BRITAIN’S main sickness benefit is ‘not fit for purpose’ and ‘deters people from taking up work’ a Labour government review has found.
A report by Sir Stephen Timms the Social Security Minister said that Personal Independence Payments (PIP) were not working ‘as intended’.
It warned that the ‘spiralling cost of the handouts’, set to hit £41 billion by the end of the decade, is causing public support for the Welfare State to crumble, but claimed that ‘the review does not propose ways to find savings’.
The dossier continued to quote research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies which showed that ‘when benefits were reduced people were more likely to seek work’.
These are the drastic savings that the Labour government is seeking to find a way to bring in and enforce on the working class!
The Tories are in fact rejoicing at Labour’s refusal to defend the Welfare State.
Helen Whatley the Tory Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary commented: ‘Labour is in denial about the Welfare State. They have at last admitted that it is broken – but what they mean is it is too hard to get benefits, and not generous enough. They could not be more out of touch.’
However, there has never been a greater need for the Welfare State than there is today when the the capitalist system is in its death agony.
Currently there are over three million unemployed, including over one million youth who are having their present and futures destroyed by the crisis of a capitalist system that is in its death agony, and is going from bad to worse!
Drastic and savage measures are being designed to punish the unemployed and destroy the benefit system, when the source of the crisis is in fact the death agony of the capitalist system and its current destruction of millions of workers’ jobs and lives.
Millions of workers are being dumped by a ruling class that is determined to make them pay for the crisis of the capitalist system.
The Labour and Tory unemployment policy is that the working class must be coerced into gritting its teeth and accepting that the capitalist boom has gone for a long time and is being replaced by a desperate struggle by the ruling classes to dump the entire crisis onto the backs of the working class, returning it to the low wages and the desperate conditions of the 1930s era of mass unemployment, which was followed by a six-year-long worldwide imperialist war, 1939-45!
Today, the imperialist powers of the EU, the UK and the USA are gearing up for another great war.
World War II saw millions of workers killed fighting for the different groups of bosses that aimed to rule the world.
Today, the US, the UK and the EU, faced with a massive economic and political crisis, are seeking to resolve it by crushing Russia and China in another world war that is now rapidly emerging.
In the face of this developing world crisis, the working class of the world must unite to prevent a new world war by overthrowing the US, UK and EU ruling classes, through bringing in a World Socialist Republic.
All over the capitalist world, there is a massive economic and political crisis emerging at a tremendous rate.
We must answer the imperialist war-drive with a massive worldwide movement to establish the Fourth International as the world party of the socialist revolution.
We must build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country.
Our enemies are not the people of the world but the US, UK and EU ruling classes that want to establish extreme right wing regimes under which capitalism will be able to continue to super-exploit the working class of the world.
We say build the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution to organise to complete the world revolution. A vital part of the International are the organisations of revolutionary youth. They must be built in every country and there is no doubt that they will organise and lead the victory of the world socialist revolution.
