The "pre-election" budget presented by Sunak's Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, was the Tories' opening gambit in their election campaign.

    Hunt was determined to be seen as a "good" traditional Tory who cut taxes. But given the bad state of the economy (no, the recession isn't over!) the best he could do was cut 2p off workers' National Insurance contributions - for the second time. And Labour smilingly approved. Hunt also decided that "non-doms" should begin to pay taxes on their overseas earnings from 2025 (if they can be traced...) - thereby "nicking" one of Labour's flagship proposals...

    So even though this budget was merely pre-election politicking and the Tories will soon be voted into the wilderness for the next five years, most of their policies will remain virtually unchanged in Labour's "Red Box".

    There's an unpleasant irony in this NIC cutting spree, because NICs were originally introduced to help fund the welfare state and NHS. You paid now to insure yourself against illness and unemployment later. And then the government topped-up the amount from the Treasury.

    But no more. It's precisely the starving of the NHS and social welfare of funds which has led to Britain having the lowest life expectancy, highest extreme poverty and worst cancer survival rates in the G7.

    The degeneration of such a "public-minded" (perish the thought!) concept, has got to the point where Hunt even suggested that NI should be abolished altogether. And Labour's Reeves didn't disagree. "Put the money in workers' pockets" they say (as if!), and forget "society" - echoing Margaret Thatcher. But despite the media's nonsense, the fact is that even this Tory heroine taxed the rich at a higher rate in the 1980s than Hunt is doing today.

    As for the talk about the "historically high tax burden", this doesn't mean what reporters repeat, over and again: that taxes themselves are historically high! Nope. "Tax burden" is the total tax intake expressed as a percentage of GDP (the size of the economy). So if GDP has fallen (as it has) the "tax burden" is greater and if it rises it is smaller... In fact Britain's "tax burden" is lower by 2.2% than all other advanced economies and 6.4% lower than the EU14! A shameful fact in today's context of starved public services!

    In the meantime, after Lee Anderson's defection, Sunak and Gove are desperately trying to prevent Farage's Reform Party from swallowing more of the party's MPs/votes, by moving the Tories ever-further rightward. Hence Sunak's latest rhetoric against "extremists" and the refusal by extreme Tory ministers to condemn outright the violent race-hatred and misogyny directed at the veteran "Labour" MP, Diane Abbott.

    Having already curtailed the right to strike, Sunak & Co are now threatening the right to political free speech and threatening to proscribe those who oppose their gruesome fuelling of the Ukraine war and Netanyahu's bloodbath in Gaza. Given that our best defence is to go on the offensive,we need to stop them, before they stop us.

The 6 March is the 40th anniversary of the start of the year-long miners' strike. But up until today, the lessons of this strike have not been learnt. Or if they were, they have been forgotten.

    Today, sections of workers are going on strike one by one, on their own, repeating in an almost farcical way, the fatal mistake made by the miners and their National Union of Mineworkers leaders in 1984.

    It's little wonder that the 2022-3 strike wave which was meant to signal (according to the RMT's Mick Lynch) that "the working class was back" ended with few or no gains. In fact for postal workers, who've faced huge job cuts since, and degradation of all their previously hard-won conditions, it has been an infuriating defeat!

    Instead of co-ordinating strikes and mobilising workers together on the ground, each section of workers struck in splendid isolation with only one or two token exceptions.

    Yes, we should know better! Forty years ago, the strongest battalion of the working class took on the full might of Tory PM Margaret Thatcher's "armed bodies of men", fighting heroically for over 13 months. And lost.

    This wasn't just a defeat for the miners. It was a defeat for the whole of the working class. Afterwards there was a prolonged period of demoralisation. Many workers concluded that "if the miners could not win, the rest of us have no chance".

    This was precisely Thatcher's intention. She saw her no-holds-barred battle against the miners as a class war, aimed at the whole of the working class, with herself as the capitalists' chief of staff. Not one worker should be allowed to think it was possible to fight the bosses' industrial closure plan, involving massive job cuts and an unprecedented turn of the exploitation screw. Not only that, but the ground was to be laid for the across-the-board privatisation of (then) state-owned utilities - telecoms, gas, electricity, water, etc., without opposition from the vast public sector workforce.

    Thatcher carried out all her plans successfully. But her success was never inevitable. Had the miners seen their battle in the same way she saw hers - a class war - needing the full mobilisation all of their class brothers and sisters, there is a good chance Thatcher and the bosses could have been beaten. Of course there's no point in crying over spilt milk. But every reason not to keep repeating the same mistake.