Mao famously said that political work must precede economic work. This dictum is well understood by the Tories as evidenced last year by their rolling out of the big lie about Labour’s ‘deficit legacy’ before embarking on £95 billion spending cuts to fund the banking bail out.
Now, in order to legitimise attacks on the pay and pensions of workers in public services, the right wing propagandists of the so called Policy Exchange are a running ludicrous media operation claiming that the pay gap between the public and private sector continues to widen in favour of the former:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/public-sector-pay-gap-continues-to-widen-2281348.html
This will be news to the millions of public sector workers currently subjected to a Government imposed pay freeze particularly in local government where no pay rise has been awarded for two years.
UNISON GS Dave Prentis is right to pull no punch in his response to the distortions and lies of the pro-market propagandists:
"This a crude attempt to drive a wedge between the nation’s workforce and provoke a race "This a crude attempt to drive a wedge between the nation’s workforce and provoke a race to the bottom on pay and conditions. The data used is out of date and does not reflect the true picture and it does not compare like with like. It should be taken with a huge barrel of salt. This year the banking and finance sector, the utilities, car manufacturing, the retail sector have all had pay increases and city bonuses have made a spectacular come-back’: http://www.unison.org.uk/asppresspack/pressrelease_view.asp?id=2281
