STRUGGLE OR STARVE! Resist the slaughter of jobs, wages and services with socialist demands!

By Richie Venton, SSP national trade union organiser

Scotland’s public services face devastation, with the political parties in charge both at Holyrood and local government level hell-bent on making workers and working-class communities pay the price.

The SNP’s Programme for Government should be renamed ‘Programme for Savage Cuts to Jobs and Services’.

The SNP and Scottish Green Party alliance which controls Scotland’s biggest city are brutalising workers’ wages and services to some of Glasgow’s most vulnerable people, instead of mobilising a movement for funding to tackle the crisis they face.

The SSP’s fighting socialist alternatives have never been more urgently needed to be adopted by the trade union movement and community organisations, to defend and expand jobs and services, by taking the wealth of society out of the hands of the grotesquely rich, into the common ownership of the people.

SNP to cut 20,000 jobs

Faced with predictions of a Scottish Government funding gap of nearly £5billion by 2029, John Swinney’s government aims to wield the axe to 20,000 public sector jobs, with weasel words about “avoidance of compulsory redundancies still being their policy.” 

When is redundancy “voluntary” anyway, when workers face threats to lose out on enhanced redundancy packages, or the ‘option’ of moving far from home for a new role – or, as in the recent decisions by Glasgow’s SNP/Greens councillors’ alliance, with the reserve weapon of ‘fire-and-rehire’ on lesser terms hanging over workers’ heads?

Democratise NHS boards!

Slashing the number of Scottish health boards from 14 to 2 will do nothing to reduce the undoubted bureaucracy that bloats the service, but instead make it more centralised, more remote from the demands and needs of workforces, and is certain to lead to the slaughter of many lower-paid admin staff if boards are merged. 

Rather than capitulate to another bout of centralisation which repeats the job losses and service cuts seen in the past 13 years of the centralised Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, the trade unions should use the very truncated (sham) 3-months’ consultation on the NHS to mount a campaign against all job losses and for democratisation of a fully publicly owned and controlled NHS. 

Massive savings could be made by cancelling all PFI hospital contracts, which siphon off an average of around £5 for every £1 invested by loan-shark bankers, hedge-funds and overseas speculators. 

Instead of Swinney’s bogus talk of cutting down quangos, the unions should demand democratically elected health boards, embracing representatives of all workforce unions; elected representatives of patients and local communities; alongside councillors and government representatives – with a workers’ majority and skilled workers’ salaries, not the mind-boggling remuneration packages enjoyed by current NHS board chiefs.

Butchery of council jobs, wages and services

As we have persistently warned, local government services are particularly in the firing line for butchery of jobs, wages, and the public services they provide. 

All the political parties currently represented in councils and parliament face the harsh choice of defiance or compliance with these cuts. 

The evidence so far is that neither SNP, Labour nor Scottish Green councillors have the vision, political spine nor working- class understanding to defy all cuts and confront those who wield economic and political power with an entirely different set of policies, to transform the lives of workers and communities. 

Instead, they prostrate themselves at the feet of austerity, originating in Westminster, meekly devolved by Holyrood, then imposed locally at a terrible cost to workers and vulnerable service users, as they try to balance the books within the straitjacket they fail to burst asunder.

Workers livid, in tears, walking out

Glasgow City Council is in the eye of the storm, but by no means is it unique. 

In this proud city of radical and socialist traditions of struggle by working-class forces going back to the Calton Weavers of 1787, council workers are leaving meetings in tears and despair, many of them going off sick with stress, as they are told how many thousands of pounds per year their wages will be cut by.

As a parking attendant explained, “Staff are losing £3,500 a year despite facing daily physical and verbal abuse while bringing in millions for the council. I have personally been punched, pushed, spat on and screamed at. I have had people try to run over me. This is the thanks we get from the council. Staff are livid, with many walking out with stress.”

Another woman added, “I’m single and I can’t afford to live with less money. I will only have £50 left a month after paying my bills. Last year parking attendants brought in over £26million to the council and now they want to pay us less.”

Wage cuts of up to £11,500

Workers in ASSIST, the domestic abuse support unit, face the biggest pay cuts, up to £11,500 a year. Many of them fear they will lose their home or see £40,000 wiped from their future pensions. 

ASSIST provides vital support in high-risk court cases, covering 14 local authorities in the West of Scotland, hosted by Glasgow City Council but fully funded by the Scottish Government. Apparently, the axe-wielding Glasgow City councillors – SNP and Scottish Greens – didn’t even consult the other local authorities, and instructed the workers affected not to share this information. 

The people they are offloading the council’s financial crisis onto in this case are mostly women, some of them single parents, many of them themselves survivors of domestic abuse.

It’s not Glasgow City council’s chief executive who faces a cut to their salary of at least £209,472 – which became a retirement package of £567,317 when Ann Marie O’Donnell stepped down in 2024! It’s workers in parking, cleansing, janitorial services, care staff etc, who are facing cuts of £2,000 to £3,500.

Welfare and Older People’s Care

Alongside wage cuts, the Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership – the joint council/health service body – have announced plans to slash Glasgow’s welfare rights service by 54% and close 6 out of 10 older people’s daycare centres. 

These are vital facilities for some of the city’s most vulnerable and elderly, helping to tackle poverty, support older and disabled people, provide much needed respite to carers, and help people to live independently. 

Unison members are currently holding a consultative ballot for industrial action to save these services from the butchers’ knife.

These are but some of the anti-working-class measures by the ruling SNP/Scottish Green councillors’ alliance, in the face of horrendous financial meltdown. 

Glasgow in financial meltdown

It will cost the council hundreds of millions to compensate thousands of workers for 20 years of wage discrimination, originally imposed by the ruling Labour administration from 2006 onwards, which meant women earning up to £3-an-hour less than man in jobs of equal value. 

On top of that, Scotland’s watchdog – the Accounts Commission – have just declared Glasgow City Council faces a budget gap of £110million over the next year – and that excludes the costs of the new Pay and Grading structure, which in itself is designed to deprive workers of thousands of pounds a year, as we’ve already described. 

The Accounts Commission identifies not only rising demands for services but the costs of homelessness as root causes of the city facing financial ruin. Homelessness cost £35million last financial year; they estimate that will rise to £56m this year and £75m in 2027-28. 

Councils starved of cash

These cold statistics cannot hide the human catastrophes facing workers and service users. But instead of trying to fill the gap by robbing workers of wages and communities of services, a team of Scottish Socialist Party councillors would point the finger at the underlying causes and fight for radical measures to solve the crisis.

The atrocities of 20 years’ wage discrimination; absolute pay cuts to at least 2,500 council workers; cuts to welfare and closure of older people’s daycare centres; and the longstanding failure to tackle violence against education support staff, are not separate issues. 

They must be fought together, because the common cause is gross underfunding of the city’s public services. 

Since the 2008 banking crash, born of greed and speculation in the financial markets, successive Westminster governments have treated millions of working-class people to doses of austerity. We are made to pay for the bailout of the bankers through the slaughter of jobs and public services.

Instead of resisting Westminster’s knife gangs, successive SNP and SNP/Scottish Green governments at Holyrood meekly bowed the knee and devolved austerity to local authorities, health boards, FE colleges and other providers. 

Failure to tax the rich

Glasgow has been particularly hammered, with the loss of over £500 million in Scottish Government funding to the City Council in recent years. At the heart of this is a pathetic failure and downright refusal by Scottish governments to make the rich pay their share towards the upkeep of services worthy of the 21st century. 

They blanked the growing demands for a wealth tax on the obscenely rich, where for instance the SSP’s demand for a 5% wealth tax on all millionaires would last year have raised £1.25 billion from just the 10 richest families in Scotland. 

Axe the Council Tax!

Even less excusable has been their failure to implement the promise made by the SNP in the 2007 Scottish elections to abolish the council tax. That flies in the face of 83% of people in recent opinion polls favouring its abolition… and adds to the growing list of broken promises, breeding cynicism, despair and the growth of right-wing gangs with their racist scapegoating. 

In their recent Programme for Government the only nod towards that promise from the SNP is the introduction of two new higher bands of council tax on properties valued over £1million. That is cynical tinkering around the edges, with the Scottish government’s own figures showing at most it will only raise an extra £12m to £16m a year for Scotland’s 32 local authorities. And even that empty gesture is not due for implementation until 2028!

Council Tax reinforces inequality

The council tax has been grotesquely unfair since its inception by John Major’s Tory government in 1993. Low- and middle-income families are hammered by council tax bills for declining services, whereas the very rich pay disproportionately far less of their incomes. 

A tiny minority – including 13,000 individuals with annual incomes above £200,000 – live on a different planet to millions of other Scots and yet at most only pay three times as much council tax on a band H house as those living in the very cheapest Band A home. 

The council tax reinforces inequality. And from millions of people, it’s simply unaffordable. That explains the June 2026 report showing Scotland has £1.6 billion of unpaid council tax, part of the £9.3billion across the UK. Council tax arrears rose by £1billion in the last year alone, and by 65% across the UK in the past five years (52% in the case of Scotland).

It’s simply unaffordable

Such huge shortfalls to council funding are not the product of hordes of tax-dodgers maliciously depriving local authorities of the wherewithal to pay decent wages, protect jobs and provide quality public services. 

On the contrary, as Toby Murray, policy and campaigns manager at the Debt Justice charity, says:

“People aren’t avoiding council tax; they simply can’t afford it. Many are on low incomes and living in poverty. Instead of offering support, councils are sending in bailiffs or sheriff officers in their millions, punishing people for struggling with their bills.”

Council tax debt is the biggest single debt collected by enforcement officers, with a 30% increase of referrals in the past two years. 

In Scotland council tax debts are pursued by sheriff officers, wage and bank arrestment, or deduction from some benefits. And they can be pursued for anything up to 20 years, whereas other debts are “statute barred” after five years. The whole system is unfair, punitive and the cause of misery to millions already drowning in the overall cost-of -living crisis.

Demand income-based Scottish Service Tax

As the SSP has demanded since our foundation in 1998, the council tax should be abolished outright, immediately, and replaced by the progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax which we have advocated and won increased support for in the trade union movement and other sections of the population.

Under this socialist alternative, the Scottish Service Tax would (based on calculations from 2024 data) boost funding to Scotland’s councils from £2.7billion collected in council tax to £5.3billion Scottish Service Tax. 

Using the same income data, our income-based alternative – with progressively increased taxation rates on rising income bands – would mean 75% of households paying less than they do now. By contrast, the aforementioned 13,000 in Scotland with incomes exceeding £200,000-a-year would pay a combined total of £1billion – 19% of the total 5.3 billion Scottish Service Tax.

We can easily wipe out Scotland’s black hole

That one measure would eradicate the predicted £4.7billion Scottish government funding gap – and garner the funds to guarantee equal pay; compensate the victims of pay discrimination; save and expand jobs for the provision of decent local services. 

And precisely because it would be a fair, progressive system, based on the ability to pay, it would eliminate the poverty-driven arrears created by the regressive council tax. 

This policy is surely ‘a no-brainer’ which any fair-minded person will support, but it will never be introduced unless we build a mighty force to compel those in government to do so. 

The Scottish Socialist Party is determined to battle for this radical redistribution of wealth, entirely possible even within the straitjacket of Holyrood’s limited devolved powers, and we have gained growing support in the organised working class for this alternative in recent years. 

Make the rich pay!

The consultation on local authorities, announced in Swinney’s Programme for Government, cannot be allowed to be a sham, a vehicle for further job cuts, pay cuts, reduced services and evermore centralised council bureaucracies. It is instead an opening for socialists, trade unionists, community groups and youth organisations to pound the politicians with the demand to immediately abolish the council tax, to make the rich fund jobs and services through this progressive income-based Scottish Service Tax.

Take Scotland’s wealth into public ownership 

There are multiple strands to the struggles we face against the butchery being conducted by politicians of many stripes – SNP, Labour and Greens included. There is an alternative. 

We live in an immensely rich nation where progressive taxation and public ownership of energy, transport, construction, major industries, AI, banking and landed estates would usher in a life of plenty for all. 

To even begin that socialist transformation requires courage and determination to resist cuts at every level, through collective action, the combined power of the working class, with concrete socialist answers. 

With the savagery of attacks on the working class currently in motion, we face the choice of “struggle or starve”. Join the SSP in that struggle for a society based on the human needs of people, not profit.