Sunday 9 December 2012

Osborne launches another attack on working class in Autumn Statement

It is easy to see the cracks in George Osborne’s autumn statement. It was a ‘smokescreen budget’, designed to fool people that the well off are going to be contributing their fair share, yet in reality they will be contributing very little compared to working class families, pensioners and benefit claimants who will still pay the real price for the failures of capitalism.
In addition to this, where is the necessary investment from Osborne to kickstart our economy and help drive us out of recession? Simple it’s not there. This country could be at the forefront of a green economic revolution with more than 1 million jobs created in the green sector alone. Personally I would like to see encouragement of public and co-operatively owned businesses to lead this sector with the necessary investment and support coming from the government. In addition to this I would like to see greater support for small businesses and sole traders in general – ordinary people who are trying to make a living in this country instead of gambling on the stock market or driving wages to the bottom through hiring lower waged labour. I do differentiate between good and unscrupulous employers in small businesses. Such companies who are unscrupulous and keep wages down by exploiting their workforce I feel deserve no support, as their loyalty is not to the country or their workforce, but to their bank balance instead.
Moving on to Osborne’s attack on benefit claimants, which I feel represents another giant leap towards Victorian conditions in this country. This is all part of the neo-liberal plan to divide and destroy any solidarity within working class communities.  Their aim is to stigmatise those on benefits and making conditions even harsher for them. We cannot let Osborne and the capitalist class to destroy our communities and we need to build greater solidarity within the working class in order to defend ourselves against the purges of the government and its allies in the mainstream media.
It is a fact, when people are desperate they will break the law in order to survive or to support their families. It is a matter of survival and I would challenge even the most law abiding citizen to challenge this. Through this purge on benefits and the working class more and more people are going to be forced into petty crime in order to survive. No doubt this will be picked up upon by the ‘hang em and flog em’ brigade readers of the Mail and the Express and other right wing papers who will claim crime is getting out of control and call for stiffer penalties. This is why we need to defend working class people and communities and those on benefits and point the blame at those who are creating the economic and social conditions for crime. How can we totally condemn those committing anti-social behaviour when all they can see before them is a no hope society and a dog eat dog world.
Our message has to be to invest in both our economy and the people and to oppose the capitalist divide and rule and social cleansing policies wherever they are implemented. We have to expose the greed, self interest and dog eat dog nature of the capitalist system not only to people in our communities, but to those active in the wider labour movement. As those to blame do not solely rest within the Tory party and their Lib-Dem buddies in the coalition, but with the Labour leadership and careerists within the Labour Party, Trade Unionists who have become so accustomed to their luxury lifestyles they have detached themselves from the people they are supposed to represent, and councillors who have been elected on an anti-cuts manifesto yet when in office simply carry out the dirty work of the government. In our fight to overthrow this rotten government and the capitalist system such people are nothing more than the enemy within our own camp.