Aux armes, citoyens!

The sheer arrogance of the Tories and their Lib Dem poodles as they go about making the poorest and the most vulnerable targets for benefit cuts increasingly makes them resemble the French court on the eve of the revolution of 1789.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived the life of aristocratic indifference while the majority of French peasants could not afford bread because of rising prices. While the queen may never have uttered the immortal phrase “let them eat cake”, she might as well have. Her reputation for profligacy was such that she became known as Madame Déficit, held personally responsible for bankrupting the treasury.

So when housing minister Grant Shapps, defending the bedroom tax,  says his sons share a room, he is having a laugh at our expense. His house is big enough for each of his three children to have their own room if one wasn’t used as a study.

Treasury secretary Danny Alexander, a Lib Dem, has attacked “bedroom blockers” –  his description of social housing tenants who need help with their rent but are deemed to have a “spare room”. From yesterday their benefit was cut. This is the very same man who deprived the Treasury of over £100,000 during the expenses scandal.

He registered a property as his second home when he became an MP in 2005, despite admitting to Revenue and Customs that it was in fact his main residence. The trick allowed him to claim over £37,000 of taxpayers’ money doing up the London home, which he sold for £300,000. He used a tax loophole to avoid paying capital gains tax.

Not so much a spare room as taxpayers’ cash going spare – if you’re an MP that is.

And what about Iain Duncan Smith, who has spearheaded the attack on the poorest section with the bedroom tax, caps on benefit uprating, council tax benefit deductions and an array of other measures that target the disabled?

Yesterday, the work and pensions secretary, claimed he could live on state benefits of just £53 a week – if he had to. By this morning, more than 125,000 people had challenged him to do so via an online petition.

You can’t imagine IDS moving from the lap of luxury to a life of intolerable hardship where £53 a week means a choice between poor quality food and heating your home.

Duncan-Smith’s 16th-century Tudor house in the Buckinghamshire village of Swanbourne is said to be worth £2m. The property, which includes a swimming pool, tennis courts and three acres of grounds, belongs to the family of his wife. Duncan-Smith’s salary is over £134,000 a year. That’s 48 times more than a person living – or barely surviving -  on £53 a week.

April 1 turned out to be a joke played at our expense by the ConDems. Access to legal aid was savaged while the contracting out of large parts of National Health Service was introduced. Most of the policies described here were, of course, built on foundations laid by the previous New Labour government.

Yet the right-wing of the Tory Party is far from satisfied. Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph, wrote: “The NHS and welfare remain hugely expensive monoliths, prone to excesses that are unaffordable in an age of austerity. Today’s reforms are a step in the right direction, but only the beginning of what must be a very long journey.”

As is commonly known, Antoinette and Louis XVI met their fate at the hands of the guillotine. The French Revolution frightened the life out of the British ruling classes, who thought they were next in line for the chop.

What the ConDems show is that history sometimes offers up a second chance. They are impervious to protest, limited strikes and direct actions. Something a lot stronger and more permanent is needed.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

How we can defend pensions

There is a common thread between the upcoming strikes in defence of public sector pensions in Britain and the slow-motion car crash that is Greek political economy. In both countries, the state is saying it can’t pay, won’t pay.

In Britain, pensionable age is rising to 66 and even higher thereafter. Against a background of people living longer and tax revenues in decline, we have to work longer, perhaps until we drop. Public sector pension contributions are going to rise steeply, with retirement age being pushed back for most, treasury secretary Danny Alexander has announced.

In Greece, as state bankruptcy looms, pensions have already been slashed along with public sector salaries and just about anything else the “socialist” Pasok government can get its hands on. As a result, the government has lost its legitimacy and authority. Will the Greek generals step in as they have done before?

The state in both countries is the national voice of a global capitalist system in profound crisis. In Britain, the budget deficit produced by the banking crash and recession has spurred on the drive to cut spending on pensions, education, welfare and public sector jobs.

Deepening the problem is the fact that during the globalisation period, tax take from the corporations has declined as a share of national income (GDP). In 1985, tax on corporate incomes in the UK was about 4.75% of GDP; by the end of 2005 it had fallen to under 3.5%. The figure has fallen throughout the European Union since 2000.

The burden of funding state spending has therefore increasingly fallen on wage earners and consumers. As real wages have fallen in Britain, with increasing numbers working part-time, and people have reduced their spending, so receipts have come under further pressure.

The secret talks between Britain’s trade union leaders and the Coalition government over pension “reform” are meaningless in this situation. Either the union bureaucrats are going to fight or make a rotten deal with one of the weakest governments for a long time.

But what should be the aim of the resistance, which has driven teachers, lecturers and civil servants to a one-day strike on June 30? The state can’t compromise because there is no room for a deal. In the market capitalist state that Britain has become, the public sector is unsustainable.

It would take the creation of an entirely different set of social, economic and political conditions to reverse the attacks on pensions, services and jobs. Relying on corporations to pay more tax is unrealistic under globalisation and asking workers and consumers to share more of the burden – as the government is doing – is reactionary.

However, if the economy were socialised, owned and run not in the interests of shareholders and lenders but those determined by society as a whole, then a different basis for public spending could be established. Instead of taxation as a source of state revenue, we could use the surplus created by economic activity for social purposes.

Under capitalism, this surplus is used to fund massive bonuses and executive salaries, pay off lenders and keep dividends flowing. Tax avoidance is, of course, de rigueur. In a not-for-profit economy, the “dividend” would end up in the hands of a democratic state dedicated to providing for social need.

We should not accept, as some trade union leaders have already done, that they “understand” the pensions’ deficit and that action is required to deal with it. The fight is for a more developed society that enables people to retire young enough to enjoy their lives and fulfil personal development. As capitalism can’t and won’t do that, the battle for the alternative is on – both in Greece and Britain.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The curious outing of David Laws

The story of how David Laws, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, came to step down from his post at the weekend after just a couple of weeks in the job, is a curious one, to say the least.

Ostensibly, his departure was a straightforward “expenses scandal” tale. The Daily Telegraph revealed on Saturday that Laws had claimed £40,000 in Parliamentary expenses which had been used to pay rent for rooms in properties owned by his long-term, but secret, partner. The cabinet minister for cuts had used the expenses to hide the fact that he was gay.

By the end of the evening, the outed Laws – who immediately sent his own case for investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards – had quit the Lib-Con coalition government, which was severely weakened as a result. Laws was an architect of the coalition agreement and the man put in charge of cutting the massive budget deficit.

He was replaced by Danny Alexander, a much younger and inexperienced politician. Lo and behold, he was next in the firing line. Today’s Telegraph accused Alexander of avoiding tax on the sale of a second home, something the Lib-Dem MP hotly disputed.

One of the questions in this murky affair is why did the Telegraph choose to publish their investigation at this particular time? And where did they get the information from? We ask, not because we hold any brief for the reactionary coalition government, but simply to check if something more serious than a scandal is involved.

The Telegraph, for example, is deeply ambivalent about the coalition. This leading Tory newspaper has columnists like Simon Heffer and Lord Tebbit who would like to see Cameron’s government collapse. They despise Cameron who they see as “not one of us” and who, the paper believes, used the election stalemate to form a coalition that would distance itself from “traditional Tory values”.

Last week, the Telegaph launched a campaign to defeat the coalition’s plans to raise the rate of capital gains tax and widen its scope. Some Tory backbenchers have also threatened to block the coalition’s plans for a referendum on the voting system and other policies they don’t like. They also reversed Cameron’s plans for a takeover of their backbench committee.

So the obvious question is: is there a systematic campaign by the Tory right-wing to destabilise the government. Who fed the Telegraph the closely-guarded information about Laws? Undoubtedly the paper has friends in high (and low) places, such as MI5 who presumably vetted Laws before he joined the cabinet. The paper has already said that its original investigation into Parliamentary expenses did not reveal what Laws had done. I am sure no one is readily going to provide the answers to these questions, but they are worth asking.

A major post-election political crisis was kept in the box only by Cameron and Clegg deciding to ditch their own programmes and party rank-and-files to form Britain’s first peacetime, full-scale coalition. The fact that the British state is near bankrupt, as one Tory cabinet member admitted over the weekend, will not stop its enemies from plotting against it..

These are uncharted, dangerous political times for the British state. There are signs that it is at war with itself, as well as ordinary people whose jobs and living standards are now in the coalition’s sights. Don’t be surprised if the Laws affair is only the first of many such stories.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor