CHANCELLOR OSBORNE underlined the precarious nature of his ‘recovery’ when he told the House of Commons yesterday ‘the job is not done…we don’t squander the gains we’ve made but go on taking the difficult decisions…but this time spot the debt bubbles before they threaten financial stability’.
Truly, you can’t have capitalism without a crisis.
His policy is to ‘address the deep-seated problems of unsustainable spending, uncompetitive taxes and unreformed public services for which there are no quick fixes’.
By ‘no quick fixes’ he means a permanent war to address ‘unsustainable spending’ by destroying the Welfare State, ‘reforming’ the public services by privatisation – handing assets worth billions over to the bosses for half price, such as the Royal Mail – and dealing with uncompetitive taxes by further shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor.
After paying tribute to the sacrifices that his government has made the British people pay to try to resolve the capitalist crisis, he also reported ‘the hard truth that the job is not yet done. Yes, the deficit is down. But it is still far too high and today we take more difficult decisions.’
Osborne had to reveal the fall in GDP ‘from peak to trough between 2008 and 2009 was not 6.3 per cent, as previously thought – but instead was an even more staggering 7.2 per cent.
‘£112 billion wiped off our economy – around £3,000 for every household in this country, and one of the sharpest falls in the national income of any economy in the world.
‘It is a reminder of the economic calamity that befell Britain; the simple fact that our country remains poorer as a result of it; and that a lot of work still remains to put that right.’
The solution is to put the working class, the youth, the pensioners (in fact, the whole of society outside the ranks of the bosses and bankers) through the wringer, repeatedly, until capitalism can stand erect on their bones, for just a little bit longer.
He also had to point to the ‘risks that remain for the UK from abroad…because we are too dependent on markets in Europe and North America’.
Its individual weakness, and the weaknesses of EU and US capitalism, are the reasons why Cameron has gone down on all fours in front of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy to beg for trade, ‘something’, he admits, ‘our country should have done many years ago’.
He declared: ‘Today I am doubling to £50 billion the export finance capacity available to support British businesses…’
£50bn for the bosses. For the workers there is only grief in a situation where: ‘The OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) today expect debt this year to come in at 75.5 per cent of GDP…It then rises to 78.3 per cent next year, before peaking at 80.0 per cent the next year…’
The solution to this deepening crisis is: ‘We will cap overall Welfare Spending…We have taken very difficult decisions to bring benefit bills down – and saved £19 billion a year for the taxpayer. We need to maintain that discipline.’
There is to be a further cut of £3bn in departmental budgets over the next two years.
Further: ‘Based on latest life expectancy figures, applying that principle would mean an increase in the state pension age to 68 in the mid 2030s and to 69 in the late 2040s…Future taxpayers will be saved around £500 billion pounds.’
Osborne could have added that as the Welfare State is destroyed, the NHS privatised and living standards collapse with them, the life span will also plummet, meaning that there will be a truly massive pensions saving, with people dying well before they reach 68, or 69, as they do in many cities even today, in the areas beyond southern England. People’s retirements are being sacrificed to balance the books of the bankers and bosses.
Forever the cynic, after describing that youth who do not conform to the requirements of the state will lose all benefits permanently, Osborne declared: ‘The country stood behind the banks in the crisis, and now it is right that they support the country in recovery.’
This is after RSB, still partly state-owned, has been allegedly engineering the bankruptcy of some of its customers so that it is able to take possession of their property cheaply.
British capitalism is in terminal decline. The only way forward for the working class is to put it out of its misery with a socialist revolution that will take society forward to a new, much more advanced stage in its development, in place of the barbarism that Osborne is seeking to bring in.
