PM BORIS Johnson has refused to rule out raising taxes again, on the first day of the Tory Party conference and just three weeks before the Chancellor announces his Budget.
The prime minister said he was a ‘zealous opponent of unnecessary tax rises’. However, he admitted on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that the pandemic had hit the UK’s economy like a ‘fiscal meteorite’.
Last month, the government announced it would be raising National Insurance to pay for health and social care. Earlier this year, Chancellor Rishi Sunak also froze income tax thresholds – leading to more people paying the levy.
Also the extra £20 weekly Universal Credit payment, brought in during the pandemic, is due to end this week, at a time when the price of energy and food is rising.
Johnson, on the Marr show, said: ‘I can tell you that you have no fiercer and more zealous opponent of unnecessary tax rises than me, but we have had to deal with a pandemic on a scale which this country has not seen before in our lifetimes and long before.
‘We don’t want to raise taxes, of course we don’t, but what we will not do is be irresponsible with the public finances.’
The truth is that massive tax rises for workers and the middle classes are on the way.
The capitalist world is now hanging over the cliff edge of an economic crash caused by the mountains of fictitious value, ie promises to pay that have been issued to try and keep capitalism going.
UK capitalism is broken, as is the US economy. On October 16th, the US will hit its $28.4 trillion debt limit, before it crashes over the edge.
In the USA, the bankers are urging the government to mint a $1 trillion coin and deposit it with the Federal Reserve in a desperate attempt to reduce the overall debt level and prevent a crash!
Poised on the edge of the precipice US capitalism is reduced to looking to a coin to save it!
The ING economist James Knightley has already said that there will be a ‘cataclysmic event’ when the US actually does default on its debts.
Further to that he said: ‘This will trigger a whole crisis of confidence in the US financial system and by extension the Global Financial system!’
This situation is making the UK ruling class extremely nervous.
Johnson will be imposing more and more savage cuts on the UK working class and middle class, and there is no doubt that he fears a revolutionary response.
The ruling class has only just grasped that this revolutionary response by the millions of the working class will take place at a time when its main state police force, the Met Police, that served it faithfully during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, is now hated and despised by workers and the middle class for being institutionally racist, institutionally corrupt and now a proven danger to women.
Saturday’s Daily Telegraph debated with itself the full scope of the problem, asking: ‘Is Cressida the problem – or is it the Met itself?’ – doubting that she could clean it up, ready for war with the workers even if she wanted to.
In its comment column, titled ‘The police must work to regain our trust,’ The Telegraph lamented: ‘Thanks to the lockdown, the blue collar worker is king: The investment banker cannot survive without the truck driver, and the latter is now so much in demand that he or she might end up better paid than the banker.’
The ruling class organ has belatedly recognised the strength of the working class!
The truth is that the crisis is forcing the ruling class into a battle to slash the living standards of the working class, with its main weapon, the police completely discredited.
This is therefore the time for the trade unions to take the offensive and to demand the disbanding of the Met police and to smash all the cuts.
The TUC must be made to call a general strike to bring down the government, disband its hated Met police forces, and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in a socialist planned and nationalised economy that will provide jobs and a future for all.