Cuts will drive Britain to ruin

That was the dire warning on Wednesday from Canadians who have bitter experience of an identical right-wing assault on the public sector.

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday's Budget the Con-Dem coalition sought advice from Canada's former finance minister Paul Martin, who wielded the axe on his country's public spending in the 1990s.

And north American union USW painted a bleak picture of what Britain has in store, saying that women and the most vulnerable are still paying a price for the Liberal Party's onslaught.

USW national director for Canada Ken Neumann said: "Important programmes such as health care, housing, unemployment insurance, children's aid, services for abused women and so many other areas were gutted.

"All that leads to more suffering and higher costs over time.

"Despite the rhetoric, the reality is that many are still suffering because of this bad policy - and there is no evidence that the cuts helped us economically as proponents suggested."

Canadian economists repeatedly warned Britain in the run-up to the Budget not to follow their country's austerity model.

Andrew Jackson said in April: "Because of cuts to unemployment insurance and welfare, poverty rates remained at near recession levels through most of the 1990s.

"Today, Canada has one of the least generous unemployment schemes in the OECD," he said.

Britain's Unite union, which together with USW's Canadian and US arm has formed the world's first global union Workers Uniting, backed its sister union's warnings and vowed to fight the "ideologically driven" cuts.

Unite assistant general secretary Gail Cartmail, who met Canadian public-sector workers this week, said women in Canada were "paying the price" for the deep and permanent cuts to social programmes and public services.

"Now the UK's Con-Dem government wants to make cuts twice as tough as those made by Canada," she observed.

"By hitting the purse in the brutal pursuit of ideologically driven cuts, the result will be a widening of the inequality gap and reducing more women to poverty."

Research from the British-based Women's Budget Group has shown that British women will likewise be hit hardest by the spending cuts as they make up 65 per cent of the public-sector workforce threatened with pay freeze and mass redundancy.

Women are also the main users of public services due to their disproportionate caring responsibilities and particular health requirement, including during pregnancy.

Mr Osborne's vicious cuts include a two-year pay freeze and tens of thousands of job losses in the public sector, reduced disability allowances, a rise in VAT to 20 per cent from April next year, and considerably diminished child benefits allowance for families - all of which will hit women the hardest.

Ceri Goddard of women's group Fawcett Society warned: "Reducing women's economic security in this way risks rolling back on women's independence."