Stealing from the poorest

Now the Tories are coming for the pennies in poor people's pockets.

Freezing benefits is a staggeringly vicious attack of class war - but it's doubtful the workshy millionaires in the Cabinet realise just how vicious.

Neither the well-upholstered David Cameron nor any of his colleagues have missed meals to buy shoes for their kids or shivered under blankets because they can't afford to put the heating on.

They have no idea how much difference even a pound or two a week matters to a household forced to account for every single penny.

Which is why they can gloat about slashing benefits while they run the economy like the Bullingdon club on a cocaine-fuelled casino spree.

The £10 billion to be cut from the welfare bill is peanuts compared with the £100bn we lose every year to tax-dodging by the rich and big business, never mind the billions thrown at the banks or squandered on wars.

This is one of the richest countries on Earth - and hopefully still will be even after the Con-Dems have finished trying to destroy it.

We can easily afford a decent basic standard of living for every single one of us.

The Tories will tell you otherwise but even they don't believe their own argument.

They just want you to believe it while they get on with their mission of wrecking the welfare state that we built and fought for.

But one look at the polls tells you that the British people have seen right through them.

It won't be long till they're thrown out into the dustbin of history and we can get back to the job of building the better society the Tories don't want us to have.

We're withDr Lister

Stories reporting the ongoing financial meltdown in NHS hospitals have become a regular feature of our news pages.

But today's admission by watchdog Monitor's chief executive David Bennett to a panel of MPs revealed just how big a failure the market system has become. The 24 trusts he cites are the tip of the iceberg.

Health Emergency's Dr John Lister has spent decades watching the various failed NHS policies drawn up by politicians with a peculiar fetish for forced competition - and correctly predicting the results.

When he brands the net result of the last 15 years of abuse of Britain's real crown jewels a "policy balls-up," it's a criticism worth heeding.

It was market fanatic Blair and his new Tory acolytes who really went to town on hospital-building.

But they weren't funded the logical way - through low-cost government borrowing.

No, the magic solution was to get firms to build expensive hospitals in return for the right to rent them back to the NHS on decades-long contracts.

Squeezed between huge hire fees and the need to flog their operations to other bits of the NHS to pay for them, the net result for hospitals is big debts.

Lister and many others predicted this cash crisis years ago. Now he reckons no privateer has the capacity or the interest in taking on medical duties at these cash-crisis hospitals - unless they get millions in handouts to make it worth their while.

So, he says, the only sensible solution is to take back our hospitals from the PFI bandits and turn them over to the people. Given Lister's track record at calling it right, we can't help but agree.