almost beyond belief. Watch how the big, powerful charities on Tuesday expressed uncharacteristic outrage. Along with the Children's Society, Save the Children is fiercer than I can ever recall, calling this "dire news for the poorest families – both in and out of work"; "A major blow", says 4Children; while Barnardo's calls it "a desperate state of affairs when the government's own analysis shows that a further 100,000 children will be pushed into poverty as a result of tax and benefits changes announced today".

That 100,000 is added to the 300,000 that the Institute for Fiscal Studies already expected to join the numbers of poor children from Osborne's previous cuts. The increase in the number of two-year-olds getting nursery schooling is excellent, but why pay for it by taking from the tax credits of those families supposed to benefit? Households that gain are commuters, higher up the scale: few in the bottom 25% have cars or use trains. Meanwhile, the young are hit, the cut in the education maintenance allowance causing fewer to attend college at 16, and there are signs of a serious fall in university applications.

Politically, how will this feel? The outrage of respected charities is telling: worms are turning. The government has deliberately and unjustly provoked the whole public sector – from headteachers to hospital cleaners. Cameron and Osborne's record for serious miscalculation is formidable – from the economic effect of their austerity to their unravelling NHS debacle and the precarious work programme.

The gap between what they say and do is now exposed. The injustice of how the pain has been shared is breath-taking. A windfall taking just one year's bank bonuses would pay for all the cuts in youth services and the EMA for the next 23 years. That's just one example. Osborne is fatally wrong on the economy, as his deficit target slips by two years in just the past eight months. But even if his straitjacket were necessary, the pain would be politically acceptable only if justly shared. The Bullingdon budget tears the last veil of deceit, leaving the nasty party naked for all to see. But every school will get its King James Bible with Michael Gove's presumptuous foreword: is prayer all that's left?
Guardian

The derisory pensions offer hits women workers hard

Two-thirds of those on the public sector strike will be women, and no, many can't fall back on their spouse's pension


Nurse and patient at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham
Many of those taking part in the public sector strikes will be healthcare workers angry about the treatment of the NHS. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Whichever government spin doctor came up with the idea of labelling the latest pensions offer "generous" and strikers "irresponsible" failed to think through how badly this would play with women. Or perhaps the ministers they advise still don't get who the great majority of the teachers, healthcare workers and civil servants walking out really are.

Over the last year I've travelled around the country to meet public service workers – and two-thirds of them are women. I have never seen a group of women workers so concerned and so angry.

These workers make up the core of what has become known as the "squeezed middle". Their wages have been stagnating for years and, since the government imposed a pay freeze, living standards have fallen sharply. The traditional public service promise – modest wages in exchange for some security in old age – has been broken. By unilaterally switching the indexation from RPI to CPI, the government has already stripped up to 20% off the value of pensions at a stroke.

Low-paid council workers in Newcastle told me what the pay freeze means at a time of rising prices – the worry about buying a teenage son new trainers, not being able to fill up the car with petrol for a family outing, the twist in the stomach when the gas bill arrives.

Few government ministers, if any, have personal experience of bringing up a family on an average salary, let alone low pay. But for many of those living week-to-week on a tight budget and with precious few savings in the bank, a 3% increase in contributions would mean they have no choice but to opt out of the pension scheme altogether.

The government argues that the lowest paid will be protected from having to pay more – but not from the indexation switch and not from the requirement to work longer. And there are 750,000 part-time workers – again, the overwhelming majority women – whose earnings fall below the £15,000 threshold but whose full-time equivalent earnings take them above, and so will not qualify.

The implication that women work for pin money and can manage on a worse pension, presumably by relying on husbands, riles. But even more galling for women is that few government ministers seem to even appreciate the value of the work they do.

The women I've met understand that the quality of public services and the treatment of those who deliver them are intimately linked. Nursery workers paid barely more than the minimum wage talked passionately about the importance of educating small children and shaping future lives. Teachers were worried about the impact of ever heavier workloads on classroom discipline. Benefit advisers vented frustration that, despite five unemployed people chasing every vacancy, the jobless were vilified as scroungers while corporate tax dodgers got off scot-free.

And healthcare workers, already suffering job cuts, felt deeply insulted that the NHS was being turned into a market for profit, while those dedicated to patient care were consulted but ultimately ignored.

The government's attempt to instil fear, guilt or gratitude by suggesting that public service pensions are generous compared with those in the private sector has also backfired. Women know only too well about the collapse of pension schemes in the private sector. Many of them have partners who work for companies where employers have walked away from pension responsibilities. That's one reason the assumption that they can fall back on a spouse's pension really grates.

My impression is that most women public service workers have a long fuse. Precisely because they care so deeply about services, more than anyone, they still want to find a sensible and fair negotiated agreement. But their patience has run out.

As a recent Survation poll showed, people trust unions nearly three times more than the government to provide accurate information on the pensions proposals. And those women taking strike action – many for the first time ever – know that the government has fought shy of full disclosure on current pension provision affordability, and that the moves it made during the talks were too little, too late.

Despite strong majorities in favour, the government is challenging the union mandate for strike action by pointing to ballot turnouts. It would do well to remember that at the last general election only 23% of the total electorate voted Conservative. The real test will be the turnout, and unions are confident the strike will be solid.

Fundamentally, women still question why the government is hitting modestly paid public service workers to pay down the deficit, rather than the wealthy finance and bank chiefs, whose greed necessitated a trillion-pound taxpayer bailout and caused the mess in the first place.

Last week, the prime minister said that if the strikes went ahead "people will know who to blame". The women I spoke to certainly do.
Guardian

Jeremy Clarkson: 'striking public sector workers should be shot' BBC

Jeremy Clarkson's strike comments "disgraceful and disgusting" says Ed Miliband Mirror

The Jeremy Clarkson moment: populism or oligarchy?

I don't know if Clarkson is a simplistic populist or an eager instrument of corporate interests, but I'd leave the pub if he came through the door

Micheal White - Guardian
Who was right about yesterday's public sector strike then? Jeremy ("execute them") Clarkson and his sneering Fleet St allies who dismissed the occasion as an extra shopping day? Or the strikers themselves and those sections of the media that looked more kindly upon their protest, which included (steady on, chaps) the first 12 pages of today's Guardian?

This doesn't seem a difficult one to me. As one commentator said on the radio, the Daily Mail was famously screaming "Revolution!" during the mild-mannered General Strike of 1926 and was saying similar stuff this week.

"No change there then," the commentator noted. It wasn't true in 1926 and wasn't very plausible even in the late 70s and turbulent 80s, when serious agitators such as Arthur Scargill really thought they might overthrow capitalism. Instead it overthrew him.

Reports by John Harris and Guardian colleagues across the country confirmed by TV pictures and my own impressions of the London march, suggest that the marches and rallies were good-natured and surprisingly lacking in the kind of rage that was commonplace in the Thatcher years.

"Carnival atmosphere" is a cliche someone offered me yesterday: nothing wrong with an accurate cliche. Most people on the Thames Embankment headed for home as soon as the rally organisers told them to. The Met police – 5,000 coppers out in force with not much to do – were even handing out leaflets with route maps and FAQs such as "What is section 60?" and, "How do I complain?"

Where has the anger gone? Into despair and alienation? Some of it, yes. Into a more sophisticated understanding of the tectonic plates of world history that have been grinding us beyond the power of governments to control? Some of that too.

Several ex-Labour voters on the march told me that they want to see a new party, not the eternal Trotskyite factions that come out in force on such occasions, but a proper party of the left that would represent working-class people as Labour once did.

There's a People Before Profit party emerging in Lewisham, which has been beating the Tories in local byelections and plans to stand in the Westminster byelection at Feltham and Heston on 15 December, hastily arranged after last month's death of Labour's Alan Keen. It may not get far, but it's a welcome antidote to the far-right alternatives that also seek to appeal to working people on hard times.

All this should be a wake-up call for Ed Miliband and I'm sure it is. But what about the coalition and Clarkson? Have they misjudged the public mood out there in Middle Britain more badly than the strikers or, say, the Guardian's Seumas Milne who writes today that this "big society" demonstration of democratic muscle could be a turning point?

Not being much of a petrol-head myself, I've usually managed to avoid Clarkson, but his robust comments on the One Show – just joking? No, you weren't – about shooting strikers with their "gold-plated pensions"– is not the lad's first foray into populist rightwing politics on behalf of north Oxfordshire's self-styled media elite, which gathers around Rebekah Brooks' Christmas hearth to roast a few peasants (surely, that should be pheasants, Mike?).

Does Clarkson's calculated attention-seeking matter? Well, you never know. John Kay, the oh-so-wise academic commentator, pointed out on Radio 4's Today programme that flat median incomes over the past 30 years have had a baleful effect on public debate and democratic space in the United States. We've had far fewer such years here, but it is corrosive.

The twin dangers it poses are simplistic, demagogic populism – of either left or right – v the power of corporate oligarchs which disdain the majority, and rule by manipulation, as they have done so happily for years in Greece and much of Italy.

Are we better off? Yes, actually, though on a day when an ex-Information Commission official told the Leveson inquiry that his bosses thought media groups "too big'' to take on over evidence of phone-hacking there is no room for complacency.

Is Clarkson a simplistic populist or an eager and wealthy instrument of corporate interests, even though he's a public sector employee of sorts himself, by virtue of his BBC contracts?

Here's his highly sympathetic Wiki entry (did you write it yourself, lad?), so you can decide. To me he always comes across as a talented oaf, the kind of chap who claims not to believe what he writes (a damning admission in itself) and doesn't even mean that. I'd leave the pub if he came through the door.

But the Mail, Telegraph and Sun are all mouthpieces of major corporate interests – and we should bear that, as well as their proprietors personal and corporate tax arrangements, in mind.

Having tried and failed to whip us all – including the ever-biddable and jittery BBC – into a frenzy before the event, they were quick to dismiss it as a flop today – an excuse to go shopping for most strikers, David Cameron's "damp squib".

There will be some truth in that, there always is. Mainstream opinion is divided about both the efficacy of token strikes and the propriety of them when so many others are worse off than strikers who have jobs and pensions to strike over. As the Guardian's front-page lead reports today, things are tougher and getting tougher for the foreseeable future.

Whom do voters blame for the mess? Even the Sun's poll today shares the blame quite evenly between the eurozone crisis, the Labour legacy, the bankers' bust and the coalition cuts – with Europe the clear favourite on 41%.

But knowing, as we do, that most households are feeling the effect of rising taxes, falling public services and falling net incomes, I'd hesitate to assume ministers are going to maintain their current share of public support and acquiescence unless the public service unions do something really stupid – of which there is no current evidence.

In a just world I'd also like to think that voters don't take their newspapers verdict on the strike day on as much trust as they once did after what the Leveson inquiry has raked over.

But hey, let's not get carried away. That's always a good thought for ministers and strikers to bear in mind too.

Jeremy Clarkson apologises over strike comments BBC

Clarkson is a rebel with a cause. That cause is Jeremy

The Top Gear man shows there are two kinds of jokes inciting violence: Facebook foolery spells jail; on TV it flogs DVDs

Marina Hyde - Guardian

I've lost count of the times I've called for Jeremy Clarkson to be shot. I only meant it seriously on about 95% of them, and I never imagined doing it in front of his family. But if that's the way Jeremy thinks these things ought to happen, I'm humane enough to take last requests.

In the meantime, late-capitalist dreamweavers continue their mission to divide the world into people who will call the BBC to complain that Jonathan Ross should be sacked, and people who will call the BBC to complain that Jeremy Clarkson should be sacked. But I would like to think there is a vast third category that finds our national sport of taking offence to be the last word in plonkery. In as few words as possible, I wish to place myself in the last section. I support the freedom to make jokes, even if they're bad, and even if they're the most hackneyed rehash of all your other bad jokes – even if you've basically only got one joke. As anyone remotely familiar with what we'll euphemise as "my work" would surely have guessed.

That dealt with, I suppose we need to talk about Jeremy, despite all his rows being designed to prove the adage: "Never fight with a pig. Everyone gets dirty, but the pig likes it."

As you'll have heard, the Top Gear presenter joshed on Wednesday's The One Show that all strikers should be shot in front of their families, and moaned about suicides making his trains late or something. He's flogging his new DVD – Crash! Bang! Wallop! What a Video! – so is touring the studios in his pose as the nation's foremost rebel. I know what you're thinking: Christmas DVDs, promotional tours, robotically confected controversy … none of these really feel like the answer to the question: "What would Spartacus do?"

And you would of course be right. As only the terminally clueless will have failed to spot, Jeremy Clarkson works for "The Man". He doesn't live off the grid in some revolutionary base camp. He lives in Chipping Norton. He plays tennis with the prime minister. I won't spell out for you precisely what he does to The Man – imagine if children were reading – but maybe one day he'll bring out a range of Clarkson-branded kneepads.

Furthermore, a huge whack of his income comes from Rupert Murdoch. Has he been contacted by Operation Weeting? If he has, he hasn't been rebellious enough to say. And if he hasn't, it is likely to be only a matter of time. Yet even if the phone-hacking allegations were to spread to his employers the Sun, my bet is Jeremy wouldn't resign in disgust at the intrusion on his personage. He has a lucrative ability to hold two contradictory positions in his mind at the same time – and in this, he is quite the man for our times.

Indeed, since inequality is much in people's minds, we might observe that there are two kinds of jokes about incitement to violence. There's the kind you make on The One Show, which sells your DVD, and there's the kind you make on your obscure little Facebook page that gets you a four-year sentence, as happened during the summer unrest with a pair in Northwich who didn't even turn up to their own "riot" (nor did anybody except the police). Or perhaps you prefer the chap convicted for a joke tweet about Doncaster airport.

Yes, there are two kinds of jokes, just as there are two kinds of marijuana. There's the pot that presidential hopefuls admit to having smoked in a youthful-experiment-type way, and there's the pot criminals currently serving life sentences under preposterous three strikes legislation were caught with. Consider dear old Dubya Bush, whose unpunished frat boy toking was no impediment to Texas becoming the US state that prosecutes more of its citizens for marijuana than any other. Or, for balance, consider instead Bill Clinton, who "never inhaled", but blithely instituted a "one strike and you're out" policy, which saw entire families thrown out of social housing because one member (frequently a teenage child) had been busted for marijuana possession.

Two kinds of marijuana, and two kinds of dumb joke. And the one thing you'll never find is the person who smoked the "good" kind of weed defending the type who smoked the "bad", just as you won't find Jeremy defending any Facebook or Twitter users' right to make offensive jokes in any of his columns. His whinge in the column following the sentencing of the Facebook fools concerned the Notting Hill carnival (he's got a flat there).

It would be wrong to brand Jeremy a rebel without a cause – but his only cause is himself. He only gives a toss about things that directly affect him, and exists as our very contained, very well-paid version of the Tea Party.

Meanwhile, those who spent Thursday watching the news instead of phoning the BBC will have absorbed the dire warnings for us all from the Bank of England's governor, Mervyn King, and judged that there were immeasurably more important things to worry about. Do we really get the rebels we deserve? PAGING WAT TYLER.