Lib Dems and Tories in the coalition do not care for the poor or needy,

They intend clearing out central government of any who don’t vote blue in a similar way as the Westminster council did in the 1980s – this time by pricing the poor out via the cap on housing benefit.

They intend (indeed they have in many instances) to remove the safety net of benefits from the majority of those who use them to survive.

As you say this iliberal coalition government will remove tax credits from families by increasing the amount of hours they have to work.

As for the poor friendly policies the Iliberals in the government have introduced – look at them carefully, see how they compare to what we all championed at the last election.

I was certainly more than happy to shell out £3 for my copy at conference, but I’ve found a bit more difficult to get other people to read when it would cost them money.

The Liberal coalition with the Tories (under Simon) in the National Coalition of the Depression of 1930′s saw a rejection of Lloyd George’s New Deal and a policy of a banker backed Raw Deal instead with the usual bogus justifications of an austerity package. The Liberal Party then lost its Welfare State initiative and electoral success to the Labour movement as we all know. That was a disaster, as the centralised, State-run version of Social Contract triumphed, exposing the Welfare State to all the destructive criticism since levelled at it.

The current loss of social benefits is used to sustain organisations like the IMF and various broken banks, and huge budget deficits have been created to switch from democratic public control to private power and the financialisation of society.

The ITEM club 2012 Spring analysis states
(quote)
Ideally each sector balance would be close to zero. What stands out is the government financial deficit or net borrowing, which pumped £147 billion into the economy in 2010 and a further £122 billion last year. But these massive figures were largely the consequence of cash being drained out of the economy and indeed the Exchequer by the private sector. The biggest drain was the company sector, which sucked a hefty £72 billion out of the system in 2010, and a further £80 billion last year. And most of this cash is being hoarded, not spent or invested. Non-financial companies increased their holdings of currency and bank deposits by £48 billion in 2010 and a further £82 billion last year, taking the total to £754 billion, a staggering 50% of GDP.

It is not difficult to see how companies find themselves in this cash-rich position. Globalisation has dramatically increased the power of capital over labour, with workers at the bottom of the pile and even the ‘squeezed middle’ coming under huge pressure. This has been most apparent in the US where companies continued to post record profits right through the downturn. In the UK, companies have been swimming in cash while consumers have been drowning in debt
(unquote)

But an updated New Deal policy would mobilise these idle balances for productive use; and use budget deficits to fight ignorance, poverty, disease and idleness: there should be no reliance on false hopes of automatic macro-economic return to full employment equilibrium in a market economy, if only because workers cannot release spending power by mortgaging their labour in advance (although debt-bondage may be reappearing with student and pay-day loans).

So the Coalition’s reliance on private action is likely to be very ill-founded. In that case and we are being used as human shields for the battle-tanks of the Tory party of Big Capital. I suggest we need to be very circumspect in the Coalition and can only welcome Lord Smith’s thought-provoking article.