THE Labour shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, engaged in a nauseating charade on Wednesday of verbally attacking his Tory opposite number whilst at the same time making it clear that he was in complete agreement with him.
This feat of duplicity masqueraded as the Labour response to Osborne’s Spending Review, which announced a brutal cut of a further £11.5 billion from government spending.
This cut is to be achieved through imposing massive pay cuts on public sector workers through an end to automatic incremental pay increases as a supplement to the existing wage freeze.
Along with the low-paid having their wages cut, Osborne is determined that workers losing their jobs should be made to pay as well, with any one made redundant having to wait for seven says before they can claim Jobseekers Allowance.
For those seven days, they and their families can starve as far as he is concerned or, alternatively, throw themselves on the mercy of the payday lenders.
As for anyone unfortunate enough not to be fluent in Oxbridge English, they won’t get any benefits until they have attended English language lessons – learn English or starve to death is the mantra of Osborne, and Balls fully agrees.
Just to make certain that anyone claiming Jobseekers Allowance is kept on the grinding and degrading treadmill of proving that they are constantly looking for jobs that just don’t exist, Osborne plans to make them attend Jobcentres every week instead of fortnightly.
Single parents are to be taught a lesson as well – all single parents with children over three have got to register for online job searches, write CVs for jobs that they cannot do because of childcare responsibilities, even if they did exist.
And what was Balls’ response to this vicious and deliberate plan to drive the unemployed into starvation levels of poverty?
Quite simply he accepted every single one of Osborne’s plans and restricted himself only to querying whether they would produce real ‘savings’.
In an interview with the BBC, Balls said: ‘We need to look at the detail, obviously. On the welfare things, English language for incoming migrants – definitely. For the seven-day – is it going to be a blank cheque for Wonga? Let’s look at the detail. If it saves money and it works, fine.’
So it is ‘fine’ as far as Balls is concerned to cut pay and end benefits for the unemployed – especially if they are immigrant workers – his only quibble is that these measures might not make the savings necessary to plough back into the bankrupt banking system and keep the bankers rolling in money gouged out of the working class.
Naturally, Balls emphasised his and Miliband’s complete and total support for ‘caps’ on benefits – indeed he had already pre-empted Osborne when he went even further than the Tories in demanding a cap on the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
Balls was also at pains to underline the fact that this was just one area where he and Labour are prepared to out-Tory the Tories when he complained that Osborne’s cap on welfare spending will only last for three years – he wants it to last for five years at least – and that old-age pensions are excluded at present from the cuts.
Balls wants pensioners to share the pain along with the unemployed, the low paid and single parents.
His criticism of Osborne’s spending review was strictly limited to: Are the cuts enough to save the banks !
This treachery demands an emphatic response from the trade union leaders – that they immediately break with the Labour Party and call an all-out general strike to kick out the government and bring in a workers government that will go forward to a socialist society and, in the process, consign Balls, Miliband and the rest of the Labour leadership to the sewers of history where they belong.
