LABOUR’S leaders love the rich and have no time for the poor.
As a government, Labour turned Britain into a second tax-free home for Russian billionaire oligarchs who had managed to get their hands on Soviet property under the Yeltsin regime.
At the same time, it championed the export of millions of manufacturing jobs from Britain, and insisted that the bosses had a right and a duty to go where the profits were the greatest, and the wages the lowest.
Under its rule since 1997, the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. Before the crash, business flourished under its rule, basking in Brown’s light touch regulation of the banks and the major industries.
Now, after the capitalist crash has taken place, Labour’s maxim is that keeping the bankers in the manner to which they have become accustomed is the mission of the Brown government.
The banks have therefore been treated to hundreds of billions of public money.
However, even in these hard times, Labour’s spleen for the poor has, if anything, been sharpened.
The naive would have assumed that the Brown government had learnt its lesson from the furore that surrounded its abolition of the 10p lower rate of taxation for the poor and its replacement by an 18p rate.
Its enthusiasm for caning the poor almost brought it down on that occasion, and it was forced into a humiliating retreat.
Now it is at it again. But there is a method in its madness.
With unemployment set to reach three million by Christmas 2009, it is bringing in legislation that will force one million disabled people and single parents into work or workfare, or else face losing their benefits.
What they are really doing once again is looking after the bourgeoisie.
With one million more due to be demanding access to the JobSeekers Allowance next year, it is clearing the decks of at least one million disabled and single parents to keep government costs down.
This has already caused a storm with many Labour MPs denouncing the measure as a massive and ruthless attack on the poorest people.
At the same time, it is now moving to privatise the Royal Mail and sell off a third of it to TNT for £3bn, thus ending the daily delivery to any part of the country and axing 50,000 jobs!
This has also roused many Labour MPs into angry declarations that they will vote against it in the House of Commons. But once again the Tory Party will vote it through!
Not content with this move to wring billions out of the working class it is starting to find itself . . . as a loan shark.
Currently, the social fund extends £500m a year in interest-free loans to some 1.2 million benefit claimants.
The government now says that in future some loans could be run by credit unions, which it says typically charge annual rates of up to and beyond 26.8 per cent.
Once again, Labour is hammering the poor in order to coddle the bankers.
Details of the proposed changes were released in a Department for Work and Pensions consultation document that states that the government is considering offering contracts to credit unions to provide ‘affordable loans’.
What is to be done about such a Labour government whose Tory allies will see to it that any such measure passes any parliamentary challenge?
All of its anti-working class measures must be fought and defeated.
Since the trade union leaders are refusing to lead this fight they must be removed and be replace by leaders who are prepared to take on the government and bring it down.
Once the working class has brought the Brown government down it must bring in its own workers’ government.
This will expropriate the bankers and the bosses and bring in a socialist planned economy relegating capitalism to the museums.
