In his Autumn Statement mini-budget, Chancellor George Osborne will attempt populist politics in his budget by scapegoating the unemployed and attacking benefits.
He wants to set one group of working people against the other to avoid the blame himself.
As unemployment rises, those in work are being forced to work longer hours, work harder, often being bullied and are doing so for less real pay.
Who could blame those suffering in that way for idealising what an existence on benefits could mean.
But the Socialist says to workers and pensioners: “Beware!” Watch out for your wages and pensions, they plan to drive them down using the brutality of benefit cuts.
Lord Bichard, former benefits chief, recently said that retired people should do community work or face losing some of their benefit.
When did a fund you pay all your life become a benefit? When the Con-Dems want to make you pay for their crisis.
Attack on all workers
Regarding workers, benefit attacks are, plain and simple, the government’s way of forcing down wages. Unemployment is an economic policy of capitalism to ‘regulate the labour market’.
Capitalist strategists actually debate what kind of unemployment they want.
The long-term unemployed aren’t ‘good’, they want more of a ‘precariat’: millions of insecure workers increasingly desperate and impoverished enough to take any job on any terms to undermine existing jobs, wages and conditions.
They hope that, as a result, people will be too scared to fight back in the unions.
