WEDNESDAY’S budget left no room for doubt about who the coalition government intends should pay to bail out the bankrupt British economy – pensioners, the unemployed, the low paid and the working class as a whole.
At the same time, it was a clear statement by Tory chancellor, George Osborne, about who would not be expected to pay – the rich.
Under Osborne’s budget, pensioners will be funding the tax cut for the rich through a reduction in the 50% top rate tax payable by those earning over £150,000 a year.
300,000 of the wealthiest households in the country will make a killing: someone earning £1 million a year, a ‘poorish’ salary for the bankers and financiers, will get an extra £40,000 a year.
The money to finance this will come from the 4.4 million pensioners who pay tax – they will lose £84 a year to keep the rich in sports cars through a ‘stealth tax’ in the form of a freeze on their personal allowances.
According to the Saga organisation’s director general: ‘Over the next five years, pensioners with an income of between £10,000 and £24,000 will be paying an extra £3 billion in tax while richer pensioners are left unaffected’, except that the latter will be basking in the sun of their massive tax cuts.
Just to underline the fact that, as far as the government is concerned, the elderly are nothing but a drain on the economy who deserve to be soaked for as much as possible, Osborne made it clear in his speech that he intends to end any ceiling on the state pension age.
He said: ‘There will be an automatic review of the state pension age to ensure it keeps pace with increases in longevity.’
In other words, this bankrupt British capitalist system can no longer afford to pay out state pensions for any length of time – if people insist on living longer then they will have to work longer till they are 70 or even 80.
Work till you drop is the Tory-devised future for the working class under this system.
As for the unemployed, the sick and disabled, Osborne made it clear that he intends to cut an extra £2 billion a year from the welfare budget, insisting that the coalition’s priority was to ‘pay off its debts’.
These aren’t the debts of pensioners or the working class, they are the debts of the banks that they have had transferred to the capitalist state, and are now transferring onto the backs of the working class, the pensioners and the youth. They are to be robbed on a systematic scale to maintain the broken system of the bankers and capitalists.
The decision by Osborne to press ahead with tax increases on petrol will drive the cost of living up to the extent that pensioners, the unemployed and low paid will find it impossible to live in any other way than to make a socialist revolution.
The gesture towards ‘fairness’ by increasing the amount of stamp duty payable when selling houses worth more than £2 million is a sick joke – not even millionaires sell their houses that often.
This is a budget that openly declares that the working class will be driven to destitution in the cause of keeping the rich in luxury and the banks from collapse.
The response of the Labour party leadership was for Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls to thump the table and denounce the budget as being solely for millionaires, but ,tellingly, Balls did not commit Labour to repealing the tax cuts to the rich.
The opposition by the Labour reformists is pure rhetoric, they are in complete agreement with the coalition that the working class must pay, their only quibble is that the Tories are too blatant about siding with the rich while screwing the poor.
The workers must respond to this budget by demanding that the trade union leadership call an immediate all-out general strike to bring down the coalition and replace it with a workers government that will expropriate the bankers and bosses once and for all. Leaders who will not do this must be removed at once!