David Cameron's plans to reduce budget deficit could spark riots - TUC.

The TUC are warning that, if Cameron is elected, and if he brings about the kind of cuts in public services which is he is hinting that he might, then we could very well see a return of rioting in the UK.

Moves to cut public spending will spark the threat of industrial action by millions of workers and a possible return to the riots last seen in the 1980s, union leaders have warned.

The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, used the eve of the TUC conference to warn that public spending cuts would trigger a "double quick, double dip" recession that would push unemployment to more than 4 million.

As mainstream parties draw the battle lines on cutting the budget deficit, Barber said choosing spending cuts over effective investment to hasten recovery was "pure economic masochism".

He warned that any moves by a Conservative government to scale back the public sector would raise the prospect of mass industrial unrest: "If a Conservative government was elected that was taking the axe to the public sector, that might well provoke a reaction. There would be that danger."

The last time we had riots in this country was during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, when unemployment reached over three million and the gap between rich and poor expanded in a way which was previously unheard of in post industrial Britain.

And yet Cameron is setting out his stall promising cuts which could well be savage, certainly if the words of Philip Hammond, Cameron's shadow Treasury chief secretary are to be believed. He is promising to make himself the nation's hate figure. So one can only imagine what the Tories have in store for us.

"Spending cuts will provoke a double quick, double dip recession. Unemployment could well exceed 4 million and it would take many years before there was any chance of returning to anything like full employment. That would scar for life a whole generation of young people," said Barber.

Cameron is being idiotic about this. His party have been out of power for more than a decade because it took that long to for the British public to stop thinking of the Tories as the "Nasty party" and yet, with power within his grasp, he is proposing the exact same policies which produced rioting on the streets of Britain in the 1980's.

The notion of asking people earning the kind of wages being handed out in the city of London to pay a little more in taxation is so repulsive to Cameron that he would rather withdraw services from those most in need and risk the social upheaval that such policies might bring.

I know that there is every chance that Labour are going to be hammered at the next election, but reading stories like this makes me wonder if people really know what they are letting themselves in for.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Cameron, Brown, TUC, cuts is services, riots, rioting