Disregard the Cameron guff

The sad thing for him and his party is that people understand only too clearly what is in store and that's why they want nothing to do with it.

Cameron paints his vision as a series of grass-roots initiatives, with local communities taking responsibility for their own neighbourhoods and providing services in an innovative way.

The problem is that many of these services are already being provided by public-service workers whose jobs are threatened by the Tories' Big Axe.

Bob Crow's memorable description of Cameron's Big Society as "lollipop ladies (being) sacked and replaced by volunteers while the bankers who created this crisis cream off another £6 billion in bonuses" cuts through the Tories' New Age rhetoric.

It poses in the starkest terms the class reality behind the smooth-faced snake-oil salesman's spiel.

Hundreds of thousands of public-service workers will be first to bear the burden of losing their jobs while society's most vulnerable people will be denied the services that they currently depend on.

And as surely as day follows night, similar numbers of private-sector workers will taste the bitter fruit of redundancy as the contracts provided by public services dry up.

And why is there such a supposed need for government to wield its axe with such vigour?

Because, according to the Tories and their Liberal Democrat Orange Book neoliberal ideologues, there is no alternative to this Year Zero-style apocalyptic plan for public services.

Hundreds of billions of pounds have to be saved within a four-year period in order to deal with the economic mess left by Labour, which was worse than imagined before the election.

Not one part of that proposition is true. The coalition has not been forced to act as it is. It has chosen to do so.

The small-state zealots are using the crisis sparked by City bankers to engineer a reversal of the post-World War II settlement, hacking away at the welfare state and the National Health Service.

Neither party put such proposals in its manifesto because they would have been vote-losers, so they are pressing ahead with extremist measures for which they have no mandate.

Cameron insults public-sector workers by implying that the services they deliver can be replaced by a £100 million transition fund to help charities and social enterprises bid for government contracts to provide services.

The irrelevance of his Big Society bank can be judged by the puny size of its capital base - £200m from banks that are in the process of paying out 30 times that sum in bonuses.

Disregard Cameron's guff about his passion for his mission to build the Big Society. His mission is to boost corporate profitability at the expense of working people.

Labour has to move beyond nonsense about judging every proposed cut on its merits just as it must acknowledge its role in helping to prepare the way for Cameron with its desire to involve the private sector and charities in service provision.

But the onus of defeating this all-encompassing assault on workers lies on the unions, which will need to co-ordinate their resistance, backing the TUC March 26 anti-cuts march and preparing for a public-sector one-day general strike to defend jobs and services.