IN an attempt to show some class war steel, Chancellor Osborne began his speech at the Tory Party conference with an assault on a former Tory government, that of Edward Heath.
Osborne said: ‘In 1972, when a Conservative Prime Minister, two years into office, was faced with economic problems and over-powerful unions, we buckled and we gave up.
The result was higher inflation, more strikes and the Three Day Week.’
He added: ‘A decade later in 1981, when another Conservative Prime Minister and Conservative Chancellor, two years into office, were faced with economic problems and powerful unions, we did not give up, but pressed on and overcame.
He was referring to Thatcher’s 1982 Malvinas imperialist war, the 1984-85 civil war against the miners, and the Tory 1986-87 year-long war against the printers, when the capitalist state, alongside its ally Rupert Murdoch, fought a year-long pitched battle to smash the Fleet Street trade unions.
These wars were financed by the massive oil wealth that was flowing out of the North Sea and which was used to build up coal mountains all over Europe and pay vast overtime bills for the police forces and troops involved in the class war.
Now, the North Sea oil wealth is gone, and world and British capitalism is in its most desperate crisis forcing Osborne to admit: ‘Today, in the face of the great economic challenges of our age we here resolve: we will press on and we shall overcome.’ Faced with the prospect of a new civil war to be fought, the response of the Tory Party faithful was not one of massive enthusiasm.
Osborne continued: ‘We’re not going to get through this as a country if we set one group against another, if we divide, denounce and demonise’. He then did precisely that, identifying the enemy within, declaring: ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’
He unveiled one of his heroines, and the chief villain, lauding ‘the teacher prepared to defy her union and stay late to take the after-school club.’
Coming to the crunch-point he confessed: ‘The truth is that the damage done by the debts and the banking crisis was worse than we feared. The rise in world oil prices has been larger than anyone forecast. And sadly the predictions that you made, that I made, that almost everyone here made about the euro turned out to be all too true. This makes the job more difficult. But it doesn’t make it any less urgent.
‘Our published plans already require us to find £16 billion of further savings. But our country’s problem is not that working people pay too little tax; it’s that the government spends too much of their money. And if we want to go on doing that, and limit the cuts to departments, then we will have to find greater savings in the welfare bill.’
This turns out to be £16bn savings in the current parliament and ‘£10 billion of welfare savings by the first full year of the next Parliament’ – all to be slashed from welfare.
Declaring war on housing benefit and child benefit he declared: ‘How can we justify giving flats to young people who have never worked, when working people twice their age are still living with their parents because they can’t afford their first home?
‘How can we justify a system where people in work have to consider the full financial costs of having another child, whilst those who are out of work don’t?
Stopping short of calling for sterilisation of ‘feckless’ child creators, he declared: ‘The question for countries like Britain is this: are we going to sink or swim? So today we set out proposals for a radical change to employment law.’
Capitalism is sinking and it wants to force the working class and the poor down into the abyss.
There is only one cure for this crisis-ridden system and its plans for civil war, – it is the socialist revolution and the working class taking power and putting an end to capitalism for ever.
