‘Fairness must be the cornerstone of all our efforts to achieve economic renewal,’ trumpeted Fianna Fail Finance Minister Brian Lenihan as he delivered yesterday’s Supplementary Budget Speech. It was a monstrous political lie because he went on to announce the most unfair, savage and immoral Budget in the history of the State.
Budget 09 - a savage attack on workers & the unemployed
It couldn’t have been otherwise given the very basis of this Budget which is that working people, the big majority in society, are being forced to bear swingeing cuts in their living standards to pay for the catastrophic economic crisis brought about by the speculation, profiteering and insatiable greed of a small cohort of big developers and bankers legislated for by Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats.
It is unfair and immoral that from today workers striving to survive on the minimum wage in one of the most expensive countries in Europe, will lose the equivalent of one week’s income with a new 2% levy.
It is unfair and immoral that a middle income worker on €50,000 a year and saddled with a massive mortgage because of the profiteering of those who crashed the economy, will be saddled with a levy of €1,500 a year due to a 4% levy.
Against rising unemployment which may reach a half million within two years, the slashing of the jobseekers allowance, the dole in other words, by €100 per week is a vicious attack on young working class people. The excuse is that this will push young people to participate in training programmes. Training programmes for what? Imagine what the sixty young apprentices brutally booted out by multinational SR Technics must be feeling today.
This Budget will not resolve the economic crisis. It will deepen it by virtue of the billions of cuts not only in working people’s incomes but in capital and current spending over the next three years.
The proposal that the taxpayer should buy off the major banks €90 billion worth of toxic loans for peroperty speculation beggars belief. Those in their twenties and thirties who are chained to those savage mortgage payments as a result of those same speculators will spend the rest of their lives saddled with this unless this crazy market capitalism is replaced.
Ninety years ago, in his seminal little pamphlet called Socialism Made easy, James Connolly said, ‘The time for patching up the capitalist system is past, it must go.’ Were he alive today, he would certainly be reinforced in that view.
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