THE number of people unemployed in the UK rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million in the three months to July, official figures have shown. This is the largest increase in nearly two years, bringing the jobless rate to 7.9%.
Youth unemployment also rose by 78,000 to 973,000, while the number receiving the Jobseeker’s Allowance rose by 20,300 in August to 1.58 million.
In all, to complete a disastrous picture, the number of people in employment in the economy fell in the three months to July, by 69,000 to 29.17 million.
PM Cameron’s remarks greeting this picture of misery was typically Tory – it was to lash out at immigrants, threatening that those who could not speak English would lose their benefits.
The loss of the Jobseeker’s Allowance could well bring starvation. The loss of housing benefit will certainly bring homelessness and see tent cities in every town. This is the brutal capitalist Britain that the Tories are creating, supported by their Liberal comrades in arms.
However, yesterday’s surge in the unemployment figures is just the start.
‘Today’s data provide further evidence that the fading of the UK’s economic recovery is having increasingly severe effects on the labour market,’ said Samuel Tombs at Capital Economics.
‘Continued rises in unemployment in the coming months seem likely.’ This is the bourgeois verdict.
In fact the British economy is poised to undergo a major contraction or slump, driven by the developing crisis of the EU, which is heading for Greek and Irish defaults and the collapse of a number of EU and UK banks, and with it a number of industries.
The unemployment figures, now mounting rapidly on a world scale, go hand in hand with a massive inflationary surge, being continually stoked by the continuing oil wars, and by finance capital purchasing (seizing) the world’s raw materials, from cotton to coffee, for decades ahead, so that they can continue to make super profits, and hold humanity by the throat.
The just released UK inflation figures show that the UK inflation rate for August, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), increased from 4.4% to 4.5%, with the RPI rate which includes mortgage payments rising from 5% to 5.2%.
The wages, benefits and pensions of tens of millions of people are being cut by the inflationary leap, by the minute.
The capitalist world is in the grip of a developing banking crash and slump, and also by its opposite, runaway inflation.
The Cameron-led coalition is determined that the working class and the middle class will pay for this crisis, and is cutting wages and benefits and pensions as rapidly as it can to prop up the banks, whose crisis is actually deepening, despite the trillions that have been looted from the working class and the middle class.
This looting has reached the point where the government’s answer to every perceived problem is to cut benefits, with the ‘savings’ going straight to the banks, in one way or another.
It is in this context that the pensions strikes this autumn must be just the start of the action.
What is required is not just a struggle against the coalition, but to defeat it. Not just a big protest, but the delivery of the coup de grace to bring it down.
This means that the TUC must be forced to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in socialism via a socialist planned economy.
This is the way forward. There is no other way of defending the interests of the working class and the middle class in the face of the most vicious Tory attacks ever.
