IN HIS speech to the Tory faithful yesterday the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, made it absolutely clear that he is going to grind the unemployed and low-paid into the ground in order to pay back the bankers.
Announcing that the coalition are preparing to make cuts of £16 billion to the welfare bill in the next two years, Osborne was categorical that this would come off the backs of unemployed youth and ‘benefit scroungers’.
For unemployed youth under the age of 25, housing benefit will be stopped and they must go back and live with their parents.
Those unable to return to the parental home will be left to rot on the streets or forced to throw themselves on the mercy of charities.
Over one million unemployed young people are treated as garbage for the ‘crime’ of being unable to find work in an economy that is collapsing and where jobs are being decimated.
The future the Tories have for families who exist on benefits is similarly vicious.
Osborne singled out parents on benefit as a target for cuts, insisting there will be a limit to the number of children in a family in receipt of benefit. So, the unemployed are forbidden from having children – and if they do, the state will make sure they starve.
With the introduction of a universal benefit capped at £26,000 a year and people in social housing already being told that their housing benefit will be cut if they have so much as one room spare – homelessness and destitution is the only future that capitalism holds for the working class and youth.
But the cuts do not end there. In addition to these measures Osborne is insisting that benefits will rise in future at below the rate of inflation, effectively yet another cut for every person.
Nor will the cuts stop at another £16 billion on top of the £18 billion imposed when the coalition came to power in 2010.
Osborne also announced that they would be followed by a further cut of £25 billion in 2015.
If he was clear about who would be paying to bring down the national debt that the government owes to the private bankers and speculators, he was equally clear who would not be paying – the rich.
He said the budget could not be balanced ‘simply on the wallets of the rich’. No, it will come from the backs of the working class.
The national debt, which Osborne is determined will be balanced at workers’ expense, stands at £2,311.6 billion which is 147.3% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) according to government statistics.
Of this amount, £1,252.1 billion is due to the sum spent to bail out Northern Rock, RBS, Lloyds and other banks from bankruptcy.
Over a thousand billion can be spent on stopping the banks from going bankrupt because of a crisis of their own making, and this is to be paid for by the poor and unemployed with their very blood and bones.
This is only the tip of a very big iceberg. As the world crisis deepens this figure is set to grow enormously, meaning that for the banks and the capitalist system to survive they will have to try and impose on the working class conditions where there is no spending on benefits, where the entire Welfare State, including education and health, is declared to be too expensive and must either be closed down or privatised.
There is no choice for workers and young people today. To have any kind of future at all requires immediately kicking out this government through a general strike, not to return a Labour
government which is in complete agreement on making workers pay for the crisis, but to replace it with a workers government that will nationalise the banks, repudiate all capitalist debt and advance to a socialist society.
