Ten years of austerity cuts instead of massive investment in public services and productive industry has hugely increased the human and financial toll of the Covid crisis. Now the economic recession which began early this year is going to bite deeper at a time when unemployment and government debt are already rocketing as a result of the pandemic. Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s pay freeze for most public sector workers and his cruel 27% cut in overseas aid will not begin to pay the bills for a decade of Tory misrule. The choice is clear despite Sunak’s silence: either working people and their families will be forced to pay down Britain’s biggest-ever peacetime deficit through higher taxes, or the labour movement and its allies campaign for wealth, windfall and financial transaction taxes on the super-rich and corporate monopoly profits.
