Conservative Party attacks the Unemployed - stealing benefit from the unemployed & giving it to business!!
Last week the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, David Cameron, pledged to give businesses a tax break of £2,500 per new employee they take on who has been unemployed for three months or more, upto 20% of their workforce.
I thought I'd explore this in more detail .. as a trade unionist through and through, I wanted to expose the real intention behind the tories agenda for the unemployed. In his speach Cameron admitted it would only benefit 1 in 3 new jobs, the companies could only claim the tax break if, the employee had not worked for that company in the last 12 months, had been unemployed for 3 or more months and the company had not made any redundancies.
It seems the Tories want to force the unemployed into ultra low pay jobs or work for dole payments while removing benefit entitlement from others thus giving that money to business instead.
Right back to Thatcherism(Monday 05 January 2009)
TORY leader David Cameron said on Monday that he sometimes felt like shaking Gordon Brown and saying: "Look, what don't you get? It's a credit crunch, that's what needs to be addressed."
Mr Cameron then proceeded to vanish swiftly up his own back passage by insisting that the recession should not be used as an opportunity to "tear up the market system" and "return to 1970s-style interventionism." And then, to crown it all, the Tory buffoon leaped to the defence of the privateers, saying that he would like to see a much larger private sector in the future. Just how many ways does the Tory leader want to cut his cake? Let's run through it carefully for the benefit of the confused Mr Cameron.
First, let's define the present "credit crunch." It's a highly specific phase in free-market capitalism, during which the speculators who run the big banks overreached themselves in their avarice, caught a cold with some very risky investments and, as a result, lost trust in their colleagues' business acumen and shied away from lending them more money to speculate with.
Now, since this reaction was common to all the big bankers, lending ground to a halt and, because free-market capitalism relies on borrowed capital to fuel both the markets and any industrial expansion going on, the whole system damn nearly collapsed.
Now, since this reaction was common to all the big bankers, lending ground to a halt and, because free-market capitalism relies on borrowed capital to fuel both the markets and any industrial expansion going on, the whole system damn nearly collapsed.
One of free-market capitalism's biggest weaknesses is its total anarchy and lack of any central planning. It's a free-for-all in which the devil takes the hindmost. So far, so good. But what is Mr Cameron's answer? Why, to defend the market system even though it virtually self-immolated and to demand that it should be left alone to grow and extend, despite its evident self-destructiveness. A bigger private sector, less government intervention and let the market sort out its own ills is his prescription.
The fact that this would result in hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers struggling to make ends meet while capitalism butchers itself in a frenzied blast of financial and industrial blood-letting seems not to impinge on his consciousness or, if it does, it clearly doesn't matter to him. So the friendly, socially conscious face of that nice Mr Cameron suddenly shows itself as a mask and under the mask is revealed the snarling face of unbridled Friedmanite Thatcherism in all its bloody glory.
All of this Tory rubbish wouldn't matter if Labour was what Labour should be. But it ain't.
If all was as it should be, Mr Brown would be laying out plans for huge government investments in industry, paid for by raising taxes on the rich and carrying with the investment the purchase of great tranches of shares in the companies concerned, thus bringing into the equation some element at least of state control and sensible planning.
The car industry, with its tens of thousands of jobs, could be preserved, rail expansion could be secured, homebuilding could be revitalised and the mess that is the free market could be hamstrung in its insane rush to speculate on anything and everything. Instead, Mr Brown offers us what? Just the Tory scheme to guarantee bank lending for businesses and a determination to press ahead with part-privatisation of the Royal Mail and other institutions.
Oh, and you can borrow off the government to pay your mortgage for a bit when your job vanishes, providing, of course, that you can pay it back later.
Some choice.
