Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood has attended a cross-party meeting that aims to devise an alternative to the cuts agenda being driven by the “Con/Dem” Coalition Government in Westminster.
The AM for South Wales Central was invited to attend the meeting in London, which was organised by the TUC, following months of high-profiling campaigning against cutbacks in the public sector. As chair of the PCS union’s cross-party group at the Assembly, Ms Wood has spoken at several rallies this year in defence of the civil service redundancy scheme and against public sector job losses.
Ms Wood said: “The Tories and Liberal Democrats in the UK Coalition Government seem intent on inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the most vulnerable people in our society in order to reduce the budget deficit. A total of £11 billion has been stripped from the welfare system at a stroke in George Gideon Osborne’s budget.
“It defies all logic and morality to be taking such a hard-line against the lowest paid while the richest and those who caused this crisis get off relatively scot-free.
“The meeting in London was all about devising alternative means of reducing the deficit without any adverse impact on the most vulnerable in society and campaigning to protect public services.
“Cracking down on tax exiles; as suggested by the PCS Union, scrapping the increasingly irrelevant Trident nuclear missile programme and higher rates of tax for those earning the most who can most afford to pay, are just three examples of how the budget deficit could be tackled without taking money from those who are struggling to make ends meet.
“I hope the cross-party co-operation at the TUC-organised meeting will in some way help us achieve a more progressive approach to reducing the budget deficit.”
