CHANCELLOR Osborne’s second budget this year will be his first for a Tory government with an overall majority and he intends to use it to make savage welfare cuts to make up for ‘lost time’, during the five years of coalition with the Lib Dems.
On Sunday he said he had found all £12 billion of welfare cuts he needs as part of his plan to balance the current account deficit by 2017/18. The budget will prepare the way to turn the UK into a low tax economy for big business and the rich, with a ‘small state’.
The ‘small state’ is shorthand for ending the Welfare State, with its ‘security from the cradle to the grave’ outlook destroyed, and the NHS localised, decentralised, cut and closed and then privatised. Only the rich and the powerful, and their offspring are to enjoy any security in Osborne’s UK.
Osborne says he will cut the annual welfare bill by £12 billion ($18.69 billion), and make £13 billion pounds of departmental spending reductions, that will mean mass sackings of over 100,000 state employees,on top of the 90,000 that have already been dispensed with.
He also says that he will raise an extra £5 billion by clamping down on tax evasion and avoidance. After the HSBC ‘no tax’, and ‘no prosecutions’ saga the idea that the Tories are going to clamp down on tax evasion by the big banks and bosses is just a very bad joke.
However, one of Osborne’s big aims is to turn workers into the working poor, by targeting council house tenants in London and the provinces. If a family lives in London and as a family earn £40,000 a year, they will have to pay a market rent – in a city where market rents are the equivalent of robbery with extreme violence.
Families who live in the provinces and have an income of £30,000 will also have to pay market rents for their homes, or be evicted! This is another savage attack on working families that the Tories have tried to say that they represent.
Over 340,000 families will be pauperised by this attack, delivered at the same time as the Chancellor is proposing to raise the limit for paying inheritance tax to £1,000,000, creating another gold rush for the rich.
It is thought that this onslaught on council tenants could affect 340,000 households, and even government calculations have it that this will cost tenants an extra £70 a week. This is a big sum, but a sum that shows no understanding of the heights that market rents have soared to, particularly in London.
This £70 a week plus will go straight into the coffers of the Exchequer. So much for those in the Tory Party who never cease to claim that they ‘reward work over welfare’. The Chancellor had earlier pledged to reduce the welfare cap by £3,000 a year to just £23,000 per household.
Yesterday, he revealed that this figure will be for families living in London, and the cap will be set even lower outside the capital city. He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr: ‘We’re going to cut the benefit cap, as we said we would in the manifesto to £23,000 in London.
‘But I can tell you today it will be lower in the rest of the country.’ Outside London the cap is now expected to be set under £20,000. Families outside London, in the north, west, south and east of the country, are to have a much bigger slashing of their benefits. This is despite the fact that the responsibility for the current economic crisis rests with the banks, who were rescued after 2007 by the taxpayer to the tune of over £1 trillion, and whose state-subsidised bankers have never been richer.
Presumably the next Osborne crisis measure will be to stop families moving into London in case they are looking for higher benefits! Meanwhile, the 1,000 families who between them have over £547bn as the Times Rich List showed are laughing all the way to their banks and counting houses. They are the untouchables!
The proper response to Osborne’s latest measures is a general strike to bring the Tories down and bring in a workers’ government.