YESTERDAY PM Cameron pledged that a Tory government will introduce a law, within 100 days of taking office, guaranteeing no rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020.
The desperate Tories are desperately seeking an election winner and have been driven to treat the electorate as if it was a gang of idiots with its ‘fool’s gold’ offer of a five-year taxation freeze.
Cameron and Osborne are also displaying their complete cynicism.
At a time when bankers are warning about a new banking and shares crash when the US raises its interest rates, when the banks are already wobbling, and the eurozone is set to explode – driven on by its massively sharpening contradictions of which Greece is just one – and as a new Middle East war has erupted in the Yemen, the Tories are able to issue a five-year guarantee of no tax rises.
This is a new more comic version of King Canute keeping the tide at bay!
Cameron and the Tories are taking the electorate for idiots, and will pay a heavy price for their contempt!
The Tory Party is already ready to carry out up to £50bn of cuts in the next five years if they are elected.
Their declaration of no tax rises is in fact a declaration that they intend to destroy the Welfare State, privatise the NHS and abolish all benefits to return to the conditions of the 19th century.
Before the no-tax-rises announcement on Tuesday morning, the Institute for Fiscal Studies announced that Conservative proposals ‘would almost certainly require significant cuts to some of the main benefits – child benefit, housing benefit, tax credits and disability benefits’.
The IFS also said that the pace of cuts would be faster than in the last government, the cuts would hit the poorest households hardest, and it would require cash reductions rather than just freezing benefit rates.
Factor ‘no tax rises before 2020’, into this equation, and what you have before you is the plan to destroy all of the gains of the 1948 Labour government.
Also on Tuesday, the TUC issued its analysis, also before the Tories no-tax-rises pledge.
It stated that 2010 to 2014 was the worst five-year period for living standards for at least half a century.
Commenting on the latest GDP figures published on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show the rate of GDP growth falling by half to 0.3 from 0.6 per cent, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘The slowest recovery in modern history just slowed down again. This is bad news for jobs and living standards. What’s more, Conservative plans for extreme cuts after the election risk completely killing off this faltering recovery and plunging the economy back into even deeper trouble.
‘The makers are marching backwards, construction is slumping and it’s only services that have rescued the economy from shrinking. This is the opposite of the rebalanced economy we were promised.’
The Tories are taking the UK into a massive disaster, where the rich will be able to double their money yet again, while the workers and the poor go under.
The News Line urges electors to vote WRP for a socialist revolution where our seven candidates are standing, and to vote Labour everywhere else to get the Tories out.
There is no doubt that the response of the bosses and the Tories to an election defeat will be to crash the economy so as to force Miliband into a national government following the example of the 1931 coalition led by Ramsay MacDonald that pushed through huge cuts.
If this happens the trade unions must call a general strike to prevent the formation of a national government, and to go forward to a workers government and socialism.
The central issue is that the workers and the middle class have no future under capitalism.
The way forward is to a workers government and socialism, with the bosses and bankers expropriated, and a socialist planned economy producing to satisfy people’s needs, and resolve society’s problems, taking the place of law-of-the-jungle capitalism.
Forward to the British socialist revolution!