THE drive by the Tories and their media supporters to demonise workers and the sick, as the root cause of the crisis that is holding British capitalism in a death lock, was ratcheted up yesterday with a series of articles in The Daily Telegraph.
An article by Szu Ping Chan and the paper’s deputy political editor Daniel Martin launched a vitriolic attack on sick workers under the headline: ‘Millions paid benefits without ever having to find a job.’
According to this article: ‘Nearly 4 million people are being paid jobless benefits without ever having to look for work, following a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pains during lockdown.’
This plays to the dominant theme emerging openly within the Tories and the ruling class that the lock-down during the Covid pandemic was a disaster for capitalism, and that the long-term health effects of long-Covid are now seriously undermining economic ‘recovery’.
Workers should have been happy to work as normal and risk untold thousands more dying on top of the 225,324 deaths so far recorded from the pandemic.
The fact that the working class refused to accept having its lives and the lives of its families put on the line for the profit of the bosses and bankers, is a running sore at the heart of the Tory Party.
Now all those sick, disabled or suffering from severe mental problems are being vilified and told they must be driven back to work under pain of having their benefit entitlements cut.
To drive the blood pressure of the average Telegraph reader and Tory supporter through the roof, the article maintains that: ‘Around 3.7 million of the 5.2 million people currently claiming out of work benefits have been granted an exemption from finding a job, meaning that taxpayers face bankrolling their benefits indefinitely.’
Of course, for the Tories this is just a case of workshy workers sponging off the state, nothing to do with the fact that due to the deliberate underfunding of the NHS, waiting lists for treatment are at record levels, meaning that many of those sick are unable to access treatment.
Nothing to do with the fact that the soaring cost of living has driven millions of working class families to the point of despair and desperation, simply to feed their children, pay the rent, heat their homes or even cook food at home. Or that the continued attacks to drive wages down below the spiralling inflation rate, has left workers with wages lower than they were 15 years ago.
Now for the Tories and their media supporters, the fault is not only all down to the working class, while the solution to the capitalist crisis is to force and starve the sick back to work in all the low paid jobs vital for the super-profits of the bosses by slashing or even abolishing their benefits.
In his budget last March, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced plans to ‘abolish the Work Capability Assessment in Great Britain and separate benefit entitlement from an individual’s ability to work’ and pledged the ‘biggest changes to our welfare system in a decade’ to achieve the goal of starving workers back into employment.
Now the vicious war on the most vulnerable section of workers is being linked to the equally vicious war on migrants and refugees. Last week, Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman told a gathering of right wing Tories that the road to capitalists’ salvation lay in making all these ‘economically inactive’ workers retrain as fruit pickers or HGV drivers.
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith also writing in the Telegraph yesterday, denounced companies ‘addiction to cheap labour that is fuelling the migration problem’ and insisted that Britain concentrates less on bringing in workers from abroad and more on driving workers off sickness benefits.
This concerted attack on workers at home and those fleeing imperialist war and starvation abroad, is a sign of the desperation of the Tories and ruling class to dump the economic crisis of bankrupt British capitalism onto the backs of the working class.
Workers will, however, never accept being driven into the ground to save a capitalist system on its last legs. The time has come for the working class to demand that the TUC get off its knees and mobilise the enormous strength of the working class by calling a general strike to bring down this weak, disintegrating Tory government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
