TORY Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been in Washington this week attending the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The IMF, the main economic guardian of the capitalist world, has spent all week agonising over a historic world economic crisis which includes the collapse of major banks in the US and Europe, an inflationary spiral, along with a recessionary crisis hitting the most advanced capitalist economies.
The UK economy has been identified as the weakest link among the developed economies according to the IMF’s latest forecast which has placed it bottom of the league table of leading economies.
The doom and gloom about a UK economy clearly falling into recession didn’t stop Hunt from striking a wildly optimistic note when he told the BBC that ‘the economic outlook is looking brighter than expected’.
Hunt confidently predicted that inflation in the UK, which currently stands at the headline rate of 10.4%, will fall to below 3% in 2023 while growth in the economy will increase by leaps and bounds thanks to the Tories implementing ‘radical reforms to boost the jobs market and business investment.’
The ‘radical reforms’ that Hunt introduced in his budget last month to boost the jobs market was ‘the biggest change to our welfare system in a decade’ – changes designed to force the sick and disabled back into low paid work through cuts to benefits.
The sick and disabled along with retired workers are held responsible for recession by the Tories and the way to economic growth is to force them back to work.
They are not the only culprits guilty of holding back all the economic growth promised by Hunt.
On Thursday the director of economic statistics at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Darren Morgan, blamed strikes by civil servants and teachers for pay increases as the prime cause of the UK economy ‘flatlining’ in February.
In other words, recording zero growth in that month and only recovering to a miserable 0.1% growth after, was all down to teachers and civil servants – nothing to do with the world capitalist crisis.
The reality is that despite all Hunt’s pathetic boasts about turbo-charging the economy, British capitalism is gripped by a recession and inflation at the same time. The only way out for Hunt and the Tories is to make the working class pay for this crisis.
In placing the blame for recession on workers taking strike action to defend their living standards, Hunt is setting out the justification for the anti-trade union legislation, soon to be enacted into law.
The new Tory laws will make striking virtually illegal, enforce the legal right of employers to force employees to work and cross picket lines (even if the strike has been legally balloted for) or face instant dismissal, with no right of appeal. Unions will be dragged before the courts too and face crippling fines if they refuse to comply with these laws.
Hunt had a very direct message for junior doctors striking for a 35% pay increase and for every public sector worker taking action for a pay rise. Hunt said it would be a ‘terrible mistake’ to give pay increases above the rate of inflation, even though strikes were being blamed for damaging the economy, as workers’ pay increases would only fuel inflation.
For the Tories striking workers, along with the elderly and sick, are to blame for the recession, while pay increases that protect workers from a cost-of-living crisis driving millions into poverty, are the cause of inflation.
This should be a massive wake up call to those trade union leaders who are increasingly pinning their hopes on arbitration and negotiations to win any concessions from this Tory government.
The Tories are preparing for a class war to the finish against workers as the only way that British capitalism can hope to survive the economic catastrophe rivalling the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The time has come for the trade union leaders to get up off their knees and demand an immediate TUC emergency congress to organise a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward today.
