EX-ARMY officer Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, was yesterday planning just how to force unemployed workers to give up their council homes, and move to areas where there are supposedly jobs available, without any guarantee of housing.
What are they to do with their families: desert them, put them into tents, or the children into care?
And what if they won’t go to pick fruit on farms or do other agricultural work for the gangmasters, at slave pay rates? They will be encouraged in the same way as they were in the 1930s by having their dole and any other benefits slashed! Hunger is to be used to force them to move. This is what the Tories are planning.
The hungry 1930s were the decade of the work camps when, particularly, young men, once capitalism could no longer make a profit out of employing them, were given the ultimatum to go and break stones in work camps or lose their benefits.
With hundreds of thousands of public sector workers due to be sacked in the next year, there will be no jobs available anywhere, except slave labour jobs, paying at the minimum subsistence level.
This is all that British capitalism can afford!
Workers will have to be whipped into giving up their homes to take such ‘jobs’, and the Tories plan to use the whip of benefit cuts to force them to do so.
In the emergency budget, a major attack on housing and disability benefits was announced by Osborne as part of this savagery against the workers.
The descriptive language being used by the Tory media is Norman Tebbit’s ‘Get on your bike’, to emphasise that the cruelty of the Thatcher decade is about to be brought back.
However, this time round they are going to have to take on the whole working class and the majority of the middle class.
Thatcher is notorious for the organisation of a planned war against the miners, with the objective of closing the UK’s mines, destroying 200,000 jobs and smashing the NUM.
This war was very carefully planned. It was financed by North Sea oil wealth, saw the establishment of coal stocks all over Europe, and the use for an entire year of tens of thousands of police, supported by special forces of all kinds.
This was a huge struggle over one industry, the mining industry. So that Thatcher could get on with the job, the TUC was kept on side and TUC leaders regularly consulted. Their job, which they carried out, was to see that the miners fought alone.
As the emergency budget made clear, the entire working class, all of the poor and most of the middle class are going to be forced to pay for the crisis of capitalism.
The Tories are very conscious that they could be swept away by a massive revolutionary wave.
Their tactic is once again, after recruiting the Liberal Democrats, to get as many Labourites and union leaders on-side as possible.
This is why the Tories are now putting forward the idea that since ex-Labour Pensions Minister Hutton has agreed to head their review into Public Sector Pensions, it should be possible to get a number of trade union leaders to join him on the basis that they would influence the outcome, and would additionally be persuaded to do nothing as 700,000 public sector workers are sacked in the next year.
The so-called Tory envoy to the trade unions, Richard Balfe, is already discussing this with various trade union leaders. The TUC has signalled that it is available by inviting Cameron, the Tory leader to address the TUC Congress!
The Tories are seeking to split the trade unions in order to turn the UK into a huge wasteland, a 21st century version of the 1903 East London that Jack London describes in his book, ‘The People Of The Abyss’.
The Tories, Liberals and Labour collaborators must not be allowed to do this. The TUC must be made to withdraw its invitation to Cameron to address the TUC. TUC leaders who collaborate with Hutton must be removed. The TUC must be forced to call a general strike to bring down the Coalition and bring in a workers’ government.
All workers and youth who intend to have a future must join the WRP at once to organise the British socialist revolution.
