Anti-people and out of touch

The injustice of his decision is compounded by the dishonesty of his claim that slightly higher pay rates in the public sector are starving the private sector of suitable staff.

Where the private sector experiences recruitment difficulties, this is related to skills deficiencies rather than workers opting for marginally better-paid public-sector jobs.

Forcing through constant cuts in purchasing power for poorer regions and nations will actually damage the private sector as workers have less money to spend.

This will be the case especially in the devolved administrations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland where the Tories have no governing role but have the power at Westminster to wreck the living standards of people living there.

As teachers' union NASUWT leader Chris Keates points out, national pay scales are not peculiar to the public sector.

They are operated by major retailers such as Tesco, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis on grounds of cost-effectiveness and service consistency, which apply equally to the public sector.

Introducing regional rates of pay will encourage migration to higher-paid areas of the country, principally the south-east of England, which are already among the most heavily populated, causing great pressure on housing and services.

But Osborne and Nick Clegg are unconcerned about the social implications of their vandalism of our public services.

They are intent on cutting public-sector pay and pensions to facilitate private-sector penetration of services and to create a war chest to finance abolition of the 50p tax band, which is payable by just 1 per cent of the population.

Those campaigning to abolish the 50p rate pursue two contradictory lines of argument.

On the one hand, the businessmen who wrote to the Times recently described the tax band as punitive and harmful to investment.

On the other, Lord Sugar suggests that it won't raise as much cash as expected because "most people" dodge it by adjusting salaries and finding other ways to get money out of companies.

Rich people's generalised hostility to the 50p tax band, on whatever pretence, is probably the best argument for retaining it.

That is indeed the attitude of the majority of people, according to the latest ComRes opinion survey, which shows 58 per cent against its abolition and just 21 per cent in favour.

The fact that opposition to doing away with the 50p rate is highest, at 70 per cent, among Liberal Democrat voters provides further confirmation of the unprincipled nature of Clegg and most of his MPs.

Following hard on the heels of the Lib Dem spring conference rejection of the conservative coalition's Health and Social Care Bill, it illustrates how cheaply and how completely Clegg & Co have sold themselves.

They have offered Liberal Democrat MPs as parliamentary voting fodder to the Tories to drive through an agenda so right-wing that neither party would have signalled these policies in their election manifesto.

The damage that will be done over the next three years to our public services and workers' living standards will be huge unless the labour movement unites to derail these anti-people policies.