EX-BANKER and City financier, Sir David Freud, is Labour’s ‘Workfare’ programme architect.
He drew up the plans to force single parents and all but the most seriously disabled onto Workfare, work-for-your-benefit schemes, where refusal would mean a loss of benefit and being plunged into penury.
He aimed to progressively harass all single parents with children of four years or older into forced work.
He also aimed to force up to one million disabled off Incapacity Benefit into work.
He aimed to hand big business extremely profitable contracts to put the unemployed onto Workfare slave labour jobs.
He was what the Labour leaders really liked, a real banker, who really wanted to get after single parents, the sick and the unemployed with a big stick.
Freud however has just dumped the Labour Party and joined the Tories. They are really pleased with him and plan to make him a member of the House of Lords so that he can serve as shadow Welfare Minister and as a member of any new Tory government.
As far as Tory leader Cameron is concerned, he is a ‘hugely impressive figure’.
The Labour government has however not sent him on his way with curses. They are genuinely sorry to see him go.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman confirmed, ‘We discussed this matter in advance with David Freud and he has left his role as an adviser to the department by mutual consent.
‘We thanked him for his important work in building consensus around the welfare reform green paper in July and wished him well for the future.’
Labour now intends to carry out the policies that this Tory banker has left behind him.
However, what this defection shows is just how close the Labour and Tory leaderships really are, and that policy-wise they are like two sides of the same coin.
In fact, despite the simulated outrage, anger and shock displayed by the Labour and Tory leaders at House of Commons question time they have no principled differences on any issue of policy.
They are agreed on the issue of sending more and more troops to Afghanistan.
They are agreed on the privatisation of all of the state-owned sectors of the economy.
The latest example is the Royal Mail where the Tories have assured Brown that they will prevent some Labour MPs sabotaging the legislation to privatise the Royal Mail by voting for the government. If they voted against, they could bring the government down.
They are all agreed that capitalism and its banks must be supported in every possible way and that the working class and the middle class must be made to sacrifice so that this can be done.
Any differences that they have over how to save capitalism are minor, none are differences over principle.
In fact, the present parliamentary situation could be characterised as constituting a situation where both sides are waiting for the economic situation to further collapse to the point where they will have to launch a national government to ‘save the nation’ by imposing wage cuts, job cuts, pension cuts and tax rises on both the working class and the middle class.
The major parliamentary parties are simply a national government in waiting.
What the working class requires in this situation is a revolutionary leadership that will mobilise the trade unions to bring the Brown government down from the left, in order to bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies to put an end to capitalism and go forward to socialism.
This leadership is the WRP. Join it today.
