LABOUR Chancellor Rachel Reeves is set to tell workers that major unavoidable tax rises are on the way since she has inherited a £20bn funding gap from the Tories.
Both the working class and the middle class are in her sights and she is set to declare alongside the Treasury that: ‘Britain is broke and broken,’ and that the former Tory regime presided over a ‘cover up’ of the ‘dire state’ of the public finances.
Reeves has already told The Sunday Times that the Treasury assessment of the UK’s finances shows that ‘Britain is broke and broken.’
Reeves is due to accuse Jeremy Hunt, now the Shadow Chancellor, of presiding over a ‘cover-up’ of the ‘dire state’ of the public finances.
Reeves has already told The Sunday Times that: ‘If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it. People up and down our country will understand that. When household budgets are stretched, families have to make difficult choices. And government needs to do the same,’ she told The Sunday Times.
Reeves is expected to announce today a pay rise for public sector workers of 5.5%.
The Shadow Chancellor, Hunt, has already told the Telegraph that because of the dire state of the capitalist economy, raising taxes would amount to ‘the biggest betrayal by a Chancellor in her first budget that we have ever seen’.
Hunt continued that Labour would not have the legitimacy or the mandate to increase taxes, because they ‘weren’t honest with us before the election, that this is what they wanted to do’.
The Telegraph continued that it understands that the Treasury will present Reeves with options to equalise Capital Gains Tax and Income Tax rates and to cut Pension Tax Relief for the middle classes.
Reeves is also expected to delay a series of road and new hospital projects, with Downing Street blaming the NHS for a ‘litany of problems’.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, yesterday warned that the ‘shocking findings’ included public services crumbling, and announcements that without proper funding, long term spending pressures will be piling up’.
The essence of the current crisis is that the working class is going to have the whole weight of the crisis of British capitalism, in fact, its death agony, piled onto its back.
The British ruling class will ruthlessly impose job cuts and wage cuts as it drives to settle the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system in the only way that it knows, by making the working class pay for the crisis, and by also preparing war with Russia and China to divide and redivide the planet.
The ruling class is now faced with a situation where on a world scale it has been overtaken by Russia and China and the other workers states to the point where it cannot compete with them.
This is why the UK ruling class, while it cuts public spending on health and education by billions, is handing more billions over to the Ukraine to finance its war with Russia, a showdown that it views as inevitable.
For the British ruling class, the only way forward is to drive the working class back to the conditions associated with the 1930s, of massive slump and unemployment and the rise of murderous fascism.
The UK working class and the working class of the world must now rapidly move forward to build the WRP in the UK and revolutionary parties in all the main capitalist countries to organise socialist revolutions to put an end to world capitalism and bring in world socialism. Capitalism must be overthrown and dumped into the dustbin of history.
In Britain, the WRP and the Young Socialists must be built up mass revolutionary organisations that will be able to lead the British socialist revolution in the period ahead and and establish revolutionary parties in all of the main capitalist countries.
Sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International must be built in every country in the days ahead. They will be called upon, as the crisis of capitalism deepens, to lead the worldwide socialist revolution to its victory.
We urge UK workers and youth to join the WRP and the Young Socialists today to lead the British socialist revolution and to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide to organise the victory of the world socialist revolution!