Unison General Secretary Andrea Egan urged Prime Minister Andy Burnham to use Britain’s Oct. 28 budget to begin redirecting public money and tax policy toward workers and public services.
In an opinion column published by The Guardian on Oct. 26, Egan proposed treating tax policy as part of that shift: she wants capital gains taxed more like income and higher contributions from wealthy people. She also called for services to return to public control, alongside a multiyear funding commitment covering public provision and workers’ pay. Egan said business lobby groups and right-wing media oppose the tax changes.
Egan said trade unions would back a worker-centered economic agenda if Burnham’s government put it into practice. She presented the budget as an opportunity to begin that work, tying union support to policy decisions.
She argued that temporary help with household bills would leave deeper economic questions unresolved. Egan warned that failure to change course could give far-right groups an opening.
Egan cast Burnham’s opposition to neoliberalism as a break with an economic order formed in the 1980s. She said the existing settlement might have impoverished most people even as some benefited, and argued that those who profited from it would resist a shift. She pointed to the economic changes after World War II as a measure of the scale she believes is needed.
Burnham’s Sept. 29 speech to Labour’s annual conference set out a fiscal constraint. The Labour Party’s transcript says he pledged to follow the government’s fiscal rules and argued that change could proceed only as quickly as the country could afford. That condition will frame debate over how much of Egan’s program can be taken up in the budget.
HM Treasury has scheduled the budget for Wednesday, Oct. 28.
