It appears increasingly likely Scottish Councils and other public sector organisations will push for an effective pay freeze for much of it lower paid workers next year. At the same time cuts to essential and much needed services are also under active consideration across the public services. We are told these drastic steps are needed to meet a massive budget shortfall estimated over the next few years. Thinking Scots with a conscience may well be entitled to ask the question: why is it when the Establishment faces a self created crisis it is always working folk and the vulnerable that are asked to pay the price? 

Councillors, politicians and officials will retort that public sector organisations all over Scotland are facing tight budgets and this is correct. There will be much playing of the blame game over the coming months and years. No elected official should be able to escape responsibility for her or his decisions, but surely there are two indisputable facts we should remember when we consider the austerity years that lie ahead. 

Firstly, due to Labour’s pro-market dogma over the last twelve years, many councils & health trusts in Scotland have indebted future generations to paying an excess of thousands of millions of pounds to private companies for the building and maintenance of schools, hospitals and other facilities under ruinous PPP/PFI schemes, as compared to what would have been a much lower public liability under traditional methods of public sector borrowing.  

Secondly, when international capitalism went belly up last year, Gordon Brown and New Labour spent £850 billion of our money bailing out the banks - £14, 000 for every man, woman and child in the UK. This was done not to take these gross failures into proper public ownership and re-evaluate our priorities for economic activity, but to return as quickly as possible to business and bonuses as usual.   

And who is to pay for saving the skins of the richest 0.1% in the world?  Year on year real cuts of between £300 - £500 million to the Scottish Government budget have already been factored in, whatever Tory government is returned to Westminster at the next election, and this budgetary pressure will inevitably be passed on to councils, the NHS and other public sector bodies. 

Labour and their apologists will try every tactic in the book to try and get us to look elsewhere for scapegoats when our pay packets are cut, our jobs go, and our services are decimated – but we should neither forget these critical facts when we go to the ballot box over the next two years, or forgive those responsible for the mess we are now in.    

Steve Arnott - Solidarity's Highlands and Islands spokesperson