THE real anti-working class face of the Blair, Labour government is becoming clearer and clearer every day, as the crisis of capitalism deepens.
Yesterday was no exception.
Sir Alistair Graham, a Blair supporter and chair of the House of Commons Committee on Standards in Public Life, had to admit that the Prime Minister had ignored the importance of upholding standards in public life, and that in fact Blair saw standards as a ‘minor issue’.
He made his remarks as the police investigation into the cash for peerages scandal, closed in on 10 Downing Street, from where the PM is alleged to have accepted a number of huge anonymous loans for the Labour Party from millionaires who support his policy to privatise health and education, and allegedly, in return promised them seats in the House of Lords.
Opinion polls show that the Labour government is now considered to be as sleazy as the previous Tory government of John Major, which will be forever associated with Harrods and brown envelopes.
The Labour government rewards its rich business supporters with government department contracts, and has reserved a special spleen for the poor.
A BBC investigation, made public yesterday, showed that up to 80,000 sick and disabled people a year are being wrongly denied benefits by private contractors who have been awarded much sought-after government contracts.
Numbers of medical reports on people claiming benefits were unreliable or inaccurate, or had been altered to prevent benefit being awarded.
Because of this, thousands of people claiming Incapacity Benefit or Disability Living Allowance have had to appeal.
The investigation found that some handwritten medical reports were altered so that the meaning was completely changed, while in other cases a computer-based medical questionnaire produced misleading or nonsensical information.
A benefits adviser based in Cumbria, came across one case in which an applicant for Disability Living Allowance had had 20 alterations made to her medical report. As a result, her claim was invalidated
An example was that the word ‘unsteady’ was changed to ‘steady’ to describe her ability to walk, and her walking distance limit was changed from 30 metres to 80 metres. The privateer Atos Origin declined to comment on these cases, but will no doubt retain its fat contract.
The third instance of anti-working class spleen concerns the privateer Capita, an old friend of Blair, which makes huge profits from its Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) contract from the Home Office. Its just-resigned boss, Aldridge, was one of the bosses involved in the loans-for-peerages saga.
He resigned after it became public that he had made a £1 million undeclared loan to the Labour Party.
Yesterday, it was admitted that nearly 1,500 people have been wrongly labelled as criminals by the CRB.
A number of them were not only turned down for jobs, but had the slur of paedophilia hanging over them, and had to go to police stations where they had their photographs, fingerprints and DNA samples taken to establish that they had been framed up by the Home Office.
The Home Office said the errors arose when personal details were similar to those of people with a conviction, but were ‘a tiny proportion of cases’. It would not apologise, and insisted that that it was right to err on the side of caution.
What insufferable arrogance from this anti-working class government and its privateer allies.
There is only one thing to be done with this government. It must be brought down by the trade unions to bring in a real workers government that will expropriate the privateers and carry out socialist policies.
