PRIME Minister Gordon Brown yesterday pledged to a gathering of businessmen in London to ‘intensify’ the government’s attacks on the Welfare State, whilst continuing to give the banks ‘whatever’s necessary’.
Brown said that he couldn’t promise to keep anyone in their current job, telling the gathering: ‘What’s happening at the moment is a million manufacturing jobs are moving from America, Europe and Japan every year to Asia.
‘Service jobs are now moving in large numbers as well. . .
‘I cannot promise the people that we’ll be able to keep them in their last job if it becomes technologically redundant, but we can promise people that we’ll help them into their next job.’
He can’t save workers’ jobs but he is moving hell and high water to save the bankers.
He continued: ‘And that’s why today, when we are announcing reforms to incapacity benefit, our emphasis is on people’s ability and not just their disability.’
Brown said that in the 1980s, ‘quite frankly people were put on to incapacity benefit simply to lower the numbers of people who were on unemployment benefit’.
This is the New Labour line that those on incapacity benefits are scroungers, who are going to be forced into work.
Ignoring the government’s mass closure of Remploy factories for the disabled, he claimed the government’s ‘reforms’ would mean ‘that people who have disabilities are given the training, the support and the employment opportunities that are necessary, so that they can participate successfully in an economy that is far different from what it was 20 years ago’.
He said: ‘We will continue to make these changes to restructure the economy . . . with an intensification of our welfare reforms, to give people the opportunities to move quickly from one job to another, if that is what is necessary.’
Ignoring two world wars and the worldwide depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, Brown described the current banking crisis and collapse of world share prices as ‘the first crisis of the global age.’
After previously insisting that Thatcherism was his inspiration, Brown declared his 100 per cent support for ‘Keynesian’ economics ‘that assumed that things would not return to normal without special action’.
Brown said: ‘What we had to do in the last few weeks is this: first of all, in addition to the liquidity that we’ve provided to the financial system, so that the banks can keep going, we decided in Britain – and I think other countries have agreed with this decision – that we had to recapitalise and strengthen our banks.’
He continued to pledge that he would bring in regulations to prevent another crisis of capitalism, an ‘early warning system’. He seemed to have forgotten that in an earlier life, full of prudence, he had declared that he had cured boom to bust capitalism!
Brown said he would be meeting world leaders to discuss the world financial crisis on November 15.
He also said that the Opec oil cartel would have to be broken, as would all protectionist instruments.
This sounded as if he was pledging another Iraq war.
As Brown spoke, London’s FTSE-100 share index was plunging more than 150 points to 3,700 points, while the pound fell below $1.55.
