THE FIGHT FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR

I have just returned from Bournemouth where I made my annual pilgrimage to the UNISON UK Conference.  The highlight was attending the Denis Goldberg fringe where he read from excerpts of his book, The Mission.  Another highlight was pointing out the difference between Council Tax freezes in Scotland from that of England, and I welcome the setting up of a Council Tax working group to look at this.

However, the consistent theme, was the fight for public sector service provision, with more and more services in England being outsourced, the fight for Scotland’s Public Sector remains and will I believe dominate public debate between now and the next Scottish Elections.

This will prove crucial as Osborne wields the butcher’s knife to the Budget, aided and abetted by his Lib Dem poodles.

This will require a strong and unequivocal response from the Scottish Government.  New Labour, who are trying to convince us that we have collective amnesia over what they did over the last thirteen years, in particular presiding over an unregulated market which brought about this mess, are desperately trying to position themselves to the left of the SNP, confirmed by a quite idiotic editorial by the Daily Record yesterday – even by their standards – who incredibly suggested that the SNP were in favour of a smaller state and smaller spending – TRIPE.

The SNP is well placed to meet the challenge head on.  Outflanking New labour who sooner or later will let the mask slip as they will sooner or later revert to type by demanding more outsourcing and PFI – having been responsible for saddling the country with a mountain of PFI debt already, by continuing to believe that in-house provision is best, as we have done with cleaning contracts in hospitals for example, has more resonance in Scotland, and with voters than believe that strong, accountable public services deliver the best services.

 The other challenge will be in protecting public sector pensions, which UNISON members and other Card carrying trade union members will hit the streets for if necessary.  Even I was speechless when I heard Nick Clegg talk out about gold plated public sector pensions, really?  The average public sector pension is £4000 a year, and the average for women is £2,600 – hardly gold plated.  The cost of public sector pensions in Britain is £4.1 billion.  The cost of tax relief for private sector pensions for the richest one per cent is a whopping £10 Billion.  So when I hear the Tory vultures and the Liberal poodles’ talk of us all being in this together, I just shake my head in disgust.

It was clear to me during the election that people are not willing to pay the price for the Bankers bail out. 

The fight starts on Tuesday when Gideon takes to his feet.  I believe that the SNP have a unique opportunity to show Scotland that there is a better way.

Let’s start by talking about tackling tax avoidance, the waste of hiring consultants – who are manly hired to hive off services, bring in a Tobin Tax, and above all cutting Trident.