National Budget Day Protest – Wed 19th March

“Austerity for Ever”
No Way!
National Budget Day Protest
Wednesday March 19th
5.00 -7.00 pm

Outside Waterstones, High St. Birmingham

Leaflets available from Unison Local Government Offices, Godfrey Webster or Contact BirminghamAgainstTheCuts@Gmail.com

Nationally, the economic picture continues to look bleak. Unemployment figures are falling as more people are pushed onto working tax credits, self-employment and part time work rather than JSA. Living standards have shown their longest continuous fall since records began as inflation outstrips wage increases. Growth continues to elude this government, who can’t see how austerity kills growth, preventing the deficit from falling.

The alternative is to take advantage of historically low interest rates to invest in some of the things we need to solve the housing crisis and make big steps towards removing our dependency on oil and combatting climate change. That means a new programme of house building, replacing the council houses we’ve lost since Thatcher, ones which are rented securely and at an affordable price, with the investment paid back over time. It means building huge amounts of renewable energy production in the forms of wind, tidal, wave, hydro and solar generation, replacing what we are losing as North Sea gas and oil dries up.

The jobs created doing this will stimulate the economy, increasing government tax intake and reducing spending on social security, reducing the cost of the investment further and with the return to come on renting housing and selling energy, the investment will prove to be profitable and sustainable for future generations.