Doomsday budget heralds a total betrayal of the people. Republican Socialism stands vindicated.
Joint statements emanating from both Unionist and Nationalist ministers in Stormont have announced inevitable wholesale cuts to services vital to the health, development and well-being of working class people in the six counties.
Thursday evening’s announcements promise to launch a new era of misery onto the people of the north and will undoubtedly bring only chaos and desperation to already suffering workers, providers and the most vulnerable in our society.
As we prepare to be drip fed the stark reality of what the Stormont government is proposing, we are confident that these moves will bring the six counties into line with the rest of Ireland, uniting our people in a cycle of poverty, dependency and despair, and at the hands of career politicians, who lacking courage and principle, neither speak the truth nor strive for anything better.
The now looming reality of widespread unemployment, downgrading and scarcity which will follow on from these government cutbacks is a far cry from the bright and prosperous future which our people were promised in the wake of the GoodFriday Agreement.
In 1998, the IRSP decided to reject the false economic promises peddled by the propagandists and proponents of the Good Friday Agreement, choosing instead to stand behind the long term truths of our principled Socialist and Revolutionary analysis.
In the light of Stormont’s most deliberate and savage onslaught against our people and our class, we stand fully vindicated in that decision. Constitutional Nationalism and the advocates of reform have again failed our people, and once again the people of no property stand alone.
Tory cutbacks are designed to force upon our people, the unjust and inhumane logic of Capitalism, the politics of greed and eternal economic chaos. Our people shall now suffer further poverty, unemployment and want, all for the short sighted actions of bankers and their wealthy backers in the political elite.
Shamefully and in absolute abandonment of the Republican position, Martin McGuiness has announced his belief that the DUP budget is ‘the best our people could hope for’.
With this appalling and defeatist comment, he hopes to secure a loan from the Tory British treasury, bringing a new realism to the term ‘scrambling for the crumbs off the masters table’.
The IRSP takes this opportunity to call for a new rallying of the Irish working class. Class war has been declared upon you and your families, by those who care nothing for workers or for the welfare of the old, the young the sick or the vulnerable.
As is the case the world over, the wealth of our country lies dormant, hidden away in the bank vaults and accounts of the rich and powerful, meanwhile we are told that we the masses must pay for the actions of the few. This need not be so.
In the spirit of Connolly, Larkin and all those who across the world are out and opposing the evils of austerity, we declare that now must be the time to fight back. We are encouraged by the utterances of the Trade Union movement who at long last are showing signs of a much needed fighting spirit. We ask them to maximise that spirit, to build upon it and prepare for genuine and meaningful struggle.
We call upon our supporters and all Republican Socialists to support them in that task, and to begin the process of mobilising, against these unnecessary and savage cutbacks, and in so doing begin to rebuild the struggle for Irish Socialism and true freedom for our people and our class.
