THE declaration by Tory grandee, Lord Young – a key member of the Thatcher and Major governments that fought the NUM and supported Murdoch’s year-long war that closed down Fleet Street, before shutting down the entire mining industry – that the vast majority of people in the UK have ‘never had it so good’ reveals the real, crass, hostile and cynical essence of the Tory Party to the tens of millions of people who are facing or about to face the savage cuts policies of the Tory-LibDem coalition which will destroy their lives.
Lord Young told the Daily Telegraph: ‘For the vast majority of people in the country today, they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started.’
Young is not some Tory class-war relic, he was Cameron’s main adviser on ‘Enterprise’.
In the Thatcher government he was Secretary for Trade and Industry and oversaw the privatisation campaign of that administration.
This was the man whom Thatcher claimed brought her solutions while other ministers only brought her problems.
Young, then, is clearly neither a relic nor some hothead. Despite his resignation he remains one of the men who is providing the ‘solutions’ to the main problem that the Cameron coalition faces: how to smash the working class movement in order to save British capitalism.
Lord Young told the Telegraph that low interest rates meant that everyone was much better off, and that the only people complaining about the vicious cuts being inflicted were those on state benefits, and in a few years time we will all look back and wonder what the fuss was about.
Declaring that the recession was a figment of everyone’s imagination, Young went on to say that the loss of 100,000 jobs in the public sector was well within the ‘margin of error’.
In other words, 100,000 job losses and 100,000 ruined families is nothing more nor less than a statistical blip of no consequence.
The fact that the real number of public sector jobs under threat stands at around 500,000 does not worry him one jot, this is just another blip.
While Cameron was quick to make him apologise for being insensitive, and he then resigned, he remains one of the the chiefs of the class war.
The Labourites, naturally, demanded that he be removed as an advisor to Cameron on the grounds of insensitivity and being out of touch.
This completely missed the point.
The Tories are waging a class war. Far from being out of touch Young is very much in touch with the thinking going on in the circles of bankers and capitalists that the multi-millionaire is an integral part of.
What they believe is that the cuts being proposed by Cameron and Osborne, far from being savage, are barely enough.
For them the issue is not a million jobs here or there being lost, or the piecemeal privatisation of the welfare state and education.
For Lord Young and his cronies the only solution to the crisis of capitalism is a full-blooded assault on every single gain the working class has made in its history.
For them only mass unemployment, with the unemployed being used to drive down the pay of those working to below the bread line, will suffice.
Young resigning does not resolve the issue. The coalition government that used him remains.
The issue is that the trade unions must call a general strike to bring the coalition crashing down, to bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bankers and bosses to bring in a socialist planned economy.