The Tory leaders' performance at their party's annual conference was yet another exercise in self-satisfaction and hypocritical scapegoating.

Never mind the fact that private bosses are slashing more and more jobs, instead of making up for the Con-Dems' savage cuts in the public sector, as Osborne had promised, while already almost a million under-24s are unemployed! Never mind either that our living standards are falling more rapidly than at any time since World War II!

No, never mind all that, since Osborne pledges to "ride out the storm" with his "policy for growth"! But by which means and for what growth? By squeezing more out of all of us, to boost the capitalist sharks' profits, of course!

$$The euro scare-crow

Of course, the Tories and their Lib-Dem partners are aware that by now, we all know that the crisis is getting worse and that all their past fairy tales about a recovery were merely designed to help force through their attacks.

So now they are warning us that the only real threat to their "policy for growth" is the crisis in the euro-zone. As if the financial meltdown which produced today's crisis had been born and bred in the euro-zone!

Are we supposed to forget that the speculative housing bubble whose implosion triggered the crisis was even more inflated here, than it was in the US, or anywhere in Europe, thanks to the overwhelming greed of Britain's bankers?

Wasn't Northern Rock, a "good old traditional" British bank, the first one to go bust, even before the banking crisis broke out in the US and the rest of Europe?

And isn't Britain one of the worst offenders, both in terms of the size of its parasitical financial sector and the size of the taxpayer bailout granted to this sector since 2007, compared to the rest of its economy?

Worse, even, haven't the big British banks contributed to the problems now faced by the weakest countries in the euro-zone, by extracting exorbitant interest payments from them - like the "government controlled" RBS, for instance, which holds £1bn worth of Greek bonds in its coffers?

The truth is, that if anyone is to be blamed for this world crisis, whether yesterday or today, Cameron's and Osborne's masters in the City should be at the forefront of the accused.

No amount of euro-scapegoating will absolve Britain's banking sharks of their responsibility - whatever the Con-Dems may say to let these sharks and the austerity policies of their government off the hook.

Against their parasitic plunder

This pathetic attempt at resorting to crass nationalism is only aimed at diverting attention from the real issue - who should pay for the crisis. And the new policy "announcements" made by the Tory leaders are there to show what their answer is.

Whichever way one looks at them, they are all designed to tilt the balance in favour of the capitalists against the working class.

So, on the one hand, workers will now need to have been 2 years in a job, instead of 1, before being able to take their employer to tribunal for unfair dismissal - and they will have to pay for it!

On the other hand, Cameron's promise to build 100,000 homes/yr to fight the housing shortage, conceals a string of juicy incentives for property developers with no guarantee that even a single affordable home will be built in return.

Likewise for his new incentives for council tenants to buy their homes. In theory, for each council home sold, local councils will receive funds to build a new one - but nothing says that it has to be a rented home, affordable for the rest of us.

Even the 3,500 redundancies announced by BAE have become a pretext for handouts to companies: "special economic zones" are to be set up where companies will pay rock-bottom taxes (but not necessarily decent wages!) to "create jobs".

All these handouts are just another way for the capitalist class to plunder public funds, while cuts in benefits, jobs and services are imposed on the working class in the name of reducing the public deficit caused by the same capitalists.

Below the surface of society the parasitism of capitalism keeps stoking up anger and frustration. The Tory grandees had nothing to say about the social crisis revealed by last summer's riots.

However, this social crisis is a reality which is hitting the working class head on. For us, workers, it is high time we challenged the capitalists' plunder, by using our collective strength to tilt the balance of forces back in our favour and make them pay for their crisis!