THE Tory-led coalition has got working class and middle class families with young children in its sights for savage cuts as it seeks to slash the massive state deficit in 2012 in order to save capitalism, and its bankrupt bankers and bosses.
Families with children will be hardest hit by tax and benefit changes according to the The Family and Parenting Institute (FPI) which said yesterday that the average income of households with children will drop by 4.2% between 2010-11 and 2015-16, the equivalent of a massive £1,250 a year.
Average household income however will fall 0.9%, or £215 a year, and the FPI suggests that much of this will be due to tax and benefit changes, as well as the remaining income being wiped out by inflation, including rapidly rising bus and rail fares.
The PFI finds that ‘families with children are shouldering a disproportionate burden,’ and that ‘This disparity is largely driven by a package of benefit reforms which have affected families with children.’
Further that ‘As a result of the changes being introduced between January 2011 and April 2014 families are set to lose more than pensioner households and working-age households without children,’ it added.
Truly the coalition, with its plan to save capitalism and its ruling class, is revealing itself to be the persecutor of hard working middle class and working class families and their children. They are not their protectors, as they have been pretending for years.
In fact, they are now throwing them to the wolves, and all to save a broken ruling class and a broken capitalist system that is visibly disintegrating.
Among the many changes already implemented by the coalition government are VAT at 20%, reductions in tax credits, slashing cuts in housing benefit, a freeze on child benefits, and the use of the consumer prices index (CPI) to uprate benefits each year.
Other forthcoming changes include more cuts to the child tax credit and child benefit systems, reductions in council tax benefit, and ‘medical reassessment’ of claimants of disability living allowance.
As a result, the charity argues, by 2012-15 a further half a million children will be living in absolute poverty.
Yesterday the Labour shadow minister for Women and Equalities, Yvette Cooper, said that the research was a ‘damning verdict’ on the coalition’s family policies and she accused the government of being ‘out of touch’ with the pressures on families.
She added: ‘The government is taking more from children than from the banks. Women and children are paying the highest price. It isn’t even working – with £158bn more borrowing than planned, as a result of their failed economic policies.’
However the truth is that the Labour Party put up to £1.2 trillion into saving the banks in 2008 and is now swinging further to the right to try to rival the Tories and Liberals as the opponents of the Welfare State, and the benefit system. As well, it is adopting the new Burnham stance that the privatisation of the NHS can be carried out without passing the Health and Social Care Bill.
On Tuesday, Labour Work and Pensions shadow secretary, Liam Byrne proclaimed that the Welfare system as a whole was evil since it had ‘skewed social behaviour’. His new adopted principle is that ‘idleness was an evil every bit as insidious as disease or squalor’, unless you are rich, of course. Plus, that Beveridge would be ‘appaled at the spiralling cost of benefits. He would scarcely have believed housing benefit alone is costing over £20bn a year. That is simply too high’. Byrne also opposed the ‘unearned support’ of the unemployed.
The truth is that Labour would do exactly the same as the Tory-led coalition, and may well join it in the future, since it is seeking to save capitalism, and is prepared to destroy the Welfare State to do it.
The reality is that the only way that the jobs, wages, living standards and basic rights of the vast majority of the population, men, women, and children can be defended, is through the working class carrying out a socialist revolution to smash capitalism and go forward to socialism.
