100 days and 1,000 cuts

THE TORY-led coalition’s 100 days has sparked off the usual platitudes in the bourgeois media about the success of the Cameron/Clegg combine in getting a Tory/Liberal Democrat consensus for a savage attack on working people, not seen since the Thatcher era and the dark days of the 1930s.

The education and the health services will be starved off funds; public agencies are being scrapped; the civil service faces cuts of between 20 to 40 per cent and benefits will be shaved or means-tested — all to ensure that the rich remain rich and that the entire burden of the slump is entirely placed on the backs of working people.

Now the “hundred days” was a phrase originally coined to describe Napoleon Bonoparte’s come-back, which ended in utter defeat and exile to a tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean.

A united, determined union movement can stop the cuts and ensure that the next Labour government carries out the wishes of the organised working class. From Greece to Spain workers are mobilising to build the resistance to the new bourgeois offensive that is taking place throughout the European Union. Here the fight-back’s only just begun. Cameron and Clegg have yet to meet their Waterloo. We have to work to see that it happens and the sooner the better.