This article by Eoin Ó Murchú first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
IT is rare that the Stormont parties speak with a united voice, but the paltry allocation of a mere £370 million extra to Northern Ireland has caused anger across the board.
Community minister and DUP MLA, Gordon Lyons, welcomed the removal of the two-child benefit cap, but declared that the rest of the budget was bad and that there was nothing there for workers.
He is right. While some workers will see pay rises, the freezing of tax banks will mean that workers will pay more tax, while the rich, the corporations and the financial bosses will continue to live on the hog.
Sinn Fein’s finance minister pointed out that the £370 million allocation would only mean £18.8 million available for welfare supports, with £240 million going on administering departments over three years, with £130million on capital projects over a four-year period.
O’Dowd pointed out before the budget that the North needed £400 million to meet Stormont’s current deficit, and that by year’s end this deficit will have probably risen to £780 million.
The British chancellor’s budget will do nothing in Britain to ease the impact of the cost-of-living crisis there, as Starmer’s Labour resolutely position themselves as the defenders of big capitalism; but the budget will have an even more pronounced negative effect in the North of Ireland given its total inadequacy in placing Stormont’s finances on a sound basis.
Adding to the insult were the comments by Secretary of State Hilary Benn who airily opined that if Stormont wanted more money, it should raise it itself.
He ignored the fact that Stormont has no revenue raising powers in terms of income or corporation tax, and that the only revenue items under its direct control were local rates and issues like water charges, which are resolutely opposed by both Sinn Féin and the DUP.
Increases in these areas would, of course, just be an extra tax on working people, and would do nothing to bring about equity in public financing.
But they do correspond to the let them eat cake mentality of the ruling circles in Britain, both Labour and Tory.
The big problem, though, is that the two major parties allow their differences on the ‘constitutional question’ to prevent them putting together a joint campaign to pressure Britain into giving the North the freedom to take fiscal – that is taxation – action.
This leaves the North floundering in a financial crisis over which its people have no control.;
This is the direct result of allowing outsiders to impose capitalist orthodoxy on us all.
It is this ideology that Irish workers have to resist, North and South. Because, even as we write, the South is yet again recording the highest ever monthly levels of homelessness, as rents spiral in a climate of increasing evictions and the complete failure of a housing policy based on treating housing as a market issue instead of a social right.
Every month now, these shameful records are broken, and there is a growing sense of despair especially among young workers.
What we need, North and South, is a complete break with the capitalist model, which puts the freedom to make profit above the social needs of working people.
This is the context in which the talk of Left Unity in the south becomes of critical importance, and it will be a shameful betrayal of the working class if this chance is scuppered.
It is up to workers to make sure it isn’t.
And it is up to workers in the North to insist that the executive stand sup to Britain, demands adequate funding and rejects the failed capitalist programme advanced by Starmer, Reeves and Benn.