THE announcement that £520,000 worth of savings from the chief executive’s department have been found will be small consolation to the hundreds of council employees who are to lose their jobs in the coming weeks or months.

We will shortly know more precisely where the axe will fall, but there is no doubt that the coalition government’s imposed £12.2m budget cut for Bury will seriously damage vital services and will affect some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our borough.

The Green Party accepts that the Government borrowing of 12 per cent of GDP is unsustainable.

We would aim to more than halve the £178bn deficit by 2013 through a programme of efficiencies, increased taxation and investments in Green Jobs, housing, renewable energies, research and public transport.

In a carefully-costed alternative budget published in our 2010 General Election Manifesto “Fair is worth fighting for”, the Green Party exposed David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s sickening mantra that “there is no alternative”. This is a lie. Our paid-for budget shows that by raising taxation alone, we would halve the gap between government expenditure and revenues by 2013-14 (as the Labour Government proposed) and progressively reduce the deficit thereafter.

We stated that we needed to raise taxation from 36 per cent of GDP to 45 per cent in 2013.

We favour the introduction of a 50 per cent tax for incomes above £100,000, a “Robin Tax” on sterling foreign exchange transactions, a special tax on bankers’ shameless bonuses and a crack down on tax havens. In our report “Cuts: the callous con-trick, Finance for the Future” (*), we estimate that tax avoidance added to tax evasion and unpaid tax in the UK alone could be as high as a staggering £100 billion a year.

We would also levy new eco-taxes on non-renewables and pollutants to de-carbonise our economy and we would scrap Trident.

The Green Party believes that the Coalition’s attacks on our public services are an ideologically driven assault on local government, the welfare state and fairness in favour of the free market. Under the banner of cutting the deficit, the government’s slash and burn policies will inevitably lead to a wider gap still between rich and poor in this country and risk a backwards slide in the economy.

We believe that the social cost of this age of austerity will be horrific and communities will be robbed of the glue that holds them together. As already seen in Bury, our libraries, schools, youth centres, NHS services, civic halls and parks are under threat.

But up and down the country, our communities are rallying to protect their local services and we should do everything we can to ensure those campaigns succeed.

(*) This report can be read at:.financeforthefuture.com/TaxBriefing.pdf.

Nicole Haydock Bury Green Party Guiseley Close Bury