WEDNESDAY’S Queen’s Speech began with an evasion that her government would continue to seek a ‘high-wage low-welfare economy’.
This was said at a time when millions of public sector workers have had their wages held down by the state for well over four years, while a vicious assault on benefits has taken place that even the House of Lords has sought to oppose.
The UK government has pursued a policy of holding down wages and going from low to no benefits, particularly for sections of the disabled. This destruction of living standards and benefits at the same time as rents have reached gigantic unpayable proportions in the big cities, such as in London, under the just-concluded stewardship of Mayor Johnson, is the government’s real achievement, with people sleeping in bins in the city or under bridges.
The Queen’s government has been fighting a war with the junior doctors. All that her government would say in her speech about this war was a single sentence: ‘My government will continue work to develop NHS services over seven days of the week in England …’ This supreme vagueness was an expression of the cowardice of her government in the face of the determination of junior doctors to oppose and reject contract imposition, and to defend the NHS against a government that is determined to ‘denationalise it’.
On a number of other well-signalled policies, the government ran away. The Queen acknowledged that there were to be no more forced Academies, while what was to be the cornerstone of Cameron’s proof that the UK remained a Sovereign State against an all-powerful European Commission, the Sovereignty Bill, disappeared without trace. In fact, the Queen made only the briefest of direct references to the fact that her government was even holding ‘a referendum on membership of the European Union’.
The legislative programme includes a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act – but ministers will ‘consult fully before bringing forward proposals’ – the issue is to be put to bed until well after the June 23 referendum. New powers for prison governors to control budgets, services and the prison regime were outlined in the Queen’s Speech, and hyped up before it.
After weeping crocodile tears over the state of the prisons, under the Prisons and Courts Reform Bill, governors of six jails will be given control over budgets, will be able to decide which rehabilitation and education services to use and be able to change the prison regime and the rules over family visits.
They will also be able to enter into contracts and to generate and retain income, the government said. Governors of new prisons will have freedom to agree service contracts and establish their own boards. In February, the PM said he would reduce reoffending and allow prisoners to be treated as ‘potential assets to be harnessed’.
The prisoners in the six special prisons are to be privatised and put to work to make a profit, while the six prisons take a big step towards outright privatisation
A National Citizen Service Bill will have to be promoted by all state secondary schools, academies, private schools and councils as another cheap or even free labour front to take the place of high-wage employment.
The government is also to push ahead with its plans to monitor internet use through its Investigatory Powers Bill. It will have powers to intervene in unregulated schools, and police and monitor the internet, with Ofcom having the power to remove extremist material. There is to be an open Tory police state.
However, what emerges out of the Queen’s Speech, what it includes and what it leaves for another day, is that the Tories are split and divided and fearful that they may not even survive the aftermath of the June 23 referendum. It is our duty to make their worst fears come true by mobilising the working class to vote ‘Leave’ on June 23, to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will carry out socialist policies.
This blow will reverberate all over Europe and create the conditions to bring down the bankers’ and bosses’ EU and bring in, what the workers of Europe require, a Socialist United States of Europe!