TORY prime minster Liz Truss closed the Tory Party conference yesterday with a speech designed to convince the party faithful that, despite performing a wild U-turn on Monday, she was determined to plough on with tax cuts for the rich paid for by the working class.
Truss denounced all previous economic policies saying that the political debate has been dominated by the ‘distribution of a limited economic pie’ for too long.
In other words, previous Tory governments had paid lip service to wealth distribution across the board, Boris Johnson’s famous ‘levelling up’ slogan, but she was going to change this.
Truss was going to make sure that the rich not just held on to their wealth but would increase it while the working class and middle classes would pay the price, i.e. pay the bill.
She admitted this would be no easy task, saying: ‘As the last few weeks have shown, it will be difficult.’
That’s a massive understatement from a prime minster forced to dump the centrepiece of Kwarteng’s mini budget because of the huge anger and outrage it caused, and the terror of Tory MPs realising that they faced political oblivion as a result.
But Truss was having nothing of this spineless refusal to face down the hatred of tens of millions of workers.
Instead she proclaimed: ‘Cutting taxes is the right thing to do morally and economically’ an absolute imperative to prove to the world’s bankers, hedge fund operators and every other speculator out to make a fortune on the backs of the working class that ‘Britain is open for business.’
Already Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng have committed to £45 billion in tax cuts to corporation tax, along with £140 billion in ‘support’ for the energy companies to pay for the energy price cap.
Now Truss is pledging even more unfunded tax cuts to make the wealthy even wealthier.
This will be paid for by a massive increase in government borrowing, driving up the national debt.
It will drive up interest rates as the Bank of England tries desperately to hold inflation down, while in fact pushing inflation even higher.
It is the working class and their families that Truss intends should pay for her tax cuts.
The cost of living, already pricing food and energy bills out of the reach of working class families, will shoot up even further.
Interest rate increases will force up the cost of mortgages, leading to hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing repossession while the effect on landlords will be to force up rents beyond affordability for private tenants.
Truss promised ‘stormy days’ ahead and she identified the main enemy, an ‘anti-growth coalition’ who stood in the way of her dream of a capitalist heaven where the ruling class could exploit the workers mercilessly, turning them into nothing more than wage slaves with no rights, no benefits and forced to slave away for the greater good – the profits of the bosses and bankers.
‘Militant’ trade unions were the main enemy of capitalist ‘enterprise’ and her speech was a clear warning to the trade unions that she is not going to be deterred in her war to make strikes and unions illegal as a necessary part of her desire to drive the working class back to the 19th century.
Those were the days before trade unions when workers were indeed treated as slaves to the capitalist class, fit only for the poor house or wages that barely kept them alive enough to return to work the next day.
All week the TUC and trade union leaders have kept silent about the Tory plans for a ‘new era’ of war on the working class.
Immediately these leaders must be forced not just to speak out but to take action to kick out this Tory government.
At the TUC Congress on Tuesday 18th October, thousands of workers must lobby to demand that the TUC either call a general strike to kick out the Tories or be removed and replaced with a new revolutionary leadership that will immediately organise the massive strength of the working class to get rid of the Tories and go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and build a socialist planned economy.
