The government has announced it wants to sack 600,000 public sector workers over the next five years and they are looking at between 25 per cent and 40 per cent cuts across Whitehall departments. These figures may sound like fantasises of the young conservatives, and in some ways they are, but they are also official government policy.

In Hackney, the council is being asked to cut £80 million from its budget. If this goes ahead unchallenged we will see the decimation of services.

The new government has declared war on the public sector. This is ideologically driven and in terms of cuts is worse than anything Thatcher dreamt. In the meantime, the Liberal Democrats have sold their soul for a referendum.

Tube workers are now on the front line of a battle to defend the public sector. Their employer is seeking to cut 800 jobs from the tubes. They aim to reduce the number of staff selling tickets (with a move away from the norm where a ticket office will be open throughout the station opening hours). There will be increases in 'lone-working' which makes staff vulnerable and routine closures of ticket offices. While claiming that these jobs can be lost through 'voluntary severance' the employer is refusing to give an assurance of 'no compulsory redundancy', either as a point of principle, or because they have further rounds of staff planned if they succeed in getting these through.

These cuts will mean there are less staff on stations when passengers need them, for advice and information, or because the ticketing machines are not working (or passengers need support in using them). It will put remaining staff under additional pressure and reduce the safety on stations, particularly late at night. There are also plans for changes to 'terms and conditions of employment' which mean people will work harder for less.

Cuts will mean that some stations are left with no staff qualified for safety critical duties and some will be completely un-staffed. Imagine what would happen in the event of a fire, a terrorist attack, or a person under a train? LU is currently one of the safest railways in the world, running trains less than 2 minutes apart. Now Boris and his cronies want to take risks with the lives of passengers and workers alike.

The management 'case' for these cuts is that there is a budget deficit arising from the Private Public Partnership, (the privatisation of upgrade work to Metronet and Tubelines which is now millions over budget) and the government's decision that tube workers and passengers must pay for this failed policy as part of reducing the 'national deficit'. The train operating arm of the Tube actually runs at a profit. It is only years of under-investment by the Tories and the New Labour insanity of PPP that is driving these cuts.

There is of course a very simple alternative.
1) With regard the national deficit, we should simply make the bankers wait for their money (they got us into this mess in the first place). The Tories are using the national debt (which in reality does not need to be paid off anytime soon) as an opportunity to introduce savage cuts that will devastate the public sector, something they know they could not get away with if the economy was booming.
2) In terms of the GLA and the transport budget, the Mayor, for purely political reasons, is refusing to extend the congestion charge (it will generate money itself, improve air quality, and increase the use of public transport) and continues to spend money on his 'little England' dream of revising the Routemaster bus.

The government and the Mayor won't adopt these alternatives for purely ideological reasons (they want to cut the public sector, because they don't think we deserve these services).

Two of the rail unions, TSSA and RMT are co-ordinating strike ballots, which close on 18 August. If these deliver the expected majorities for industrial action to protect jobs and services, we can expect a political and ideological attack on the workers involved. With the Evening Standard leading the charge and high court judges exercising their personal anti-union prejudices if, as expected, London Underground seeks an injunction to stop the strike.

Faced with these attacks on trade unionists, we need to mobilise our supporters to defend them. Hackney TUC will be seeking to mobilise our communities in support of these workers and to defend our tube services. We need investment in public transport not cuts. We call for solidarity with the tube workers as part of a general working class response to the government's declaration of war against the private sector.

Visit http://www.tssa.org.uk/ or http://www.rmt.org.uk/ for more details.