4 reasons not to vote Tory

But, if anyone gets past the barrier of obfuscation raised by the Tories and the capitalist press, the true nature of the European Union, the Labour government and their Tory mates becomes immediately obvious.

Let's look at the situation without any drum-banging for a moment.

The state of public borrowing is parlous, although by no means the worst that it has ever been.

As a percentage of the gross domestic product, public-sector borrowing is nowhere near the level that the nation found itself in immediately after the war against fascism.

Interest payments on public debt, expressed again as a percentage of GDP, are lower than they were all through the '60s and the majority of the time since.

And yet, all the talk now is of a crisis which, according to the Tories and most of the commentators in the national press, necessitates the decapitation of the public sector, the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the Civil Service, the butchering of benefits and the wholesale dismantling of what's left of the welfare state.

So, why is this situation being inflated to such doom-laden proportions? Well, no-one with any sense at all would say that it isn't serious.

But it isn't terminal by a long way. No, the truth is that building a crisis into a disaster suits certain political agendas very nicely indeed.

The Tories are over the moon. Their long-term agenda, always unspoken but very seriously held, contains the reversal of every advantage fought for and won by working people since 1945.

The very thought of reductions in all local and national services, the withdrawal of benefits and the freeing of employers to drive down wages with a standing army of unemployed to act as a downward pressure on wages sends most of them to bed with happily wet dreams.

And the resulting boom in privately supplied services which would result, with all the opportunities for a quick buck that it implies, will send them reaching for their investment portfolios with glee.

As for the EU, well, the commission is positively glorying in its chance to exercise a bit of leverage on a Britain that it never quite forgave for staying out of the eurozone.

Government plans to deal with Britain's debt are not "ambitious" enough, it declares, and need to be "reinforced."

"A credible timeframe for restoring public finances to a sustainable position requires additional fiscal tightening measures beyond those currently planned."

Leaving aside the European Union's less than glorious record of fiscal responsibility and its outrageous intervention in a pre-election period, precisely why does the EU attempt to intervene at this time? It's an interesting question and the answer is relatively simple.

The EU was designed to do precisely what it is advocating as the government's only option.

Privatisation and the demolition of the public sector is written into its very heart.

The scale of cuts that it is proposing would bring Britain's working class to its knees and advance the free-market propositions that it holds dear by a very significant step, while injuring the trade unions severely.

Labour's rather more timid cutbacks philosophy is seen as much less than the capitalist class can get away with after its self-manufactured banking crisis.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne gloated that "our (cuts) argument is backed by credit rating agencies, business leaders, international investors and now the European Commission."

Well, if nothing else, that's four good reasons not to vote Tory at the coming general election.