LABOUR Party leader Miliband’s speech on the party’s economic strategy showed conclusively that the Labour Party leaders are prepared to completely destroy the Welfare State on behalf of the bankers and bosses.
Miliband was clearly speaking directly to the bankers and the capitalist class when he formally announced that the Labour Party is no longer the party that even pays lip service to the principles of the Welfare State when he announced that, in order to ‘turn the economy around’, a future Labour government would adopt entirely the Tory policy of capping benefits.
Indeed, he made it plain that any future Labour government would not just match Tory cuts but go even further in order to rescue the banks and bankrupt British capitalism.
Bemoaning the perilous state of the capitalist economy, Miliband pledged that, if elected, Labour would impose an iron discipline on spending – something he accused the coalition of not being able to achieve – and insisted that ‘social security spending, vital as it is, cannot be exempt from that discipline’.
In would come a cap on ‘structural spending’ which includes housing benefit and disability allowance.
This is a policy directly lifted from the Tory chancellor George Osborne who floated it in last March’s budget speech.
Having nicked that proposal from the Tories, Miliband then wholeheartedly committed Labour to the rest of their savage cuts when he re-emphasised the point made earlier in the week by shadow chancellor Ed Balls, that a Labour government would not reverse the coalition’s decision to make child benefit means-tested.
Balls, of course, has extended this policy to cover the winter fuel allowance payable to pensioners.
Universal benefits, described by the same Miliband back in January as the ‘bedrock’ of the Welfare State, have been dumped in the interest of saving a few million pounds to pour into the huge black hole of debt created by the banks.
The reactionary course now being charted by Miliband and Balls is to destroy universal benefit, paid out to those in need regardless of their income, and replace it with the ‘contributory principle’.
Under this system, benefits paid to welfare claimants who have never worked would be cut with the vague promise of higher payments to people with a record of work.
Miliband sought to justify this with sanctimonious drivel about the unfairness of people who have only worked for just over two years getting the same jobseekers allowance as those who have worked much longer.
Youth, who are denied any opportunity to work at all as a result of capitalism’s crisis, or indeed anyone with less than five years employment behind them, deserve to be starved, go without housing and go without clothing, or any of the other essentials of human life, according to Miliband, Balls, Osborne and Cameron.
‘Letting them starve in the gutter’ is a small price to pay for ‘turning the economy around’ for the benefit of the bosses and bankers – is the new credo of the Labour Party.
None of the money saved will go towards enriching older workers with long records of contributions – it will go directly into the coffers of the state in a vain attempt to stave off bankruptcy.
Miliband and Balls are not laying out a blueprint for an economic strategy, they are making a statement of intent, that they stand with the bosses for smashing the Welfare State that the working class in 1948 forced Labour to bring in.
They are offering up the Labour Party as a willing coalition tool to rescue a bankrupt capitalist system by smashing the Welfare State and imposing cuts of such brutality that a Tory government on its own would be unable to deliver without provoking open revolution by the working class.
There can be only one answer to this class treachery. It is for the working class to force the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and replace it, not with the treacherous Labour Party, but with a workers government that will defend all the gains of the Welfare State and advance to socialism, putting an end to capitalism for ever.
