THE Tory/LibDem coalition suffered three defeats on Wednesday; in the House of Lords over their plans to slash £1.6 billion from the benefits of the very sick and disabled.
Lord Patel, a former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians, led the attack on the government describing the welfare bill as an ‘immoral’ attack on the sick, the vulnerable and the poor, adding: ‘If we are going to rob the poor to pay the rich, then we enter into a different form of morality.’
Despite the support of nearly all LibDem peers, the bill relating to means-testing the employment and support allowance (ESA) payments to the disabled, cancer patients and stroke victims after one year was defeated by 224 votes to 186.
The amendment proposed by Lord Patel and backed by the Labour Party extended the length of time to two years before means-testing kicks in.
The other two defeats were on those parts of the bill that similarly imposed time-limits on people undergoing chemotherapy, and youth who are disabled or suffering from severe illness that make it impossible to seek work.
Even if this amendment is not reversed by the coalition government, and it most certainly will be when the bill returns to the House of Commons, all it means is that after two years instead of one, regardless of whether a person has paid national insurance contributions all their working lives, they become means-tested for the ESA (which replaced the old disability allowance) and face cuts in benefit to the tune of £94 a week.
Defending the limit of one year, the Tory Lord Freud; claimed that one year was a ‘reasonable balance between the needs of sick, disabled people claiming benefit and those who have to contribute towards the cost’.
So Freud and the Tories find it ‘moral’ to kick the sick and disabled into poverty after one year while Patel and the Labour Party presumably think it ‘moral’ to do so after two years.
For capitalism the only morality is to make as much profit as possible and to secure for itself those markets and resources that make this possible.
Therefore, they have no qualms about spending vast sums to militarily conquer countries like Libya for its oil – upwards of £1 billion was spent in six months bombarding the country with cruise missiles and attack planes – while at the same time screaming that the amendment passed in the Lords will cost £1.6 billion spread over five years (under £350 million a year).
This enormous amount of taxpayers’ money spent to finance counter-revolution in Libya is dwarfed by the amount already spent to prop up the bankrupt banking system.
When the Royal Bank of Scotland was on the verge of collapse in 2009 the then Labour government gave it a secret gift of £62 billion to keep afloat.
Last month it was revealed that the Bank of England has drawn up contingency plans for pumping untold billions into the British banking system in a vain attempt to stop them going under when the eurozone collapses.
All this has to be paid for out of the meagre benefits payable to the most vulnerable sections of society, the sick, disabled and the unemployed.
For capitalism all those who are unable to work and so be exploited and have profit extracted from them are a useless drain on their system, fit only for the workhouse or the streets: that is their morality.
Only by bringing down this government through the organisation of a general strike and its replacement with a workers government that will expropriate the banks and the bosses can the working class defeat these obscene attacks, and begin to bring in a society whose maxim will be ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’.