THE Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) confirmed what people already know, when it predicted yesterday that unemployment is set to rise, this time by 100,000 by the end of August, a leap in the rate from 8.4% to 8.7%.
Unemployment stands at 2.67m at present, and over 1.04 million of the unemployed are aged between 16 and 24. The IPPR says that up to 5,000 workers and youth will lose their jobs every week between now and the end of August.
It adds that in the period ahead 41,000 more people aged between 16 and 24 will join the ranks of the unemployed, along with an extra 7,000 older workers aged 50 or over.
Over-50s saw the biggest rise in unemployment between November and January, up by 4.8% to reach 428,000, with almost half of those out of work for a year or more, the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show.
Meanwhile, the capitalist economy continues to contract in a downward spiral movement, where any minute improvement is followed by a bigger fall.
The Bank of England has not ruled out a new bout of inflationary quantitative easing (money printing) to try and avoid a deeper depression.
However, the bosses’ rating agencies have already been warning that more ‘easing’ will see the UK lose its Triple A status, which allows it to borrow tens of billions at cheaper rates of interest to finance government spending.
In fact, the Bank of England and the government’s Debt Management Office (DMO) are arguing over the issue.
The DMO has just warned that more money printing by the Bank will hurt Britain’s recovery by pushing up the cost of government borrowing.
Robert Stheeman, chief executive of the DMO, said the state-backed body was watching the Bank’s £325bn quantitative easing (QE) programme ‘incredibly carefully’.
The DMO chief executive, when asked whether more QE would risk pushing up the cost of Government debt, replied it ‘could’. The DMO must this year raise £168bn in the markets to fund the deficit and help finance public services. The Office of Budget Responsibility has estimated that an increase in gilt yields of just 0.1 percentage points would add £900m to debt interest costs by 2015.
UK capitalism is in a state of paralysis, as the ship of state sinks, with continued savage cuts, and a continuing depression of the economy its only viable option.
Unemployment is set to rocket this spring and summer, while the savage budget cuts pauperise families who have to choose whether to pay for petrol, pay for fuel, pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families.
The South East London ‘Kids Company’ charity has estimated that there are already ‘350,000 children living in severe poverty in London many of whom survive on an inadequate diet.’
The charity states that ‘More and more children are coming to us because they are hungry and there just isn’t enough food for them at home. . . 85% of children at “Kids Company” say they rely on us for their main meal of the day. . . We’re seeing effectively responsible parents who are just not managing to have food at home. For some children it’s definitely got to the point of being a humanitarian disaster.’
The charity is doing brilliant work but it cannot resolve the capitalist crisis, as it bravely attempts to bail out oceans of capitalist anarchy with little more than a teaspoon. The UK is being forcibly returned to the days of Charles Dickens.
The only way to deal with the capitalist crisis, in reality its death agony, is for the working class to carry out a socialist revolution.
This means that the TUC must be forced to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government. This must put an end to UK capitalism by expropriating the bosses and the bankers and by bringing in socialism and a planned economy.
