Tories Put Armed Forces On Zero-Hour Contracts.

Philip Hammond, the Tory Minister for Defence, appeared on the Sunday Politics Show today to explain yet another idiotic Tory scheme designed to save those who support the Tory party from paying any tax. The scheme involves putting Britain's armed forces onto zero-hour contracts under which they will only get paid if they're actually being shot at. What used to be the Territorial Army and is now the so-called "Reserve" will form the backbone of our armed forces. As a scheme to save money, however, it suffers from some very grave shortcomings. Reservists called up for active service will have to leave their real employer in the lurch for the duration. To overcome this Philip Hammond suggests that the employer will have to be compensated by the taxpayer. In other words the pay that used to go to full time service personnel will now find its way into the hands of businessmen. Businessmen, of course, pay as little tax as possible whereas service personnel, like all employed people, have no choice but to pay their taxes. In addition to this home goal the demand that wages to ordinary people create in the economy will be lost as business takes the new public money shoved into its greedy little hands and puts it into various offshore banks. This so-called defence strategy then, far from saving money, is nothing more that yet another scheme to transfer public money to the private sector. In the meantime the defence of this country will be increasingly dependent on volunteers who will be expected to leave their workplaces at the drop of a hat and be shoved into some God-forsaken Third World hellhole to defend an oil industry that is ripping them off at home. Don't you just love neoliberalism? No, me neither.