belies its savagely reactionary core.
The result could be a new drive towards impoverishing the lowest- income families, recreating many of the horrors of the 1930s.
Embattled Chancellor Norman Lamont has called for a wholesale slaughter of sacred cows as he imposes a review' of all public spending, with instructions to ministers to cut, cut and cut Schemes widely touted in the press after a deliberately vague keynote speech from John Major to Tory party workers include:
• Withholding the benefits of up to a million people unemployed for more than a year, unless they sign on for pointless 'training"
• Press-ganging the unemployed to take on community project work for a meagre E10 a week on top of their benefits.
These proposals fall short of a full-scale US-style 'workfare' system, in which the unemployed are compelled to 'work' in menial jobs or be stripped of benefits. But with arch-ThatPeter Lilley at Social Security and Gillian Shephard at Employment looking to slash their own budgets, even harsher measures could still be on the cards. Lilley has already suggested breaking Tory election pledges, including a promise not to means-test child The new Major offensive is both economic and political in its motivation.
Collapse
Lamont's nosediving economy has brought a collapse of employment, sending even the laundered jobless total soaring above three million, and intensifying the government's huge debt crisis. Next year's €50 billion public sector deficit is nearing peacetime record levels With sterling bobbing helplessly in the wash of other European currencies, and all of the stock remedies for ending recession having already failed, Major's team are getting desperate. Since they cannot kick-start the economy, they must either find ways to cut public spending or raise taxes.
But asa recipe for making quick cash savings, workfare is a non- starter. Experience in the USA shows it costs vast sums to administer a TO INSINS Britain already has almost the lowest-paid workforce in Burope.
Significantly, the media have emphasised the idea of drafting the unemployed into what are termed 'community schemes' - loosely interpreted to mean anything from sweeping the streets to repairing roads and school roofs, or ancillary work in hospitals.
Through workfare the Tories might hope to get real jobs - which the Tories are unwilling to pay for - done for Mickey Mouse 'wages', while further smashing the public sector But the attack on the unemployed also plays a political role for the Tories. By once again stoking up the divisions within the working class, and playing off the relatively prosperous 'two thirds' against the poverty-stricken 'one Major hopes to create a free-fire zone in which pensioners, children, the sick and people with disabilities can be picked off at will to balance the books of British capitalism. third' in society, they are opening the way for even wider-reaching measures.
Included in the package of suggestions under consideration are the means-testing of pensions and of child allowances. Ministers ave been told to 'think the unthinkable'.
Labour By picking first on the relatively soft target of the unemployed who lack any organised lobby group to defend them, Major hopes to create a harsh new climate devoid of compassion for the poor, a free-fire zone in which pensioners, children, the sick and people with disabilities can be picked off at will to balance the books of British capitalism.
Abject
Major chose a good week to try it on. Labour's leaders had already embarked upon their own policy review, in which the targeting' of benefits and means-testing play an increasing role.
As Major unmasked plans further to impoverish working people to benefit the prosperous, John Smith mounted the rostrum in Bournemouth to announce the demise of socialism and a new focus on ... the personal prosperity of individuals!
Only the belated decision of the NUM to ballot on March 5 for strike action in defence of threatened pits offered any serious challenge to the right wing offensive.
Without a determined battle by the left to mobilise the strength of the workers movement against the ory onslaught, long-term blows can be struckagainst what remains of the welfare state - blows which John Smith's miserable band of Clintonite 'modernisers' will not even promise to reverse.