Having been forced to send their NHS bill back to the drawing board, the ConDems are grinding on ahead - aiming, this time, to turn their screw on the poorest and most vulnerable.
The Welfare Reform Bill, which is now under discussion in Parliament, is nothing but a Scrooge law against the jobless and working class households on low-income. And, unlike the NHS bill, it is unlikely to generate much uproar among the doctors and other layers of "professionals" that the Cameron-Clegg duo would rather keep on its side.
So, this time, the working class can rely only on its own resources to stop the attacks contained in this new bill.
Cheap demagogy
Of course, this welfare "reform" is designed to sound quite reasonable. Who can argue against the advantage of consolidating the array of complex and bewildering benefits into one single "universal credit"? It takes a degree in law and accounting for anyone to make any sense of the existing system! Except that the name of their game is to cut the cost of the welfare system as a whole. So some will lose out - in particular, the poorest.
Hence the extremely nasty campaign which the tabloid newspapers have been waging for months against housing benefit recipients, who are accused of "living in luxury on taxpayers' money". Not that they are, of course. Their only "luxury" is to be caught in the claws of greedy landlords who play the housing market so as to charge extortionate rents. If anyone is "living in luxury on taxpayers' money", it is that small layer of parasitic, private landlords who make huge profits out of people's poverty. But they won't get the blame. If only because they belong to that caste of small-time profiteers on whose support the Camerons and the Cleggs of this world rely.
Hence, as well, the scandalous campaign against the disabled and long-term sick, who are being branded as "scroungers" by the same media. Having already been forced to jump through all sorts of humiliating hoops in order to retain their benefits - they now face even more humiliation in order to prove that they cannot work, when there are no jobs available, even for those who are fit! Those with terminal cancer might be spared this loss of dignity - maybe!
Significantly, the only aspect of this bill which might be amended is the reform of child benefit - the only one not specifically targeted at the poorest!
Ultimately, what this new bill is really about is blaming the poor for their poverty and treating them as petty criminals. Rather than modernising the welfare system, as Iain Duncan Smith would like us to believe, it is merely going back to Victorian times. Only the workhouses are missing - for the time being.
The real scroungers
Of course, there is cross-party agreement between politicians to avoid raising the real issues which underpin the very existence of the welfare system in the first place.
Why does the state have to provide an inadequate lifeline to millions in the first place? Why, if not because wealthy companies are free to cut jobs and to line the pockets of shareholders instead of investing in socially useful production?
Unemployment would never have reached its present level, if redundancies were made illegal across the economy and if the work available was shared out between existing workers, without loss of pay. This would dent companies' profits? Sure. But after all, it is the capitalists who caused the crisis, not the working class - and it is only right that they should pay for the mess they created. And if, in addition, instead of wasting public funds to subsidise private profits, the state was using them to build the houses that are so badly needed, the housing crisis which feeds the landlords' greed would soon be overcome.
But instead of this, while the screw is being turned once again on the working class, politicians of all stripe are encouraging the capitalists' drive to increase their parasitism on the state. As usual, the banks are first in line, with the £50bn of new money they just got from the Bank of England, together with the £27bn in bargain-basement loans they got from the European Central Bank. And guess what? They've just announced an increase in mortgage interest rates! After the banks, it will be the turn of all British companies, which stand to benefit from another cut in corporation tax in Osborne's April budget - which will just boost the already colossal unused cash pile on which they sit.
Then, on top of getting the minimal wages they pay subsidised, via bogus apprentice schemes, the bosses are allowed to use the free labour of the unemployed behind the smokescreen of "work experience", whether compulsory or otherwise!
Yes, the only scroungers in this society, are these parasitic companies which live on our labour and on the largesse of the state!