ON Wednesday October 30, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves is due to deliver the first Autumn budget by Starmer’s government.
The ground work for this budget has been laid by Reeves ever since Labour won the election in July when she announced that to her shock and horror, the Tories had left a £20 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances that she would have to fill.
This black hole has been increased incrementally by Labour and the latest figure being banded about is that it is now calculated to be £40 billion – no one in government seems to know exactly how bankrupt the UK economy is, only that the working class must be made to pay.
Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph reported that Reeves told the cabinet that the UK faces a £100 billion black hole – the difference between what the country earns and the amount the state spends.
Plugging this black hole will require, as Labour leader Keir Starmer has insisted time and again, ‘hard decisions’ to rescue British capitalism from collapse.
Already workers have experienced the hard decisions Starmer and Reeves intend to inflict on workers when they refused to scrap the Tory two child benefit cap, and insisted on ending the £300 pensioners winter fuel payment.
This week, the New Statesman published a lengthy interview with Reeves by Andrew Marr under the headline: ‘Rachel Reeves’ make-or-break Budget: can the Chancellor save the Labour government and mend Britain’s broken economy?’
The interview doesn’t give any answer, with Reeves insisting that the black hole in the economy was entirely the fault of the last Tory government, and she was at pains to insist to Marr, that the choice before Britain is ‘invest-or decline’.
She continued that despite cutting the pensioners life line of a winter fuel-allowance: ‘I think what people will see is that we are in no way picking on one group of people. Those with the broadest shoulders are going to be bearing the burden of getting our public finances back on a firmer footing.’
Reeves’ comments about those with the ‘broadest backs’ being made to suffer and all the hints being dropped by Labour insiders, has been taken by the press as a clear sign that the budget will contain, as the Telegraph yesterday maintained, ‘the biggest Budget tax raid in history’, along with the first increase in fuel tax for 13 years.
The speculation is that Reeves intends to raise money by increasing National Insurance (NI) for employers and not increase tax for working people.
However, as the Telegraph pointed out this week, the hypocrisy on the part of Reeves and Starmer in claiming that increasing NI would not hit workers pay when two years ago exactly the same policy to increase employers NI contributions was damned as ‘the worst possible tax rise’ that would hit workers’ pay packets.
This followed a warning by the Office for Budget Responsibility that 80% of any NI increase would be passed on to workers through lower wages.
The bosses always have ways to either avoid paying tax or passing the cost on to the workers, either through low wages or cutting back the workforce.
All talk of the ‘broadest shoulders’ bearing the cost of keeping a bankrupt British capitalist system from drowning in debt is just propaganda designed to convince workers that Labour is on the side of the working class and not completely in the pockets of the bosses and speculators.
Also it gives the TUC leaders something to hold on to when justifying their total subservience to a Labour government that is determined to inflict the economic crisis squarely on the backs of workers.
The working class are not fooled by Starmer or Reeves and are demanding action to defend their services and wages from being cut by the savage austerity measures Labour will inflict in an attempt to rescue British capitalism.
The TUC leaders who are incapable of leading any fight against the Starmer government must be sacked.
The TUC Congress must be recalled and a new leadership established that will call an indefinite general strike to kick out the Labour government and go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and build a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward!
