NEWLY-INSTALLED Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt yesterday completely shredded the mini-budget announced just a few weeks ago by Kwasi Kwarteng.
Kwarteng was unceremoniously sacked on Friday by Liz Truss in a desperate attempt to save her own skin as Prime Minister, and Hunt was put in to try to rescue a Tory government from crashing and burning.
Hunt shredded the fantasy economic policies of Truss and Kwarteng by ditching all the unfunded tax cuts that they boasted would grow British capitalism out of recession.
The international financial speculators, who fund the government through bond buying, took one look at the £45 billion tax cuts funded by borrowing and dumped UK bonds in a fire sale that crashed the pound and drove inflation even higher.
What they demanded of the UK government was not more borrowing driving up the UK national debt but a plan to savagely cut spending in an austerity war on the working class.
Hunt made it clear yesterday that his overwhelming drive is savings and spending cuts.
Along with the tax breaks for the rich, out goes Truss’s Energy Price Guarantee – which was originally put in place for two years.
Instead, the price cap on energy will end next April with a review of the support, if any, the Tories decide they can afford for families drowning in debt and unable to heat their homes. Hunt said that there would be ‘a new approach’ to those in most need.
Workers will vividly recall that the Tory idea of a ‘targeted approach’ was to end the £20 a week increase in Universal Credit in order to cut back on spending.
This will be dwarfed by the attacks Hunt has planned when he vowed ‘there will be more difficult decisions’ and that there will have to be cuts as he pledged to ‘do what is necessary for economic stability’.
This was music to the ears of the international financiers, with the pound immediately making a small increase against the dollar on the promise of super-austerity to ensure, as Hunt claimed, the UK will always ‘pay its way’ and the working class will foot the bill.
Hunt has form in attempting to drive through cuts in spending – as Health Secretary in 2016 he launched a major attack on junior doctors to make them accept new contracts forcing them to work a 7-day week.
A strike by junior doctors over this intolerable demand forced Hunt to back down, but now he is back in charge and determined to inflict cuts on the NHS – along with every public service and the wages and conditions of every worker – in order to ‘save’ a bankrupt capitalist system.
This will require an onslaught on the working class and its trade unions by a weak, collapsing Tory government. It will require the Tories to make good their pledges of laws to force strike-breaking on transport and other essential services, and to go even further by banning all strikes and making unions themselves illegal.
This is the unprecedented situation that confronts the TUC as it meets today. One thing is clear – this Tory government and the capitalist system it serves will not be pushed back by limited strike action even if it is ‘co-ordinated’.
Any concessions to workers, even if backed by strikes, are off the table, as demonstrated last week when Tory Health Secretary Therese Coffey contemptuously dismissed the strike ballot of nearly half a million nurses, saying it wouldn’t get them more than the derisory 3% offered.
In the same week, Royal Mail threatened to sack up to 10,000 postal workers if the CWU carries on with its national strike action.
Delegates at the TUC Congress must make a stand and demand that the TUC takes real action by calling an immediate general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the capitalist class and build a socialist planned economy.
This is not some socialist utopian dream but a burning necessity today.
Demand the TUC calls an indefinite general strike at this Congress to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism. This is the way forward.