THE Tory Prime Minister Cameron and his LibDem Deputy Clegg visited the Olympic site in Stratford yesterday to spell out that the only future they have for youth is slave labour and savage cuts to save the bankers and bosses.
The youth are being told by the coalition that the answer to rising youth unemployment is to put them to work without pay on ‘work experience’ schemes and fake ‘apprenticeships’.
Yet the coalition leaders admit that business is still in a slump, which means there is more unemployment to come.
The drive of the coalition is to destroy the ‘public sector’ and push the working class back to the conditions of the 19th century, when life was very harsh and very short for the mass of the workers and their families, with no social security for those who were thrown out of work.
In a speech to the Institute of Directors on Wednesday, Cameron’s Chancellor Osborne said that there would be no U-turn by the government.
Osborne said there would have to be an ‘essential rebalancing of our economy’.
Under the government’s plans, the Welfare State is to be swept away and in its place will come a new Poor Law and a 21st-century Workhouse for youth.
Osborne boasted that, by determining to wipe out the government’s budget deficit, the Tories and their LibDem junior partners have achieved ‘market interest rates’ in Britain of 3.4 per cent, and that this was virtually the same as Germany’s.
This is empty talk and false. The Governor of the Bank of England King has already as good as admitted that interest rates will soon rise, with unemployment rocketing.
Youth will be faced with a desert – they will have neither jobs nor university places to go to.
Osborne’s remarks were only for the consumption of desperate bosses and bankers.
That is why he announced the government’s intention to ‘review’ all employment rights, making it easier to carry out mass sackings – to bring in youth slave labourers, no doubt.
He is not tackling unemployment when he announces 100,000 unpaid ‘work experience’ places and 250,000 fake, unskilled ‘apprenticeships’ for youth, to try to replace trade union rates of pay with slave labour rates!
He intends to tear up the minimum wage and smash up the employment appeals tribunal system to end ‘unfair dismissal’ claims.
Access to university and college for the mass of young people is being ended, with universities to return to their ‘traditional’ status as the preserve of the rich, where university education as a commodity can be bought.
There will be no ‘economic recovery’ under capitalism, despite these attacks.
Despite Osborne and Co’s efforts to restore profits and rebuild bankrupt capitalism by driving up unemployment and creating an army of youth slave labour, British capitalism will not be ‘revived’.
What is coming is not a ‘recovery’, but a massive struggle between the coalition and the working class.
Standing in the way of the coalition’s drive to recreate the Victorian era by smashing the Welfare State are the trade unions and this generation of young people, who are not prepared to be reduced to the level of slaves!
But the leaders of the trade unions, like TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber, are prepared to go along with – and even support – driving youth into unpaid work and ‘apprenticeships’.
Our message for all youth who want to rid themselves of this capitalist system is simple: join the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Young Socialists.
Build our party into a mass revolutionary party based on youth, who will drive out right-wing union leaders whom the coalition is relying on to accept these cuts, and lead the fight for a workers government.
Only a workers government with socialist policies can end youth unemployment by ending capitalism and bringing in socialism.
