In a statement, a spokesperson for the IRSP in Derry said, "It is all well and good for John Spellar to be launching yet another crack down on fraud as the Northern Ireland Office do this type of thing annually however, this new Financial Investigation Team (FIT) is unquestionably yet another mischievous election ploy by British government crooks to point the finger away from what they themselves have been doing.

"We have already had investigations into the recouping over-payments of benefits such as Working Families Tax Credit, that in itself is already piling the pressure on working class homes were the vast majority of people are being forced to cough-up for over spills of such payments which was actually designed to assist them.  The whole system is rotten to the core.

"The criminalisation of welfare recipients won't wash in areas of mass unemployment black spots such as Derry and Strabane.  If we could only scratch beneath the surface it would be more than evident just who the real criminals are - The British state, its economic policy and the scrounging politicians that govern our lives.

"We have witnessed in recent weeks, and this is even before an election date has been set, several election ploys by parties who have went on the rampage against the weakest in society.  We have witnessed the crack down on migrant workers and then we had the traveller communities and now the unemployed, this simply doesn't wash with us.

"Let's set the record straight, Blair, like each and every successive British government are solely to blame.  It has been their malignant economic strategies which has inflicted thousands upon thousands of our class to endure poverty wages, to endure life on an unemployment scrap heap, widespread child poverty and social deprivation.

"What we are concerned about ourselves as republican socialists, is by establishing the FIT to retrieve 33 million, the British State and the N.I.O have now cast a cloud of suspicion on everyone who is in receipt of Jobseekers Allowance, Income Support, Disability Living Allowance or Housing Benefit, this again comes on the foot of elections and amounts to what can only be described as the active targeting of the working class.

Concluding, the spokesperson said "These developments are now occurring after we have witnessed billions upon billions of pounds being spent with ease on Operation Iraqi Liberation, or OIL for short. This war for oil has been going on while hospitals across both islands continue to fall from crisis to crisis as waiting lists grow by the day. They are fooling none of us, they are clutching at straws here and we know full well who the real criminals are!"

STATEMENTS ENDS