TORY Chancellor Hunt announced yesterday that the ‘fiscal statement’, which had been due to be delivered next Monday, 31st October, will now be delayed by over two weeks and instead be made on 17 November – no doubt when the international bankers have given its savage cuts their approval.
Hunt said yesterday: ‘It is most important that the statement is based on the most accurate economic forecast of public finances and for that reason the prime minister and I have decided that it is prudent to make that statement on 17th November, when it will be upgraded to a full Autumn Statement.
‘I discussed this last night with the Governor of the Bank of England, who understands the reasons for doing that and I’ll continue to work very closely with him.’
Hunt went on: ‘There has been a lot of market turbulance, even in the past 48-hours. The question is how you deal with that turbulance to make sure that the very, very important, the very difficult decisions, that I and the prime minister have to make, are the right ones, decisions that stand the test of time and do the right thing for people at home who are worried about their mortgages, their jobs, the cost of living, their bills and so on.’
The real problem for millionaires Hunt and Sunak is how they can dump the full weight of the crisis onto the working class, leaving the bankers and the bosses with their billions.
Hunt went on: ‘I have demonstrated in the short time that I have been chancellor that I am willing to take decisions very quickly and I’m willing to make choices that are politically embarrassing if they are the right thing to do for the country and in the national interest.’
The bankers and the OBR are writing his new Autumn Statement. It is they that constitute the bourgeois ‘country’ and the bourgeois ‘national interest’.
Tory Chancellor Hunt made his postponement just after an intervention by the World Bank and its president David Malpass.
This multi-millionaire advised that it is too expensive for governments to help everyone with their soaring energy bills. ‘Governments are saying we will take care of everyone, which is just too expensive,’ said Malpass.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said the current scheme could cost some £30bn because it was untargeted.
It also said households could save up to £20bn per year if they were incentivised to invest in energy-saving measures like solar panels.
During the pandemic governments borrowed billions of pounds to get through lockdowns.
They paid for job retention schemes like furlough, increased benefit payments and loans and grants for businesses that were forced to close. Malpass told the BBC’s World Service the subsidies should be temporary and targeted to those who needed them most.
But Malpass said many of the Covid subsidies were not targeted. ‘They went to everyone…and now the consequences are coming home.
‘People will be left for years and even decades paying for that debt,’ he added.
The Institute of International Finance reports that global debt topped $305 trillion earlier in the year and is expected to increase further. It is the working class that will have to pay this debt.
The war in Ukraine, and the expansion of its aims and scope, are causing energy prices to rocket upwards, pauperising millions of working people in Europe. The energy crisis comes at a time when governments have already run up large amounts of debt.
Malpass said he was concerned that the additional help for people will push inflation – the measure of rising prices – even higher and bring down the banks and the bankers.
In the UK inflation is at a 40-year high of 10.1%. The International Monetary Fund expects global inflation to peak this year at 9.5% and says it will not begin to fall until 2024.
Now the World Bank has the Sunak-Hunt government in its grip. The war in the Ukraine will be stepped up while workers go hungry and their children starve in Europe, the UK and the USA.
We must win the class war that the bankers have started. The only way forward is for the trade unions to call a general strike to bring down the Sunak government and bring in a workers government that will nationalise the banks and the major industries and bring in a planned economy and socialism!
This is the way forward. Demand that the TUC call a General Strike now to bring down the Tories and bring in a nationalised and planned socialist economy!