Reject Tories of all colours

by Richie Venton, SSP by-election campaign manager

The Scottish Socialist Party is standing up for the working class and genuine, radical socialist change in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. We are campaigning for emergency measures to tackle the crimes of poverty and inequality in this rich nation. For a massive transfer of wealth and power away from the rich to the rest of us.

We are offering the people of Rutherglen, Cambuslang, Blantyre, and Hamilton the chance to reject all the careerist politicians — all of whom will grab the £87,000 MP’s salary with both hands — and instead elect Bill Bonnar, a local lifelong trade unionist and socialist.

End poverty & inequality
If elected, in keeping with the Scottish Socialist Party’s founding principles Bill will live on the average Scottish worker’s wage of about £30,000 — returning the remainder to striking workers’ hardship funds, local community campaigns, and the socialist movement.

It is criminal that 1.3 million Scots literally can’t afford to live — in the fifth-richest economy on Planet Earth! The big majority are people in work. Others are children with at least one parent in work, or sick, disabled, and retired people on basement level benefits and pensions. Combined with the insecurity of zero hours contracts, which enslave 109,000 Scots, poverty pay is the prime cause of people being below the breadline, often surviving on foodbanks.

The SSP demands:

• An immediate £15-an-hour minimum wage for all aged 16+, rising with average wages or inflation.
  Equal pay for women.
• Inflation-proofed pay rises for all workers.
• Abolition of all zero hours contracts — replaced by a legally guaranteed minimum 16-hour contract for every worker who wants one.
• Repeal of ALL the anti-union laws, so workers can collectively win a greater share of the wealth we produce, putting people before profit.

Rock bottom benefits and pensions, and brutal Tory cuts, add to poverty amidst plenty. Our state pension is literally the worst in Europe. The Tories have stolen £341m off 80,000 Scottish kids, through their two-child benefits cap.

Labour plans to keep that vicious theft of food from the mouths of children, whilst feeding the profits and personal fortunes of millionaires and big business. Labour have declared they will not introduce a wealth tax.

Nothing will change — Labour are the Continuity Tories!

The SSP demands:

• Raise the state pension to match the best in Europe.
• Scrap the two-child benefits cap and its outrageous rape clause, where a woman must prove she was raped to claim for a third child. For universal child benefits that match the real cost of child-rearing.
• Free, quality nursery places for all children.
• Full average wages for all sick workers, and benefits for the sick and disabled that afford a decent life.

Public ownership
The cost of daily necessities is rocketing skywards whilst wages plummet to their lowest share of national wealth in 70 years. Rampant profiteering by the capitalist rich is the root cause of inflation — not workers’ wages, which lag prices, drastically.

Energy giants like Shell and BP grab billions in profit, pay little or no taxes, and get vast subsidies off the UK and Scottish governments to plunder and pollute the planet.

Supermarket giants make record profits whilst their workers often rely on foodbanks. Rip-off private landlords exploit the shortage of quality public sector rented housing.

Privatised bus and train companies make a fortune at the expense of their workers and the travelling public. First Bus, McGill’s, Stagecoach, and other bus companies get £400m in Scottish government subsidies this year alone, to further fatten their profits, whilst they run the service into the ground and jack up fares.

The SSP demands:

• Public ownership of all public transport — not subsidised private profiteering.
• Free public transport for all, on buses, trains, subways, ferries — to combat poverty, social isolation, and car pollution.
• Public ownership of energy — to abolish profiteering and provide clean, green, affordable energy and create 70,000 new jobs in a worker-led, rapid transition to green energy production, tackling the climate crisis and job insecurity.
• Public ownership of construction to build 100,000 new, environmentally advanced council homes for affordable rent — and retrofit every home free of charge with insulation, draught-proofing, eco-boilers, and fast broadband.
• Price controls and public ownership of the giant supermarkets to end profiteering, combat food poverty and end reliance on foodbanks — feed the people, not billionaires’ profits.

Stop bleeding our NHS to death
Our NHS has been bled dry by successive Labour, Tory, and SNP governments, using privatisation schemes like PFI. Labour wants even more NHS privatisation — carrying on where Blair’s Labour government left off, which squandered public funds to feed the profits of bankers and moneylenders in PFI scheme.

With Wishaw hospital, taxpayers have to pay back £813m to the profiteers for a £100m building — depriving local people of £713m that could have been invested in staffing, bed spaces, and equipment to tackle the growing waiting lists and delays in treatment in an NHS saddled with huge debt to the spivs, speculators and profiteering pharmaceutical companies.

The SSP demands:

• Cancel all rip-off privatisation schemes in our hospitals — invest in jobs, pay, bed spaces, equipment — not the bank accounts of offshore bankers and speculators.
• Nationalise Big Pharma — make pharmaceuticals part of a publicly owned NHS.
• Scrap Trident nuclear weapons — save over £200bn. Invest in our NHS, education, public transport, housing — not weapons and wars.

Council jobs and local services are being butchered, with cuts imposed by Westminster Tories, passed down without a fight by the SNP/Scottish Green Party Holyrood coalition, implemented by spineless councillors from all the mainstream parties.

Axe the Council Tax: tax the rich
The Scottish Socialist Party demands No Cuts Defiance Budgets. For the past 25 years, the SSP have campaigned for outright abolition of the unfair, regressive Council Tax, and its replacement by a progressive Scottish Service Tax, based on people’s incomes — their ability to pay for local jobs and services.

The Council Tax is grossly unfair. It bears no relation to people’s incomes. Workers on £20-25,000 have to pay £1,803 on the average Band D house in South Lanarkshire, or £2,323 on a Band E property.
In contrast, Lord Willie Haughey, whose wealth was estimated at £265m by the 2017 Sunday Times Rich List, has a Council Tax bill of just £4,191 on his sprawling mansion. No wonder he can afford to give millions of pounds to Labour!

The SSP demands:

• Set No Cuts Budgets in defiance of all cuts — mobilise a mass campaign to win back some of the billions of pounds stolen by Westminster.
• Abolish the Council Tax — Labour and SNP fiddling round the edges won’t end its unfairness.
• For an income-based Scottish Service Tax, with the first £12,000 income tax-free, then rising rates of taxation on income brackets, leading to 75 per cent of local people paying less, the rich minority paying far more, and funds for local jobs and services being DOUBLED from £2bn in Council Tax to over £4bn through the progressive Scottish Service Tax.

Under the SSP’s alternative, a worker on £20,000 would only pay £360 a year; someone on £30,000 would pay £810 Service Tax — whereas an MP on £87,000 would have to pay £8,870. Tax the rich, double the money for council services, and shield working-class people from every job cut, pay cut and service cut currently threatened by all the other parties in the Scottish government and South Lanarkshire Council.

Don’t waste your vote
The Scottish Socialist Party shares the hunger of millions of working-class people of all ages for an immediate end to the ruinous, unwanted rule of the Tories. People are desperate for change. But Starmer and Sarwar’s Labour promises absolutely NO change from Toryism.

A vote for Labour or the SNP is a wasted vote. It’s a vote for more of the same poverty and inequality. Labour are the Continuity Tories. Every vote for the Scottish Socialist Party is a vote for people, not profit. For a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the rest of us. For radical socialist change.

For a principled socialist MP living on a worker’s wage.