THOUSANDS of trade unionists will descend on Birmingham tomorrow with a very clear message to the Conservative Party Conference — End Austerity Now.

This failed and flawed policy has seen huge cuts to services, leaving the most vulnerable in our society on the brink. 

In the Midlands we have seen Northamptonshire County Council go bust which is clearly the first of many. All too often it is working people who are left to pick up the pieces or lead the fightback to defend jobs and services.

Birmingham Home Care Workers will be leading our demonstration tomorrow — hundreds of low-paid, mainly women workers, who have taken 24 bouts of strike action in the past nine months defending their service, their pay and their jobs. 

Faced with proposals for hours reductions, three split shifts per day or redundancy, they are on the front line of fighting austerity. 

I am proud to stand with them and proud they are leading our march. 

There’s a widely held view on the right that you get the best in the boardroom when you pay top dollar, but you get the best out of the workforce by imposing pay cuts, impossible shifts — and redundancy if you don’t like it. It is this view that has created our unequal, uneven society, and it must be challenged.

But it goes further than that. All too many working people are in work and in poverty. There are 11 foodbanks in Birmingham alone, not just giving food and the basics, but also too often sanitary products to those who cannot afford a human necessity. 

When the fifth-richest country in the world in the 21st century has to rely on foodbanks, it should be a wake-up call to all.

We have a responsibility as a generation to change this austerity agenda, a political choice taken by those who step over the homeless on their way to the bright lights and big city restaurant chains to catch an early lunch. 

We have a responsibility to working people to make the world of work be what it should be — a route out of poverty, not some low-paid existence which leaves you in penury. 

We have a responsibility to the next generation to make sure that the world of work and the economy they inherit from us is one which is balanced and fair.

Austerity is neither balanced nor fair. It is the evil that drives people to poverty and leaves the most vulnerable unable to rely on public services which meet their needs.

It is the failed policy of bailing out bankers who continued to enjoy the playground of the privileged while the rest of society paid. 

It is the political choice of the elite who assume that working people are there to provide for them — and now is our time to demand a change and end austerity now.
 
Lee Barron is regional secretary of TUC Midlands Region.