THE bankers coalition has set the scene for next Wednesday’s cuts announcements in true Bullingham Club style, by declaring that ‘welfare cheats’ equal muggers, who are to be ruthlessly hunted down by 200 extra inspectors to be hired specifically for this purpose.
The ‘hit squads’ are to be sent where the problems ‘are rife’.
In the good old days ‘sturdy rogues’ were branded with red hot irons, or had their ears docked. The gentry are unable to do that today. Their heirs however intend to fine ‘minor’ benefit infringers £50, and to bar a person from benefit for three years after three offences.
Their modern motto is let them starve.
It is claimed that benefit and tax credit fraud costs the taxpayer an estimated £1.5bn a year. The government is in fact planning to cut benefits by £15bn. However, unpaid taxation by the bourgeoisie is calculated to be in the region of £90bn! It goes without saying that there are to be no inspectors hunting these offenders down.
However, if benefit ‘cheats’ are muggers, then the banking class whose operations caused the present world crisis with all of its privations and catastrophes must be ‘vermin’.
Yet the state bank, the Bank of England, has handed over to these same bankers £1.2 trillion in loans, gifts and guarantees, and is on the point of handing over another huge wedge of newly printed cash to these same bankers, to try to avoid the consequences of the deepening of the financial crisis that they and their capitalist system have caused.
The damage caused by the most outrageous ‘benefit cheat’ does not even figure on the richter scale of criminality when compared to the deeds of the banking class.
Yet the latter is being coddled and perpetuated, with its debts being forced onto the entire population, while relatively harmless ‘benefit cheats’ are going to be made the whipping boys for the crisis.
The Tory party is riddled with this obscene contradiction – the rich get away with murder, while the poor are to be persecuted to prop up those same rich.
Lord Ashcroft who ran the Tory election campaign, and has just resigned as its deputy chairman, avoids paying all his taxes in the UK, while the current Tory ‘waste adviser’ Sir Phillip Green makes sure that a massive section of his companies’ profits are not wasted by being handed over in taxes to the Treasury.
The Tory party and the LibDems are not so indulgent with the very poor and the very sick.
As part of Wednesday’s bonfire of the benefits they intend to close down dozens of Remploy factories that provide jobs, and decent, productive lives for the disabled. More than 50 Remploy factories employ 3,000 people. They are all to be sacked when the coalition cancels the Remploy grant of £111 million a year, for the next five years.
However, when they receive their orders from the US the coalition jumps to attention, as they have done with their decision to slash the military cuts and write a blank cheque for the Afghan war, the Trident programme and two giant aircraft carriers, to defend the interests of the US and UK bankers and bosses throughout the world.
Next Wednesday’s cuts programme will anger millions.
There is only one way forward in this situation. There must be a general strike to bring down the coalition and a socialist revolution to overthrow the bosses and bankers and bring in a workers government to carry out a socialist programme.
