Green Party leader Natalie Bennett has sent a message of support for today’s PCS day of protest against public sector job and pay cuts, and to the National Union of Teachers North West strike. Bennett said:
“On the day after the dreadful Comprehensive Spending Review, in which George Osborne sought to entrench the failed policy of austerity into the next Parliament, with the express support of the Labour Party, grassroots action to express popular disapproval of these policies is critically important.
“The public understands that austerity has failed, that it is based on the false premise that excessive government spending caused our debt problems, when in fact it was the financial crisis caused by a failure of regulation and culture of gambling within the City. Even the IMF understands it, but Mr Osborne is a devotee of the ideology of ‘small government’, and is defying sense in continuing to follow these failed policies.”
Bennett added that Comprehensive Spending Review amounted to an attack on the public sector, and millions of workers who provide essential services, from teachers and dinner ladies, tax clerks to Jobcentre workers, firefighters to nurses. “We know that child poverty is rising fast, and as the TUC has recently demonstrated, a lot of this rise is and will come from families where at least one person works in the public sector.
“It simply is not right that the people who serve all of us, our public servants, should be living in poverty.”
Bennett added that the PCS call for fair pay for all civil servants and for all contracts to be underpinned by the living wage, highlighted the critically important issue of rising inequality.
“We need to make the minimum wage a living wage – that is an immediate step the government should take, but in the meantime, ensuring that government outsourcing meets this basic standard is an important step.”