One of the advantages of CiF is that in the comments section you get to see the shibboleths of reaction condensed, vocalised, lyricised, even screamed in block capitals and exclamation points. One of the talking points that always come up whenever you discuss public sector workers is "the taxpayer". The sovereign taxpayer. The over-burdened, pushed-beyond-the-point-of-reason taxpayer, to be precise. It goes roughly like this:

You public sector workers always have your hand out. You get better pay than the rest of us, and you have generous gold-plated pensions. When anyone tries to take the slightest of your privileges away, you throw your toys out of the pram and go on strike. But I am not prepared to pay for your perky lifestyle any more. What we can't afford, you can't have. The taxpayer subsidises you to 100%, and the taxpayer isn't going to go on supporting your selfish, I'm-alright-jack lifestyles. A bit of hardship would do you lazy jobsworths some good. Market discipline. Let's see you and your red friends get by like the rest of us, uncoddled by the state and your friends in the meeja-hideen... (etc etc).

You think I'm exaggerating, don't you? Well, the point is how "the taxpayer" is invoked here as a relevant political category. You'll notice that, implicit in this is a suggestion that there are people who aren't taxpayers. But public sector workers pay taxes, not only on their income but on consumption. In fact, there is no one who doesn't pay taxes. The unemployed pay tax. Children pay tax. Prisoners pay tax. Even the homeless pay tax. To speak of "the taxpayer" is in this sense meaningless, since it includes everyone. And self-evidently, not everyone shares the political attitudes expressed by "the taxpayer" above. The question of what "the taxpayer" is willing to pay for is a political question, depending on who the taxpayer is, and what other social categories and classes s/he identifies as. But implicit in this is the idea that the taxpayer is supporting a public sector which is purely parasitic. Public sector workers are "subsidised" by "the taxpayer"; as if, in addition to not paying taxes, they add no value to the economy. "The taxpayer" is thus, by definition, always over-taxed (even if there are quite a few who are under-taxed). The subject-position expressed in this figure of "the taxpayer" is that of a lower middle class trader, shopkeeper or white van man, anxious to hold on to his wad and not pay for anything he isn't getting.

ps: It occurs to me that I've missed the most obvious point here. It's not just the penny-pinching petty bourgeoisie that "the taxpayer" identifies with. The whole point is that you're supposed to think of yourself as the employer in this situation. You're being asked to identify with the bosses.

You'll remember this. Dan at The Third Estate points up a passage from the evil one's tractatus illogico-politicus: "Ed Balls was of the opinion that the public wanted even more spending and were prepared for the extra tax, by reference to polls that the Treasury had – which I said was nonsense. On these issues, the public fib." Two things. First of all, there's the trademark cynicism and contempt for "the public"*. Secondly, I am assured by people who were in the Labour Party circa 1992 that the conclusion many senior Labourites drew from the election results was indeed (perversely) that the public only pretends to favour higher taxes for better public services, and that we had become thoroughly Thatcherised during the 1980s. But I don't believe that anyone was really convinced by this.

As I point out in - oh, what's it called, now? - the psephological and polling evidence doesn't support this idea. The New Labour project, if it is to be judged purely on electoral terms - its preferred standard actually - didn't work. It was supposed to produce a new, broad electoral coalition that would anchor British politics to the centre-left for the long-term, and all it has done is reduce Labour's base. Blair's three election victories would have been impossible if it weren't for the sheer, enervated weakness of the opposition. Meanwhile, most voters have always rejected Thatcherism, or tried to when given the chance.

But the line that it was the public who were secret Tories provided a convenient, superficially plausible rationale for pursuing a project that Blair and Brown had already been attracted to by to during their visits to Australia and the United States - the same 'Third Way' idea that Labor and the Democrats were already putting into action. The attraction behind that project was simple: the old social democratic centre was finished, and the social forces to the left of centre were too weak and divided to sustain a more radical alternative. As Kinnock et al watched the big battalions of the working class get hammered by Thatcher, they had already decided that the era of social democratic corporatism was over. No electoral package that was not already approved by at least a fraction of big capital was possible - even if it could win an election, it couldn't be carried through in practise.

The populist rightist insurgency started by Powell in the Sixties and continued by Thatcher in the Seventies proved that it was possible for a right-wing government to work outside the social democratic settlement by espousing a new politics of 'the nation'. The Conservative Party was now not merely the party of growth, or of the efficient management of social democracy. It was the party of a strong Britannia, repelling immigrants, defending the Union with Ulster, asserting British interests overseas, protecting British families, fighting for a stable British currency and a robust British industry after all the lame duck inefficiencies of the corporatist era. Such was the ideological mix that helped the Tories lead the charge against the social democratic settlement. It had not only shifted a segment of public opinion, and defeated the embedded liberalism that was the dominant strain of opinion in the Tory Party since the Macmillan-Butler era. Most crucially, it had shifted the consensus within the ruling class. The 'rule Britannia' stuff no longer works as well as it did, of course (Blair never really grasped that the energy behind this politics of 'the nation' had utterly exhausted itself by the time he became Labour leader), which is why the Prime Minister is David Cameron and not Michael Howard. But it served its purpose.

There was every reason why that project might have failed at a number of points, notably in its risky contests with the organised labour movement. Had it done so, the idea of a Labour leader that was hostile to unions and the welfare state would have been impossible. The defeat of the miners, more than the electoral defeats of 1987 and 1992 which were partially a product of that tragedy, made it possible for New Labour to emerge. It produced the viper in the breast of Labourism known as Tony Blair. Blaming this monstrosity on "the public" and its propensity to lie about matters of taxation is moronic.

*Other examples of which: "The right-wing phrase, 'underclass', was ugly, but it was accurate ... [those at the bottom] had dysfunctional lives, full stop" (p. 204); "people might say they don't like conservatives, they still vote for them" (p. 556). [hat tip, Chris Brooke] And so interminably on, the reactionary talking points offered with the familiar, demented self-assurance. And don't even look at the stuff on Iraq, Abu Ghraib ("undoubtedly exceptional offences"), Gitmo (which he says was right in principle, if done differently), asylum, etc etc.

The Liberals, having campaigned on opposition to VAT tax rises, are suffering due to being part of a coalition introducing them. A Telegraph poll has Lib Dem support down 5% to 16% - a tremendous collapse compared to Clegg's pre-election honeymoon, with Labour gaining 4% and the Tories up 2%. Now, it seems that about half of Liberal voters may defect.

If that held true in a general election, I'm guessing that the Liberals would be wiped out in the London and the north-east, and seriously depleted in their south-western strongholds. What the Liberals have done here is to apply a pincer squeeze on their own support. Giving George Osborne a 'progressive' imprimatur enables the Tories to shed their nasty reputation with centrist, and conquer currently Liberal-occupied territory. Passing a budget that openly attacks the public sector, welfare, and introduces regressive taxes - all the while giving in to the Tories in issues such as immigration, nuclear weapons and war - destroys the Liberals' reputation as a slightly progressive alternative to New Labour.

It's early days, but there are already presentiments of a potential meltdown in the Liberal faction of the coalition, with some Liberal MPs expressing unease or threatening rebellion. Simon Hughes has been elected deputy leader of the Liberals the better to coopt and contain people like him, but he has a real problem in that he represents a sizeable chunk of London's working class. And there is a crop of more recent Liberal arrivals who have sprung up in former Labour heartlands, who are at more immediate risk than Hughes. People like Sarah Teather, who exchanged her conscience for a cabinet position (she probably thought it was a bargain), will pay a high price for their loyalism. The party bosses undoubtedly think they need to brazen this out, wait for the immediate shock-waves to pass, and I've made the point before that Liberal voters, while not especially left-wing on economic issues, are largely not Thatcherites. Unlike many Liberal activists, they never supported the Orange Book crowd who took control of the party after the ouster of Charles Kennedy, and were never free market fundamentalists. This is less than a week after the budget was unveiled. Let's see what happens when it really starts to hurt.

Osborne's budget is an attack on consumption, and a bonus for capital. It is a redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest, on the assumption that it is the wealthy who will drive economic growth. VAT, a notoriously regressive tax, is to rise by two and half percentage points to 20% - Osborne had promised in opposition that he would not need to increase VAT, knowing how unpopular this would be. Housing benefits will be cut, disability benefits cut, child benefits frozen, and other benefits such as job seekers allowance will rise in line with CPI rather than RPI. The total annual reduction in spending on benefits will reach £11bn by 2014.

Most public sector workers will have a pay freeze for three years, meaning a de facto pay cut by whatever the rate of inflation is (currently 3.5%). Average real term spending cuts will amount to 25% except in ringfenced spending in health and international aid. 25% is a huge reduction, even bigger than anticipated, or advertised. There are a few off-setting measures that would in theory protect the poorest - linking pensions to earnings, increasing child tax credits - but the net effect will be a severe squeeze on working class consumption.

For capital, it's a different story. Government largesse flows in abundance - not for them the age of austerity. Corporation tax is to be reduced to 24% within four years. Capital gains tax will be increased for a very small minority of wealth-holders, but there will be a higher relief threshold for "entrepreneurs", such that the first £5m gained from the disposal of all or part of a business, or in the course of running a business, will be entitled to relief, reducing their tax to 10%. Small business tax will be cut to 20%, and employers contributions to National Insurance will be cut. A small bank levy will take back £2bn a year, but again it's a relatively trivial offset to a very large golden hello from the Tories and Liberals to their business friends.

The logic, insofar as logic is the correct term, is that such measures will encourage investment. Osborne complained in his budget that the state made up almost half of all income in society which was "unsustainable", and the Tories have long insisted that growth had to be stimulated in the private sector. But, as economists as diverse as Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf and Samuel Brittan point out, this is nonsense. The net effect of such measures will be to exert a serious downward pressure on demand, thus on growth and thus on investment. It will increase unemployment and reduce taxable income, which will tend to increase the deficit. David Blanchflower argued that previously announced austerity measures are likely to add a quarter of a million to the ranks of unemployed young people. And, although the media and the government have worked hard to scare people over this, repeating the mantra that there is no money, it needs to be repeated and underlined that there is no need to do this. Most of Britain's debt matures in more than a decade from now.

Politics is rarely pure, and never simple - but this is class war, pure and simple. That being the case, Bob Crow is surely right to call on the TUC to convene an emergency conference to plan and coordinate actions to defend working class living standards. He calls the cuts Thatcherite. Thatcher wishes she'd accomplished anything like this.

I have been somewhat alarmed and depressed to see a number of perfectly sane liberals, by no means leaning to the right-wing of liberalism, applauding - or at least offering measured approval of - the Clameron coalition. Even on Labour List, there's a commentary suggesting that this will allow Cameron to fulfil his genuinely progressive aspirations and sideline the Tory right. Others are talking about the tax measures that have been included, such as rises in capital gains tax, dropping the cuts on inheritance tax, raising the tax threshold to £10k per annum. And there has been some excitement over the possibility of Vince Cable socking it to the banks. The liberals, it has to be said, think they have won. Perhaps they have - but if so, it is a victory at the expense of many of their voters.

Cameron is not a progressive. He is an old school Thatcherite whose record on economic as on social issues is reactionary - from demanding tax cuts for the rich to support for homophobic legislation. He and his party spent the 2010 general election race-baiting on immigration. Cameron himself is an opponent of multiculturalism, and he was quite happy to participate in the Muslim-bashing fiasco when it reached a nasty crescendo in 2006. His foreign policy is impeccably neoconservative, and William Hague is already sending out the policy signals - eg, he wants to change legislation that might be used against Israeli war criminals. When Nick Clegg was in opposition, he suggested that Britain might stop arming Israel for as long as it was using those weapons to engage in wholesale butchery in Gaza that shocked even some of Israel's most unwavering supporters. Now he is part of a government that will be, if anything, more fanatically pro-Israel than the last.. On the whole, Cameron is a man who instinctively identifies with wealth and privilege, and oozes disdain in every nuance of his speech and comportment for the poor and oppressed. If Cameron's policy record, rather than his broken record PR spin, is what is at issue here, then calling him a progressive is as perverse as labelling the Pope a member of the Saviours Sect.

The idea of Vincent Cable laying into the banks may have a certain allure, and a British equivalent of Glass-Steagall may be a surprising development to come from any Tory-led administration. After all, the Tories fought the election on a manifesto that seemed to confirm that they were determined to protect the bankers' dominant position. By allowing the Bank of England to be the main regulator of the City (thus effectively allowing the City to be self-regulating), and by delegating a minister to fight for the City's interests in Europe, they showed no sign of Cable's reforming zeal before they cut an agreement with the Liberal Democrats. But the Tories have actually given themselves considerable room for manoeuvre here. All they've agreed to on this score is an independent commission to investigate the possibility of one day separating retail and investment banking "in a sustainable way" (ie in a way that doesn't offend the City). Meanwhile, Larry Elliott reports that a factional struggle is already under way between Osborne and Cable over who will have final say over any banking reform. This is a fight that Osborne is likely to win since Cable is in his position as a member of a junior partner in a coalition. The Liberals have agreed with the Tories that the B of E will become the key regulator of the City although the FSA will continue to operate, presumably as a subordinate body. That basically does mean effective self-regulation for the City. Both parties had already been in agreement on the idea of some sort of banking levy, but its terms lack any specificity, so that any policy that finally emerges is likely to be the result of domestic and international lobbying and horse-trading. In general, the City has breathed a collective sigh of relief at the terms of this agreement, as well they should.

Much is made of the fact that the coalition's current tax policy is an improvement on the Tory original, though even superficially laudable ideas such as a higher tax threshold are actually regressive in their impact. More importantly, when it comes to the big fiscal issue, the tax changes are small beer, and their overall effect is to increase cuts in public spending. And this is where it becomes most interesting. The coalition is committed to speeding up the reduction of Britain's structural deficit. This is in its agreement, and both parties favoured this before the election. Yet, they have not said how they will do this. Beyond some placatory noises on protecting key public services, there are tens of billions of pounds simply unaccounted for here. Today's FT reports:

First, the Treasury’s existing plans for public spending already imply cuts to government departments of £37bn (2.5 per cent of national income) a year by 2013-14.

Added to this, the coalition agreement has committed the parties to increases in spending on overseas aid with an annual cost of £4bn; fresh income tax cuts with a price tag of about £5bn, as a downpayment on the Lib Dem plan to raise income tax thresholds; £3bn a year for avoiding some Labour tax increases; faster deficit reduction, which implies additional spending reductions of about a further £8bn; a jobs package at £600m; more funding for poor school pupils at £2.5bn; and higher old-age pensions costing about £2bn.

Set against this are near-term plans to raise taxes on aviation of £3bn and capital gains tax of about £2bn.

Put this together and Mr Osborne will have to announce public spending cuts of £57bn a year by 2013-14 from a non-protected budget of about £260bn – cuts of about 22 per cent. [emphasis added]

You heard that - cuts of more than a fifth in all non-protected departments. That's what the coalition means: education, transport, justice, and welfare will all experience unprecedented cuts. Only the NHS as a department is protected, though there are protected 'frontline' areas in education that will not be cut. John Lanchester, as I've mentioned in previous posts, has spelled out the implications of even smaller cuts than these - it would be equivalent in justice to closing all courts; in transport to cutting a third of Network Rail grants. In defence, it would be equivalent to closing down the armed forces. Since the coalition is explicitly committed to Trident and implicitly committed to the on-going occupation in Afghanistan, I can't see that happening - which means deeper cuts for other departments. As for schools and welfare, the mind boggles. Losing a fifth of the non-protected education budget hasn't even been tested to my knowledge. Research on a hypothetical 2% cut, prompted by Ed Balls' drive for 'efficiency savings', suggests that it will lead to a serious reduction in the quality of education as lay offs led to bigger classes.

The welfare system is likely to be one of the most contentious areas where cuts are introduced. Given that pensions are projected to rise, and the link with earnings eventually restored, the main brunt of any cuts will probably fall on benefit claimants, whether they are on the risibly low job-seekers allowance or disability allowance. The Liberals and Tories have agreed on bringing forward workfare proposals. At the moment, private companies are given lucrative contracts to harrass and bully the unemployed back to work on the assumption that unemployment is voluntary and results from a lack of moral fibre. Such schemes begin within 12 months of one having been on the unemployment rolls, as things currently stand. The new government will ensure that people are immediately transferred to one of these schemes, as soon as they start to claim. As I understand the Tories' policies on workfare, they intend to build on New Labour schemes to hound the disabled and single mothers to seek work, and force those on job seekers allowance to perform menial labour for private contractors so that they remain 'in the habit' of working. (Of course, those doing the work won't be entitled to the minimum wage, much less the 'Living Wage', or employee protections). In the long run, the Tory-Lib coalition anticipates a reduction in benefits due to these measures. So, I would guess we're talking about a serious attack on the welfare state, an attempt to force more and more people off welfare rolls, and mass redundancies in the civil services as the welfare system is 'streamlined' and downsized. In addition, since both Liberals and Tories are ideologically committed privatizers, we can also look forward to state assets such as the Royal Mail being auctioned off at bargain basement prices.

Obviously, this entails a highly confrontational government, one whose outlines are not disclosed in the soothing bromides about strong and stable government that the coalition partners are laying on us. The Tories had already warned in opposition that they were prepared to take on the unions in a big way to ensure that the cuts go through, and the Liberals will back them. And the fact is that what they will be fighting for involves cutting slashing core services that are needed most by the poorest, then throwing hundreds of thousands of people on the dole, while at the same time introducing more punitive measures to drive them off the benefit rolls. It won't be long before this manifests itself with brutal clarity, at which point the government's "progressive" well-wishers will have some uncomfortable choices to make.

I've been following this developing campaign, uniting charities, NGOs and trade unions, with interest. Politically, it taps into a very good instinct. The bankers got rich pursuing speculative profits through various intricate schemes that placed national economies in tremendous danger (example of which), and have been rewarded with bail-outs. If there is going to be a shortfall in funding for public services, they should pay for it. This isn't the only justification for imposing such a tax. A letter signed by 320 economists addressed to the G20 argued that the tax would "calm excessive speculation". Joseph Stiglitz maintains that it is an excellent idea to tax what is a socially useless and sometimes harmful activity.

The proposed level of taxation, at 0.05% on all speculative financial transactions, seems to be very small. (Though it seems it is larger than the micro-tax [pdf] proposed by the TUC and the Tax Justice Movement). Perhaps that extreme modesty of ambition is one reason why the basic idea has been able to get the support of right-wing governments in France and Germany, by New Labour, by former CBI head Lord Adair Turner, by Nancy Pelosi, Jeffrey Sachs and Warren Buffet. Then there's the pay-off. Supposedly, the tax would raise £250bn each year, with "tens of billions" of that available for public services in the UK. If that could be counted on, and if the measure was likely to be passed over the objections of the Obama-Geithner treasury (not a chance in hell), then there's an extremely seductive riposte to those who say we have no choice but to make deep and painful cuts in the public sector. Nonsense - it's easy! We can raise tens of billions for public services with a minute tax on, not to put too fine a point upon it, a wunch of bankers. That would more than cover the cuts proposed by both New Labour and the Tories.

There are some objections to the tax that are superficially appealling, but don't appear to withstand scrutiny. For example, the banks will only pass on the costs to consumers, some say, thus vitiating the distributive argument for the tax. Well, aside from the fact the consumers of such services are disproportionately wealthy, any form of corporate taxation can potentially be passed on to consumers, assuming that consumers are able and willing to bear the cost. That isn't a case against taxing corporate profits. Put simply, the wages of workers which enables them to be consumers are substantially determined by market forces: higher prices tend to drive up wage claims. Hence, the aggregate effect would be the same: the tax would impact on profits, not consumers. Of course, there's the aspect of class struggle that it seems vulgar to even notice, and it is true that in general companies will try to take every opportunity to externalise their costs onto workers and consumers, but that applies with any cost, not just taxes. That's not an argument against taxes, it's an argument - at the minumum - for having an organised and combative labour force which can use its bargaining power to resist such efforts.

Another objection I have seen, from a liberal economist, is that the tax is actually not as small as it appears to be. He maintains that a 0.05% tax on currency speculations would be about six times the current broker's fee. "No industry survives that," he suggests, comparing it to a sudden increase in the cost of a cinema ticket to about £50. But this is a ridiculous, illogical comparison. The booking fee isn't the cost of the product to be consumed in this case. The product is currency, for which you pay with your own commensurate currency. And when you trade in currency, you expect to both consume the purchased product and gain a premium - the profit. A cinema ticket, in contrast to a booking fee for currency transactions, just is the cost of the product. And no cinema-goer expects to both consume the product and get a cash bonus at the end of it. (Unless they stick the place up, which might make the comparison slightly more apt). Currency transactions levied at 0.05% are thus expected to pay a fee that is proportionate to an expected return, so they would still have a motive for engaging in speculation.

He goes on to add, however, that it could wipe out all transactions where the anticipated profit is smaller than the transaction tax, thus eradicating the proposed income that would be gained from it. It's a very intimidating argument, with graphs and talk of pips and spread and so on. This is difficult for those with no specialist knowledge to assess, but let us not succumb to our natural phobia of numbers and argot. We are mere autodidacts, but we have a duty to struggle on, you and I, and try to understand what is at stake here. Perhaps one way to approach this is to consider known examples of similar practises already taking place. It has been noted that the UK already imposes a 0.5% stamp duty on share trading, which gathers £7bn in revenues and could be extended to other transactions. It doesn't seem to have had a catastrophic effect. A number of countries have already imposed a financial transaction tax. Brazil has imposed it since 1993, at an initial rate of 0.38% (this was reduced in 2008), much higher than the proposed rate of the 'Robin Hood' tax. It didn't result in a collapse in currency trading or speculation, but it did result in significant additional revenue to cover the costs of maintaining the country's healthcare system. Moreover, the information gleaned from imposing it enabled the government to prevent other forms of tax evasion. There are also a number of financial transaction taxes already imposed in Australia, India, South Korea and elsewhere. These examples don't appear to bear out the idea that a financial transaction tax would be a sufficient, sudden shock to the system to wipe out most speculative activity. The burden of evidence suggests that such taxes are actually very bad at constraining speculative activity, but quite good at raising money.

There is a problem, though. The aims of the tax are apparently contradictory. One is to throw a bit of grit in the wheels of speculation, thus reducing the chances of harmful high-risk transactions taking place. The other is to raise a lot of money with a relatively insignificant tax that wouldn't really make any difference to the scale of speculation. If it does affect the scale of speculation, then the anticipated revenue would have to be revised down in precise proportion to its effifacy in doing so. If, on the other hand, the main aim is to raise and redistribute money, then the idea of damping down speculation can be dispensed with. But that would leave an apparently progressive tax complicit in what we are agreed is an often dangerous speculative system, and one that we ought to be discouraging or dismantling. But this comes back to the objection that the tax lacks ambition. It does. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good start, and there's no reason why the government could not extend existing taxes on financial transactions to help fund public services.

So, earlier this week you may have noticed that Cameron had supported a campaign with the stated aim of stopping the UK population from reaching 70 million. This is a specifically anti-immigrant campaign, following Lord Carey's divine intervention in the nation's affairs, which ran thus:

"The sheer numbers of migrants ... threaten the very ethos or DNA of our nation.... Democratic institutions such as the monarchy, Parliament, the judiciary, the Church of England, our free press and the BBC ... support the liberal democratic values of the nation. Some groups of migrants, however, are ambivalent about or even hostile to such institutions. The proposed antiwar Islamist march in Wootton Bassett is a clear example of the difficulties extremists pose to British society."

Yes, he did include the monarchy and the C of E among Britain's democratic institutions. Yes, he did invoke DNA in a very palpable instance of dog-collar-whistling. And yes, hearing said high-pitched trill, Cameron barked. Cameron's reasoning doesn't invoke 'British values', but a supposed threat to public services which makes immigration caps necessary. Cameron, like the former Prime Minister of whom he is emulous, is not as stupid as he is intellectually insubstantial. He may not trouble himself too much about theory - the latter being equivalent to ideology, itself a short step to baggage, which is something no careerist can afford to be laden with. One travels light when going up the greasy pole. But he is, I think, reasonably perceptive, and it would have occurred to him that immigrants will provide the taxes and employees to build up public services as much as they are likely to use them. This is especially important to bear in mind when we are constantly told that the working population is not growing enough to support the taxes and national insurance necessary to maintain a decent public pension.

Moreover, as Socialist Worker points out this week, the reference to immigration is an extraordinary red herring. Most of the projected population growth is due to births, and the real "pressure" on public services in the coming years will be from the cuts intended by both parties, though with predictably greater gusto from the Tories:

You remember John Redwood. He is the Thatcherite windbag who asked John Major out for a fight and couldn't take him. He has been orbiting the moon ever since, but now seems to have been called to earth by Cameron to help craft the Conservative Party's pitch to big business - the ruling class, in more accurate terms - in advance of the coming election. You think New Labour kisses your arse?, he seems to say. Well, we can spit-shine it too. So, an important lesson for the coming elections. Attacks on immigration are almost invariably an opening shot in a class battle. Those who intend to attack the working class must first divide the working class. Start by singling out immigrants, then move on to public sector workers, trade unionists, welfare recipients, and any other likely target of invective from the steaming shit-sewer of the scum British press. Then tell everyone that focusing on class is petty and juvenile, and beneath the conduct of responsible statesmen. This is why fighting racism and fascism, defeating it in the streets and challenging it in the media, is not separable from class issues nor from the matter of resisting the recession. It is a vital aspect of securing a minimum of working class unity in the coming, highly volatile, period.