A ‘UNIVERSAL Credit’ is to be introduced in 2013, to replace all existing benefits. Cameron’s Welfare Bill includes sanctions for those turning down jobs and a cap on benefits paid to a single family.
The universal credit will see existing out-of-work and in-work entitlements, such as Jobseeker’s Allowance, Income Support and Housing Benefit, paid as a single lump sum.
Cameron told the world yesterday: ‘We’re also doing something no government has done before – and that is get to grips with the cost of welfare.
‘Over the past ten years that bill increased by £56 billion – that’s over and above inflation. Over the next four years we’re reducing it by £5.5 billion – in real terms.’
Cameron blamed the crisis over welfare payments on the criminal mentality that he claims the Welfare state has produced.
His childish reasoning goes: ‘When the welfare system was born, there was what we might call a collective culture of responsibility. . . . In other words, personal responsibility acted as a brake on abuse of the system.’
This happy state of affairs does not exist any more. He says: ‘Now let’s be honest about where we’ve travelled to, from there to here. That collective culture of responsibility – taken for granted sixty years ago – has in many ways been lost. You see it in the people who go off sick when they could work or the people who refuse job offer after job offer.’
He, of course does, not analyse the place of the bankers and their millions of bonus payments – awarded to themselves, after they have brought about the current capitalist crisis – in this pantheon of shameful abuse.
After damning the British working class he, however, insists that they can be beaten out of the benefit disease. He says: ‘But I know this country and therefore refuse to believe that there are five million people who are inherently lazy and have no interest in bettering themselves and their families. What I want to argue is that the real fault lies with the system itself. . . .
‘The benefit system has created a benefit culture. It doesn’t just allow people to act irresponsibly, but often actively encourages them to do so.’
It was after all that good old Tory Enoch Powell who described council housing and the Welfare State as a sin. Cameron agrees, adding that the welfare state corrupts and leads to crime.
He again does not trace the impact that the sheer selfishness of massive hereditary wealth and private schools has on the youth of the bourgeoisie, who then travel along the path, from being born with a silver spoon in their mouths to the cabinet via the Bullingdon club and Oxford.
In a word, Cameron is a political scoundrel.
When the benefit system was brought in, unemployment was numbered in the lower hundreds of thousands.
As the crisis of post war capitalism got under way, in the 1960s and 70s, youth unemployment and then massive unemployment came on the scene with a three million plus strong permanent reserve army of labour.
It was then that the benefit bill went up, a product of the crisis of the capitalist system.
Cameron sets out to resolve this aspect of the crisis of capitalism, not through policies that provide more jobs, at a time when unemployment is set to leap upwards, but through starving the unemployed and their families and forcing them to work for nothing or for very little.
It is capitalism that is sick, in fact it is in its death agony, and mass unemployment and cut-throat Toryism are one of its products.
Both must be eliminated through the socialist revolution that will provide jobs and houses for all through the development of a socialist planned economy that will follow on from the expropriation of the bosses and the bankers.
