YESTERDAY, Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt delivered his Autumn budget – the second budget from the government in under two months.
The first was the disastrous mini-budget of Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss which resulted in Truss being thrown out after only 44 days in the job.
This latest budget from Hunt is nothing more than a desperate attempt by Sunak to avoid the same fate by appeasing the bankers.
Truss was dumped on the instructions of the international financial markets and banks – the real masters of British capitalism, not the Tory government. They made it quite clear that they would bankrupt the UK if she did not go.
Truss made the disastrous error of thinking she could make billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts for the rich through massive borrowing that would drive the UK national debt sky-high.
This is not what the world bankers wanted – they demanded super austerity cuts to wages and services. They wanted a Tory government that would guarantee paying back to them all the billions of pounds they had loaned the Tories by buying up government bonds to keep British capitalism from bankruptcy.
Sunak was chosen as the man to do their bidding with Hunt as Chancellor to deliver their diktats and enforce, what is now the open dictatorship of the banks over the Tory government.
Over the past weeks, Hunt has been trailing the ‘eye watering cuts’ he announced so that they could be checked and approved by his banker masters before revealing them officially to the public.
Of course, Hunt littered his budget with promises to support the most vulnerable families with targeted support. The energy price cap will be extended for 12 months, which Hunt glibly announced would cap average energy bills at £3,000 a year, an increase of £500 over the existing cap.
Millions will pay more in energy bills, while the poorest paid will also be hit hardest by Hunt’s stealth tax increase, as he freezes the level at which income is taxed at its present level, instead of increasing it in line with inflation, meaning that millions of workers will pay more in tax if their pay increases.
Hunt steered clear of making a public announcement on slashing public sector spending, instead he talked about the necessity for ‘efficiencies and reorganisation of the NHS and every public service’, in other words, cuts.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) released its own assessment of the budget immediately and it made grim reading.
The OBR said that despite all the promised support with energy bills, living standards are going to fall by 7% over next two years.
This fall in living standards will be the biggest on record since at least the mid-1950s and the OBR predicted that the UK recession will last at least a year.
The Bank of England believes that the UK recession will last at least two years.
Hunt was careful not to mention the hundreds of thousands of workers taking strike action demanding pay increases to protect their living standards from the inflationary spiral. Instead, he talked of inflation as being the main enemy of British capitalism, and that he was determined to bring it down at any cost.
The cost will be born by the working class, with nurses already told that their demand for a 17% increase is unaffordable and they will just have to put up with suffering.
Wage increases that match the inflation rate, officially 11.1%, will be fought by the Tories to the bitter end.
Hunt stated that the UK will ‘face into the storm’ of the economic crisis of capitalism.
The working class must demand that the TUC face into the storm of a puppet Tory government, controlled by the international banks, that is determined to drive workers and youth into the gutter of poverty, to protect a capitalist system that is collapsing into bankruptcy.
Workers must demand an immediate recall of the TUC Congress, where the union leaders are instructed to either call a general strike to kick out the Tories or be removed and replaced with a leadership that will.
A general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will nationalise the banks and major industries and go forward to a planned socialist economy, is the only answer to the dictatorship of bankers.