Who says there are no alternatives?

We've all seen the TV discussions where a studio audience is invited to decide where the axe should fall on our public services. But take a step back and it's obvious that not only are these debates entirely contrived, they are hugely unjust.

Our screens and our newspapers bang on that the British government ran up debts of £600 billion and, like prudent housekeepers, the Con-Dems are paring back the spending to balance the books.

Yet take a closer look at exactly how those billions were spent and the injustice becomes clear - £350bn bailing out the banks, £100bn on a second generation of weapons of mass destruction in the form of Trident, another £100bn invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and £100bn signing ill-advised private finance initiative contracts which mean, for example, that a £300m hospital such as Edinburgh's new Royal Infirmary actually costs us £900m.

All this, while at the same time adding insult to injury by giving tax handouts to the obscenely wealthy.

These decisions were hugely unpopular. None enjoyed the support of the public - our opinions apparently count for little - yet we are left to pick up the tab for the wild excesses of the rich.

The economic recession, the possibility of which Gordon Brown foolishly claimed to have banished forever, occurred alongside an unprecedented financial collapse. Together they led to the current political crisis.

Those who caused the crisis are forcing those who didn't to pay for it. The rich and their politicians now insist on two "fundamental truths."

First if we are to reduce the debt there is no alternative but to inflict lacerating cuts in vital public services like health, education, transport, housing and care. And second that "we are all in this together."

Of course neither is true.

We could self-evidently use the banks' profits to pay down the debt. We could take their huge profits and obscene bonuses and invest them in improving public services for the many. We could plainly cancel plans to threaten the world with nuclear annihilation.

We could bring home our soldiers from Afghanistan and end our pointless occupation. We could tear up the contracts that all those private firms which own our hospitals, schools, prisons and roads conned us into signing. We can make the rich pay their fair share of tax for a change.

But we don't hear any politicians on the panel make such suggestions, do we? They say working people must be paid off. Jobs must be lost, houses must be repossessed, living standards reduced.

The fact is there are plenty of alternatives to mass unemployment, to students being denied the chance to study, to enforced homelessness, increased violence and worsening crime rates as our society further disintegrates.

All these are avoidable but only if we jettison the advice of Labour, Tory, Lib Dem and SNP politicians who say the cuts are inevitable and working people must suffer.

They all defend a system which got us into this mess and which now insists the victims, not the perpetrators, must be punished.

It is not a matter of "if" the British people resist but when, how and where it begins.

Colin Fox is national spokesman for the Scottish Socialist Party.