YESTERDAY the Labour shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, announced that the Labour Party has officially abandoned the principle of universal benefits in the interests of paying off the huge national debt created by the banking crisis.
In a speech on the Labour Party’s economic strategy to ‘save’ bankrupt British capitalism, Balls made it crystal clear that it is to be at the expense of the working class, starting with pensioners.
He announced the first cut in welfare spending any future Labour government would make would be to end the universal winter fuel allowance payable to the ‘wealthiest’ pensioners.
The total number of people affected by this cut is around 600,000 and the total saving amounts to £100 million a year.
In terms of the trillions of pounds of public money pumped into the banking system to stop it collapsing, £100 million does not even qualify as a drop in the ocean.
Balls was careful not to define who falls into this category, any pensioner living marginally above the breadline could find themselves designated as ‘wealthy’, his real intention was to announce that the Labour Party has broken irrevocably with the principle of the universal benefit.
This principle was laid out in the Beveridge Report published in 1942 which provided the foundation for the entire welfare state, which would be implemented by the Labour government in 1948.
Universality of benefit is central to the welfare state – that health, education and pension provisions for the retired be paid for out of general taxation and be available to all.
The stated aim of the Beveridge Report was to establish ‘freedom from want’ through a system of universal benefits.
It was a system that the working class, which had lived through the hungry thirties and experienced the horrors of the world war, demanded, a system of cradle to the grave support without the hated ‘means testing’.
A demand that capitalism was forced to concede at the time or face revolution.
Last January Labour leader Ed Miliband publicly defended universal benefits saying they were the ‘bedrock of our society’.
Four months later and this has been dumped as Balls sets out the Labour party stall as the party willing and able to do what the Tories are proving incapable of – namely inflicting even deeper cuts on the working class than the coalition has been able to inflict.
Balls made it abundantly clear to the bankers that Labour is prepared to do what is necessary for their survival, he said any future Labour government would have ‘a bleak inheritance’, and promised a ‘tough deficit reduction plan’ adding, ‘The situation we will inherit will require a very different kind of Labour government to those which have gone before. We will inherit a substantial deficit. We will have to govern with much less money around. We will need to show an iron discipline.’
The ‘iron discipline’ that Balls is promising is nothing less that the iron boot smashing the welfare state to smithereens and crushing the bones of the working class.
All the talk of ending the winter fuel allowance for pensioners is also designed to smooth the path towards the creation of a reactionary coalition between Labour and the LibDems – this is a central plank of their strategy.
What Balls and Miliband are really preparing for is the formation of an extreme right-wing coalition government with the LibDems.
The trade union leaders who preach to workers that nothing can be done but hope for a Labour government are guilty of treacherously misleading the working class – any Labour government or Labour coalition government will slavishly carry out the attacks demanded by the capitalist system.
The only way forward for the working class is to demand the calling of an immediate general strike to bring down the coalition and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
