THE Tory party conference greeted with rapturous applause the pledge by George Osborne that any future Tory government would drive the working class into the gutter in order to pay off the bankers debts.
He pledged to cut all benefits to the unemployed and low paid by £25 billion in order to reduce the government’s budget deficit to zero.
As a start, Osborne and Cameron would impose a two-year freeze on all working-age benefits including Child Benefit, Tax Credits, Jobseekers Allowance, Housing Benefit and Income Support.
A massive cut for ten million households across the country. Half of the ten million households have one or both partners in work.
According to calculations this would result in a couple with one child, both of whom earn £13,000 a year, would lose £354.20, while a family with two children and one parent in work earning £25,000 a year, would lose £494 a year through these cuts.
The Tories are promising cuts in benefits for the poor and tax relief to the rich.
Osborne said in his speech: ‘The economics of high taxation are a thing of the past.’
So it couldn’t be clearer: smash the living standard of millions of workers, increase child poverty to levels not seen since the times of Charles Dickens, drive an entire generation of youth into homelessness but don’t touch the wealth of the bourgeoisie.
Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, wants to turn the clock back even further than the 19th century, he wants to replace benefit payments with ‘smartcards’.
He intends to launch a trial of this scheme which would see benefits paid in tokens or smartcards which could only be spent on ‘food and other essentials’.
According to Smith, workers receiving any benefits in cash will only fritter them away on drink or drugs.
This is nothing more than a modern equivalent of the ‘truck system’ or ‘company stores system’ under which workers were paid in tokens that could only be spent in company stores.
This system was outlawed by numerous pieces of legislation some dating back to the 15th century.
Now Smith and the Tories want to revive it for those on benefits.
Undoubtedly the next step would be to make such smartcards only accepted in some of the supermarkets that are experiencing such dire financial problems at the moment.
As far as the Tories are concerned, workers are feckless and irresponsible and they require the firm whip of their natural superiors to keep them in line and keep them working as low paid, wage slaves whose human labour is the sole source of the capitalists’ profits.
That Cameron, Osborne and Smith can parade at their conference and outline their proposals for the most vicious class war against workers tells us a great deal about the opposition they face from the Labour Party.
With a Labour Party committed also to reducing the deficit, to making its own cuts to benefits and the welfare state, the Tories are confident in making this open declaration of war.
They are also relying heavily on the passivity of the TUC leaders who merely condemned the ‘harshness’ and unfairness of these cuts but proposed absolutely no action to stop them being put into practice, apart from appealing for workers to join in the one-day protest march on 18th October.
The situation has become much too serious for the struggle to be confined to one-day strikes or marches.
The time for protest is over, the Tories have outlined the very first steps that capitalism will have to take if it is to save itself from drowning in the sea of the bankers’ debts.
Now is the time for the building of a new revolutionary leadership in the trade unions that will demand that the protest marches and one-day strikes be transformed into a general strike to bring down the government and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
