IT is definitely no fun being young under the Tories!
As is well known, the Tories are absolutely desperate to be the party that hammers migrants and is determined to impose a four-year residency test for migrants before they can get access to any UK benefits as part of their ‘reforming’ of the EU. The problem is that EU law is currently anti-racist and anti-discrimination, so the EU Council is not able to negotiate and agree a ‘victimise the migrants’ policy for the UK.
The Tories have sought legal advice and it is that a four years residency test for migrants is illegal under EU law. In a speech in November, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged: ‘Changes to welfare – to cut EU migration – will be an absolute requirement in the negotiation that I’m going to undertake.’
The Tory solution to the problem of how the UK can stay in the EU and legally discriminate against migrants is simple. They are set to agree that all UK born citizens between 18 and 22 will have no right to housing benefit and tax cuts for those four years. In order to victimise migrants and win the UKIP vote, the Tories are willing to sacrifice all 18-22s in the UK with a savage stab in the back! The enemy is indeed at home, as Lenin so often stressed.
Ministers are not prepared to discuss how the UK’s youth are to be sacrificed to appease EU law and to be able to attack migrants. The plan, once again, is for Britons, even if they have lived in the UK all their lives, from their 18th birthday to be ineligible for working tax credits and housing benefits for four years until they reach 22.
Currently about 50,000 UK citizens under the age of 22 receive tax credits. Most of them have children. They are now deemed to be expendable and are to be thrown to the dogs. Once again, the Tories are determined to remain in the EU and at the same time to practice discrimination against migrants. This is so important to them that they are willing to cane the UK’s youth.
The lawyers’ assessment was ‘Imposing additional requirements on EU workers that do not apply to a member state’s own workers constitutes direct discrimination which is prohibited under current EU law.’ The government has therefore drawn up residency plans to include all applicants for tax credits, including British citizens.
Youth – who have already lost the maintenance grant, which assisted their secondary education, who have seen university tuition fees rise to £9,000 – are now to be officially second class citizens in what they thought was their own country.
At the same time, young people are being hit with the news that so savage have been the Tory education cuts that Sixth Form colleges in England say that they have had to cut the number of science and foreign language courses they offer, because of their financial crisis. This crisis is so severe that the Sixth Form Colleges Association said yesterday that more than a third of colleges feared that without better funding they would have to fold up by 2020.
Sixth Form colleges have faced deeper cuts to their budgets than any other group of institutions, the Association’s report said, with some losing a third of their funding between 2011 and 2016. Youth are seen by the Tory Party as little more than cheap labour fodder, to either work for nothing as part of a ‘National Youth Service’ force or as plain and simple zero-hours contract workers.
It is being spelt out to youth every day that there is no future or even hope for them under the regime that the British capitalists are imposing. They are now talking about returning to being a ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’ – the ultimate absurdity – back to the days of Charles Dickens when the poor were really poor and lived in fear of the workhouse or the debtors prisons, as did Dickens to the end of his days.
Youth, however, will not accept this future. The youth are the most revolutionary section of the working class and will rise up and lead the struggle to build the revolutionary leadership to organise the victory of the British socialist revolution.
This is the way to answer the Tory would-be work-house masters presiding over the remnants of British capitalism.
