Message to Unite: Green Party are the alternative

Message to Unite: Green Party are the alternative


17 January 2012


The Green Party urges unions to back the positive Green alternative.


The Guardian article by Len McCluskey, General Secretary of the trade union Unite, has reaffirmed Labour's failure to stand up for ordinary people. Labour's biggest financial supporter has publicly acknowledged their party's abject failure to oppose neoliberal austerity.


All three main parties now seek to protect the vested interests of deregulated financial capitalism - and in doing so they endorse an economic model that squeezes the poorest in society to sustain their broken system.


The public sector pay freeze will strip £2,600 off the wages of a teaching assistant. Pension reforms will see the average pension for a female public sector worker slashed to just £4,000. And cuts to education force students to pay £9000 a year, placing an entire generation in systemic debt.


Opposition to unfair and economically illiterate austerity must now unite around a Green New Deal for Britain. Green Quantitative Easing is needed to act as a direct stimulus to fund the jobs that create long term assets in the real economy. The UK needs a plan to reverse the unemployment that is driving up the welfare bill, and which instead gets people back into work and paying taxes.


The Green Party calls on Trade Unions to back the Green alternative that is now the only voice standing up against an economic system designed to place the tab for 2008 on the UK's public services.