Remember Redcar

Next time you hear the Chancellor, George Osborne, talk about the ‘march of the makers’, the Northern powerhouse or that the Conservatives were now the party of the workers – remember Redcar.

Or the next time you see him in his hard hat, his high vis jacket and playing at being a hod carrier  -remember Redcar.

Frankly when we hear these rhetorical tricks and see these visual clichés we take them for what they are – political gimmicks.

Redcar, a north east coastal town, relied on the steel industry for its survival.  Middlesbrough just down from Redcar was laid waste by Margaret Thatcher.

We haven’t seen Osborne or Cameron in Redcar, no doubt as sons of Thatcher toiling in Central Office they don’t want to replicate that unforgettable image (new readers go to Google) of Margaret Thatcher hand bag in the crook of her arm, head slightly bowed in the middle of wasteland.

Thatcher’s legacy as Prime Minister was 248,000 jobs lost in the region.  By the start of the 1990s British Steel had gone from 33,000 jobs to 6,500.  Jobs were lost in the chemical industry and shipbuilding had virtually been eradicated.

Today Iain Duncan Smith, secretary of state for work and pensions, tours TV studio to proclaim an economic miracle every time it looks as if employment was going up.  The truth is these are insecure jobs with workers heading for an uncertain future.

In Osborne’s conference speech he got carried away by the number of construction sites he’d visited and rallied the Tory troops by his insistence that they were the ‘builders’.

We must give this supreme political tactician credit where credit’s due, after all he spectacularly perpetuated the myth that the banking crisis was caused by the last Labour government’s spending money on schools and hospitals.

A lack of any meaningful rebuttal by Labour’s front bench left the economic field to the Tories and they exploited this mercilessly.  Their message discipline that they were the only party that could claim the mantle of ‘fiscal responsibility’ – was breath-taking in its scope.

Acceptance of this mass calumny led Osborne to attempt to consolidate the Conservative’s economic competence against a reckless opposition with his ‘charter for fiscal responsibility’.

Farce

The ‘charter’ is itself a farce. Binding a future government on fiscal rules, isn’t even constitutional – not that this would worry the Chancellor since it provided him with another opportunity to wrong-foot Labour.

The Tory leadership have turned balancing the budget and having a surplus into a fetish.  As John McDonnell said in his conference speech austerity is not an economic necessity it is a political choice. And Labour will bring to an end an ideological obsession that is causing harm and misery to countless thousands of people.

Much has been made of John’s U-turn regarding the fiscal charter and while the braying Tory backbenchers had much fun with his embarrassment nevertheless we are in the right place.

Despite this merry making by the Tories what should be really embarrassing are the number of broken promises that are stacking up not least the promise that tax credits would not be cut.

It was during the TV ‘debate’ on April 30 that Cameron told David Dimbleby, the audience in the studio and the viewers watching that ‘he did not want to cut child tax credits’.

After the election Osborne in his budget smashed this promise to smithereens.  Cameron may try to use his weasel word ‘want’ but that won’t satisfy  Michelle Dorrell, who on Question Time was visibly distressed that she was facing tax credit cuts that would mean, no matter how hard she worked, she wouldn’t be able to afford to pay her bills.  She rightly feels let down.

Will the tax credits broken promise be Cameron/Osborne’s poll tax?  We often think that Thatcher was chucked out of office by her Cabinet and her MPs because of her euro-sceptic views.  That may be true of the elite but for the masses it was the Poll Tax that brought her down.

Her MPs worried that they would lose their seats as constituents crowded into their surgeries to complain about the unfairness of the tax decided she had to go.

Steel workers have been abandoned by this government despite the unity of the trade unions and the employers that what is required is for the state to intervene.  As Unite’s assistant general secretary, Tony Burke said: “We need help, we need a strategy and there is no time to waste.”

He’s right.  There are enough waste lands in industrial Britain as there is without any more.

This article  first appeard in Tribune October 18