JOHN MAJOR has announced a moral crusade to restore what he calls the 'old values'. And this moral offensive will run hand in hand with the austerity cutbacks expected in Kenneth Clarke's new Budget.
But how far back in time does Major want to drag us?
Top Tories tell us that many of today's social ills in a crumbling, crisis-ridden, crime-laden Britain, much of whose industry has been laid waste by Tory policies, are to be blamed on the permissive values of the 1960s.
Easy sex, easy divorce and a sagging attendance at church, they imply, has bred a generation of work-shy scroungers and criminals.
Hacking back
By implication, it is suggested that cutting off welfare payments to single mothers, slashing the dole, penalising those unable to work through illness and generally hacking back the welfare state, would help get Britain back on its feet. By a remarkable coincidence, this is exactly the kind of measure Kenneth Clarke, Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley, and other figures on the Tory right have been suggesting as a way of saving money.
Both his supporters and opponents argue that Major yearns for a return to the social climate of the 1950s he knew as a child.
But the 1950s was a decade based on the consolidation and expansion of the new welfare state: social security offered greater levels of protection for the unemployed, for pensioners and those in need; millions were welcoming the new National Health Service, formed in 1948; and for young people there was improved higher education. The economy as a whole, growing in the post-war boom, was assisted by a newly-nationalised public sector including coal, power, gas and railways.
Every element of this world of 40 years ago is now under sustained, relentless attack - from John Major's own government. "THERE IS a danger it could yet again be too little, too late' from the TUC, " whined the Socialist Worker editorial on November 20.
Major: economy rests on a wing and a prayer It's not the 1950s Major wants back, it's the 1930s - a decade in which the state did notting to relieve massive, grinding unemployment, in which employers brutally exploited the demoralisation of trade unionists betrayed in the 1926 General Strike, and when millions on the breadline were denied even minimal social security payments by the hated Means Test. It was a decade in which private enterprise ran (and ruined) the basic utilities; a decade before the dread concept of "equal opportunities' had been invented, and before comprehensive schooling was even a twinkle in teachers' eyes. "Traditional' Major's defenders argue that he wants a return to a 'traditional' conservative morality based on self-reliance, the family, decency and respect for the law. By leaving these ideas deliberately vague, and playing on the bigoted prejuin the press, and the predictable shortage of leaflets, reportedly exchanging hands at black market prices akin to Faberge eggs.
Of course a march on its even Thatcher's attacks. of every ward and every bed.
It is also reassuring to find that despite the recent mergers, there is still enough competition for NHS members to force the various health undice of disgruntled layers of the conservative middle class, the Tories intend : simply to ignore the welter of factual evidence which disproves their assumptions, just as Home Secretary Michael Howard has had to ignore all his advisors to press ahead with his 'lock 'em up' Behind all its reactionary rhetoric, Major's cabinet is pursuing a goal even more dear to the heart of the Tory right, cash in their wallets and a balanced Budget.
Having cut taxes on the rich to below the level needed to sustain services, they are now determined to cut state spending and raise taxes chiefly from the poor. That's the real reason why - as leaked documents show - the cabinet is discussing how best to begin the demolition of the welfare state, on a scale exceeding Destroyed After 14 years of Tory rule has reduced the economy to insolvency, and destroyed any possibility of a new, healthy expansion based on manufacturing, they are forced to make the weak and the poor pay up to bail out the rich.
Far from increasing "self-reliance', the imposition of VAT on domestic heating fuel, together with tighter restrictions on unemployment benefit and social security will push millions of pensioners and low-paid or jobless families from poverty into total despair.
With no jobs to go to, and no childcare available, there is no way single mothers can escape the new poverty traps being cynically created.
Some of the Tory plans under secret consideration will even damage private industry. The proposal to shift £1.4 billion of the social security bill onto employers by making them responsible for sick pay and industrial injury benefit is likely to hit firms hard. The consequence will be that many will refuse to pay up, or simply sack workers who go sick.
Fig-leaf
Driven by a cash crisis they created, egged on by the Thatcherite right wing which still controls Tory policy-making, and donning the flimsiest fig-leaf of a moral crusade, Major's cabinet hold one trump card which makes them confident they can do as they wish.
Labour's timid front-bench team, many of them clinging to the same threadbare pseudo-religious 'moral values' as the Tories, refuse to spell out a radical root and branch challenge, or to link up with public sector unions in a full-scale fightback for the welfare state.
The labour movement must rise to the challenge, and build a sustained fightback for every threatened benefit and service. As the civil service unions showed on November 5 and the health unions on their November 20 demonstration, the slogan must be "On to the picket line, not back to the breadline!"