Opening shot in a week-long debate hosted by the New Left Project on the cuts and how to fight them:

This article takes the view that there is no urgent need to pay off Britain’s debts, and that the cuts agenda of the Conservative-Liberal coalition must be interpreted as being driven by the interests of the constituencies (large manufacture, service industries and high finance) that lie behind especially the Conservative Party leadership, as well as by the neoliberal doctrines that have enjoyed hegemony within the British state for a generation. The cuts agenda constitutes: 1) an attempt to cover the costs incurred by the economic crisis by redistributing wealth from the working class to the financial elite; 2) an attack on the remaining institutions of the post-war welfarist consensus; and 3) the further entrenchment of a profoundly anti-democratic praxis at the level of the state. Labour has been unable to offer an alternative to this, because it is committed to the same growth formula, if in a slightly altered admixture. But there is an urgent need for an alternative. The once-in-a-lifetime magnitude of the capitalist crisis, and the ambition of the ConDem agenda for welfare downsizing, demands a thoroughgoing attack on the politics and propaganda of the cuts. A proportionate response would involve breaking with neoliberal ideology, moving beyond the traditional policies of the trade union leadership, and forging unity in practise among those most affected by the cuts, and strategically best placed to resist them.