On Friday 4 February, from 11.30am-4pm, Labour Party leader Ed Milliband and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls will be coming to a special Labour Party recruitment event at the Sage concert hall on the banks of the Tyne, Gateshead. They say the consultation event is to speak to people about how ‘Labour can be an opposition that will stand up for those families who work hard and want to get on in life.’

When Milliband and Balls say they want to talk to 'hard working families', it is clear what they really mean. They consider the majority of the working class to be 'the undeserving poor' – they look down on us and blame us for our poverty. The Labour Party intends to abandon the majority of the working class - including millions in low-paid and insecure jobs, unemployed people, young people, older people, the long term-sick, refugees and low-paid migrants, unpaid carers and single parents - to the cuts and rising unemployment, while extending a sweaty palm to middle class voters.

This is class war. The Labour Party are on the same side as the ConDems and their cronies in the banks and finance companies. They always have been. In 1976 Labour imposed savage cuts in state spending. In February of that year substantial cuts in public spending were announced of £2 billion (£600 million from education alone) and further billions of pounds worth of cuts were later announced. In agreement with the TUC, wage increases were to be kept below 4.5% of average earning – much less than the inflation rate – representing the biggest record fall in average disposable income for over a hundred years. In 1978 unemployment rose by over a million. All of this resulted in the Winter of Discontent and laid the basis for the Tory cuts of the 1980s. In the 1990s Labour councils around Britain implemented the Tory's hated Poll Tax, using measures which included sending bailiffs into working class estates, withholding housing benefit from those who refused to register for the tax and offering rewards if people would grass on their neighbours.

Once again, it was Labour who started the ball rolling for the cuts we face now. In autumn 2009, Labour proposed to cut state spending by £70 billion. In early 2010, with 25,000 council job losses already announced, the then Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling told the Financial Times that halving the public deficit in four years was ‘non-negotiable’. He later promised cuts deeper than under Thatcher if Labour was re-elected. In March 2010 Labour passed the punitive 'Welfare Reform Act', which included measures to force unemployed people to do menial labour for £1.83 an hour or face losing their benefits. More recently, Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Douglas Alexander has proudly stated that ‘many of the government’s current [welfare] reforms build on what [Labour] set in train’ (The Guardian, 9 November 2010). Labour, he said, would support cuts in housing benefit, reduced access to disability living allowance, temporary changes to the uprating of some benefits, and testing the availability for work of incapacity benefit claimants. Up and down the country Labour-led councils are preparing to make thousands of workers redundant and implement the cuts in state welfare that the ruling class requires. In his letter inviting people to the event at the Sage Ed Miliband stated ‘I don’t disagree with everything the coalition are doing, and when it comes to things like sorting out our benefits system we will support their measures where they are right.’

Today the trade union leadership and the Labour Party are determined to control the movement against the cuts, to neutralise its revolutionary potential and cut new deals with the ruling class. We need to make it clear that the Labour Party is in no position to lead the movement against the cuts, and Milliband and Balls are not welcome in Tyneside.

Labour, Tory, all the same - They all play the bankers' game!
No ifs, no buts - No public sector cuts!