Labour yesterday unveiled its much trailed ‘Get Britain Working’ plan, hailed by Starmer’s government as the ‘biggest employment reforms in a generation’, to drive over two million unemployed, youth and those on long-term sick back into jobs.
The Labour government has committed itself to carrying out the pledge by the last Tory government to cut the UK welfare bill by £3 billion through a ‘radical’ overhaul of the benefit system.
Employment and pensions secretary Liz Kendall officially introduced the plan – which deliberately avoids revealing details of the crackdown on sickness benefits Labour intends to carry out.
Instead of coming clean about their intentions, Kendall produced a White Paper containing a list of pre-announced reforms to Jobcentres and turning NHS hospitals into little more than institutions turning out people fit enough to work.
The criteria for ‘fitness’ to work will be decided not by clinicians but by Work Capability Assessment (WCA) which was reformed last year by the previous Tory government which changed the criteria for qualifying for disability, resulting in 450,000 fewer people designated as unable to work and who then had their benefits stopped.
Labour has already committed to keeping these Tory ‘reforms’.
Extra NHS staff are to be deployed in 20 areas of England where the highest number of people are out of work.
The NHS, under Labour plans, will be transformed from a national health service into one whose function is solely to get people well enough to turn up for any low-paid job available, under threat of being left starve on the streets.
The Tories and the right-wing press were furious that Labour had put off revealing the full details of its plan to slash sickness benefits with the Daily Telegraph newspaper calling it ‘the latest blow to business’ – the bosses are demanding an immediate war to the finish by the Starmer government on workers and youth.
Labour has insisted full details of this war will not be revealed until early next year.
However, at the weekend both Starmer and Kendall made it clear in interviews and articles in the press that the war on benefits Labour will be carried out in the New Year.
Kendall confirmed in a BBC interview on Sunday that her ‘youth guarantee’ policy will force those aged 18 to 21 to be in education or work – or lose all benefits.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday newspaper Starmer declared war on benefits vowing to crack down on £137 billion welfare ‘blight’ as he called it.
In the article, Starmer promised ‘sweeping changes’ including a ‘blitz’ on cheats and those who ‘game the system’ vowing: ‘No more business as usual’.
Starmer wrote: ‘In the coming months, Mail on Sunday readers will see even more sweeping changes. Because make no mistake, we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society.’
In his typical smarmy manner, Starmer attempted to placate workers insisting these reforms would not ‘sow divisions’ by describing people on benefits as ‘shirkers’ but would ‘treat people with dignity and respect’.
Instead, Starmer has labelled them as criminals and a blight on British capitalism while Labour employment minister Alison McGovern claimed some benefit claimants are ‘stealing from the state’.
It is not workers or benefit claimants who are stealing from the state, it is the capitalist state that has been looting the working class through savage austerity cuts to wages and benefits while deliberately defunding the NHS and public services in order to pay off the massive national debt of over £3 trillion – a debt that was accelerated by bailing out the banks and corporations following the world economic crisis in 2008 and which the working class has been paying for ever since.
With the Labour government committed to carrying on and supercharging the Tory austerity war on workers and youth, the time has come to bring it down.
The TUC must be forced to act by calling a general strike to remove this Labour government and go forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers, building a socialist planned economy.
Socialist revolution is the only way forward for workers and youth – join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required for victory.