We recently had Tamsyn Widdon as a guest at one of our meetings, speaking on the subject of Modern Monetary Theory and the myths surrounding government funding.
Thanks to Zuzanna Michajluk for her summation of the key points.
NEEDS BUDGETS: WHAT USE ARE YOU TO YOUR CLASS By Rob Rooney @tuscalltheway on Wordpress April 9, 2026
The fortunes of the needs budget are inextricably bound up with the class war which has been raging since at least 1819 and which some in Your Party are engaged in.
If we draw up a balance sheet, the needs budget forces look deceptively strong. It’s Your Party policy as decided at the Liverpool conference. CTUC’s “Needs Budget for Cornwall” campaign won the endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn at the launch of Your Party in Cornwall. It’s the policy of Unite the Union, GMB and the local government arm of UNISON. We have the example of Liverpool City Council 1983-87 as a template to answer those who say a needs budget is impractical. Up and down the country, trades councils and other activists are busy devising needs budgets, having meetings and agitating in their areas. Liverpool Trades Council produced a 75-page, detailed document spelling out how Liverpool could have rejected the recommendation for a £56 million cut in the budget this year and made a start on building socially-owned homes in the city.
What’s most in the needs budget’s favour is that it demolishes the orthodoxy that cuts are inevitable. When you spell out to people that the solution to the housing crisis is in our hands, the same with the privatisation of public services generally, that we can actually start to make improvements to social provision like free universal childcare, reduced school class sizes, properly-insulated homes and that the funds for making a start on this are down the back of the sofa, the defenders of the status-quo are exposed as being on the wrong side of a history that goes back 150 years to the “moral force” and “physical force” split in the Chartist movement, to the founding conference of the Labour Party in 1900 when the revolutionary path was abandoned in favour of Parliamentarianism, to every retreat, accommodation, compromise and shoddy, sell-out since.
That split is evident in Your Party. If you want to know what use you are to the working class, your stance on the needs budget gives you the answer.
The fairy story fed to us by the ruling class about who we are and what’s in our interest, has a powerful hold, I’m afraid to say. It’s clear, from the interactions we in Cornwall have had with councillors and the trade unions, as well as other parts of the community, that there’s a lack of confidence which stems from a capitulation to the cuts agenda over the past 47 years.
Surely the only point of having councillors is to ensure local services are provided. If that’s the case, councillors who have participated in the systematic destruction of public services in recent years are negating the very reason for their existence. In Cornwall, they seem deaf to the idea that meeting need rather than cutting costs should be their motivation and blind to the suffering their decisions cause. They’re clearly not going to change and they have to be replaced.
For that to happen, a needs budget movement needs to form and in Cornwall that means a no-cuts, needs budget candidate being in place in each of the 87 wards in the next elections in 2029 and the trade unions giving unequivocal backing. That seems improbable just now but we live in volatile times. A lot can happen in a short time – look at the events in France in 1968 – and what we know is that there is a huge desire for a genuinely democratic, socialist party.
Your Party could play a play a part in forming such a movement – if the Stalinist straitjacket it’s currently in can be cast off.
