Last week and the week before, 1,700 job cuts were added by BMW-Mini and Ford to the already long list of redundancies in the car industry. This week, it is the turn of banking again. RBS is expected to announce massive cuts, which will raise the total number of mostly low-paid jobs lost at this bank alone, to 20,000. And Lloyds-HBOS is expected to follow suit with comparable numbers, within the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, thousands of jobs are being cut across the railway and London Transport network, and alongside the ongoing cuts at Royal Mail, further thousands of postal jobs are under threat due to the government's privatisation plans.

No more subsidies to cut jobs!

By a cynical twist, all these job-slashing companies have one thing in common. Either they are owned by the government, like RBS and Royal Mail, or they are receiving taxpayers' funding, when it is not both. The banks and car companies are already in receipt of billions of pounds of bailout money, while the train companies and London Transport make their profits out of "regular" government subsidies.

After lining the pockets of the very same finance tycoons who were responsible for the crisis in the first place, the government is now using public funds to finance massive job-slashing plans!

That this government should be allowed to use public funds, that is the taxes we pay out of our wages, in order to help the bosses push tens - probably, hundreds of thousands of us out of a job, is quite simply intolerable.

If public funds are to be used for anything in the present crisis, they should be used to finance large-scale programmes designed to cater for the interests of the majority.

The housing crisis is hitting a growing number of working class households. Yet, since Brown famously announced his "bailout plan" against repossessions, back in December, not one household has benefited from the scheme!

Not only should public funds be released immediately to stop all repossessions of working class families, but a vast programme to build affordable housing for rent is needed urgently - not in 2 or 10 years time, as we are told, but starting from now. What with the tens of thousands of building workers who are currently on the dole, after the job cuts of the past months, wouldn't such a programme solve both problems at once, creating large numbers of jobs together with providing the homes that are so badly needed?

Time to turn the screw on the profiteers!

Of course, there is no shortage of people who claim that because of the crisis, there is nothing we can do to defend ourselves. But such doom and gloom should be rejected. After all, can the bosses do without our labour to generate their profits?

And there are immediate solutions which could stop the growing flood of redundancies. Because all these big companies still have enormous assets which they could use to pay the full wages of existing workers without cutting any jobs.

As for the work - if there is less of it, that is no bad thing given our current long hours and appalling conditions, not to mention the apparent "need" for night work in so many workplaces! No, there is every reason to share work out among us so that everyone can work a more reasonable number of hours - i.e., a lot less - without any loss of pay!

Companies which do not use their assets to avoid cutting jobs and wages should be taken over by the state without compensating shareholders, in order to be run on a non-profit basis instead of being subsidised to maintain their profits!

To impose these demands, however, we cannot rely on union leaders who have endorsed every past attempt by the bosses to squeeze ever more profits out of us, by cutting our conditions. We can only count on our own determination to stop the job-slashers. It is within our own ranks that we will find the fighting leadership we need.

There was never any stake for us, workers, in helping the companies to make profits by giving up our rights and allowing them to ride roughshod over our hard-won conditions. Nor is there any stake in helping them to get subsidies from the government, as union leaders claim at present. Because the only thing they will use this money for, is to boost their profits by getting rid of more jobs, now or in the future.

Our interest - on the contrary - is in making the bosses, their mates in banking and their big shareholders, pay for the crisis they have caused, to the very last penny, by using the enormous profits they squeezed out of our labour over all these years. And we can only do that by fighting them collectively. All the way.