DESPITE all the government statements against leaking government information before it is to go before the House of Commons, the Treasury was at it yesterday leaking some of what the Chancellor will announce tomorrow.
Having handed out tens, if not hundreds of billions to the bankers, for everyone else it is to be death by a thousand cuts!
He is to announce that there will be £15bn of spending cuts in his budget over the next two years.
Darling is to make £10bn of Whitehall ‘efficiency savings’ from 2011/12, on top of the £5bn that has already been pledged from 2010/11.
This will mean up to 100,000 more civil servants losing their jobs, in a situation where already 80,000 jobs have been axed, 25,000 more are set to go and 500 jobcentres and benefit offices have already been closed in the last five years.
This is at a time when it is accepted by the government that unemployment is set to rise by 50 per cent to 3.2 million, as industries shut down and more and more workers are sacked at ten-minutes notice by ruthless bosses and bankers.
What is to happen to them as more and more job centres close? The budget is expected to confirm that they are to be handed over to private contractors, who will be paid for the numbers of unemployed they succeed in putting onto Workfare, slave labour for the bosses.
Darling will also have to reveal a colossal rise in public borrowing this year, with a figure of £170bn being put forward, and also a catastrophic decline of the economy, and a fall of the pound sterling, by 25 per cent in the last year against the dollar.
Its main effect has been to force food prices ever higher making the lives of the working and unemployed poor impossible.
In the Autumn’s pre-Budget report Darling predicted that the economy would contract by between 0.75 per cent and 1.25 per cent in 2009.
It is now being forecast that he will have to revise this to a fall of between 3.0 per cent and 3.5 per cent, making for the biggest slump since the 1930s
With unemployment rising rapidly, and with it the costs of keeping the unemployed alive, at the same time as rising food prices create a pressure for more wages, the pound will only be kept from complete collapse and the state from bankruptcy by a police-state regime permanently at war with the working class.
This is why this budget will see an acceleration of the privatisation drive, to hand the NHS over to the private medical companies, to completely privatise the Royal Mail, and to completely privatise care in the community.
To maintain crisis-ridden capitalism and to preserve the banks, the Welfare State, the great post-1945 gain of the working class, is to be completely demolished.
As far as pay is concerned the bosses and bankers are already agitating for a freeze in the minimum wage, so that the poverty line will be redrawn, and a freeze in public sector pay, so that millions of public sector workers will be pauperised.
On education, the Budget will confirm that the privatised but ailing Academy system is going to be expanded, and that higher education is going to pay for itself, via lifting the cap on tuition fees, so that only the rich will get an education. Everybody else will be offered a six-month unpaid apprenticeship – with a certificate at the end of it – at a fast food outlet.
This is the way of life that Brown and Darling are set to unveil tomorrow, one where the bankers matter, but everybody else is expendable.
Instead of getting better off, every year the working class is going to have poverty imposed on it for the sake of the banks.
Only a socialist revolution will put an end to this nightmare. It will not take long for the masses to realise this truth and to embrace it with all of their energy.
