14 years of austerity have pushed the UK's public services well past their limits. Our communities are at breaking point. Every part of life has been damaged by it. Choosing to implement an austerity budget this October would be a disaster.

When people can't feed their families, afford energy bills, or get a doctor's appointment, of course there's no way to get the economy growing or to start undoing the crises we're trapped in.

But instead of investing in people, the government has began cutting spending further: cuts to winter fuel payments and £5.5 billion of other spending cuts. In this October budget, it looks like the pattern will continue: massive spending cuts to fit into arbitrary rules that the government has imposed on itself.

We're very clear: this would be a choice. The government does not have to carry on down this destructive path. We need the government to rule out more austerity, invest in people and communities, and tax the rich.

We're asking you to sign this petition to demand the government does not choose more austerity. By coming together, we can call on Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to avoid the mistakes of the past and keep their promises of an end to austerity and a changed country.

What's the alternative to cuts?

The "rules" that prevent investment in society were made up by politicians, and badly designed at that. They demand short-term spending cuts instead of long-term investment, forcing the UK into a vicious cycle of cuts, inequality, decline, and more cuts. Economists are clear that they can be rewritten to allow for much more public investment.

The UK's ultra rich have also made staggering amounts of money off the rest of us over the last decades, and particularly throughout the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis. Our work found that billionaire wealth has increased by over 1100% since 1990, and grew by £150bn between 2020 and 2022 alone. Companies like British Gas or our Big Six Banks have been making record profits, and shareholder dividends hit an all-time high last quarter.

This massive increase in wealth for the very richest is damaging the rest of society. We have found that more unequal countries have more unstable economies, a position now shared by the IMF. They have worse outcomes for health and education, more unsafe communities, and less trust in institutions and each other. And we've found that it comes with much more damage to the climate.

This budget is an opportunity to correct long-term structural issues that encourage inequality and undermine the UK’s ability to grow and thrive; it is also fair, popular, and right that any revenue that must be raised is raised by taxing those who’ve profited from decades of crisis.

How could we tax the rich?

Tax Justice UK has estimated that we could raise £60bn to invest in us just by taxing the rich. In this budget, the Chancellor should:

• Increase taxes on income from wealth by equalising capital gains tax with taxes on income from work (raising £16.7bn), applying National Insurance to investment income (£10.2bn), and introducing a share buyback tax (£2bn).

• Fully close the loopholes taken advantage of by the richest in inheritance tax, the non-dom scheme, carried interest, and oil and gas (raising £2.2bn)

• Introduce windfall taxes on the obscene profits made by the big banks (raising £14bn), introduce a stronger windfall tax without loopholes or subsidies for oil and gas (£4.2bn) and on antisocial sources of pollution, such as private jets and superyachts (raising £783m)

• Introduce an annual wealth tax of 2% on assets over £10 million, raising up to £24bn a year from just taxing the 20,000 richest people in the UK.

What was the impact of austerity?

Austerity has a massive cost to society. The sheer damage it did is still being understood; research published in June 2024 by LSE found 190,000 excess deaths caused by austerity. Failing to invest and poor growth has led to a well-understood economic gap, which in June 2024 the IFS calculated at £11,000 GDP per head. The impact of this has been deeply unequal and intersectional. For example, reduction in health and welfare spending disproportionately hit people with low incomes, Black and Brown communities, people with disabilities; regional disparities widened. These unequal impacts themselves lead to higher costs for the treasury, as people in worse health require more extensive treatment, are subject to higher crime, struggle to access education that would lead to higher incomes and tax receipts and so on. Compared to more equal countries, we estimate the UK’s high inequality costs the government £106.2bn every year.