News from Northern
- Organise, educate, inform and offer an alternative
- Don't underestimate our own resources
- One huge struggle for a government pledged not to implement the cuts
- Building unity with the community
- More than just a financial crisis
Peter Wilcox (FBU Northern Regional Secretary):
Some will have more pain than others. But what affects the public sector will also affect the voluntary and private sectors.
Do lobbies of Parliament have an effect? They have to, because we have to get issues onto the Parliamentary agenda. This year, for the FBU, it is the issue of public safety, with the risk of more fire deaths due to fewer appliances and firefighters.
I don’t sign up to the claim that the public agree with the cuts. The Tory spin machine has convinced them that there is no alternative.
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Andy Croft (publisher of Smokestack Books, and Morning Star poetry correspondent):
One can never be too pessimistic. We have a government of retrenchment and reform aiming to restructure British society irreversibly. They are doing it without any real opposition in the country. Yes, there are restrictions on trade union rights. But the government’s view is that its ignoring of mass demonstrations is a test of its virility.
We have at least 3 parties – the ridiculous, the repulsive and the revolting. Politics has been reduced to technocratic choices. If we are lucky, we are just spectators in a decision-making process which has nothing to do with us.
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Brian Heron (People's Charter Commission):
My local council in East London is New Labour. We can’t go to a sympathetic section of the council, but the point of an alternative budget, based on needs, is critical. We should present it to the council to say, “This is the platform you should be standing on.”
Some London councils are trying to generate a Dunkirk spirit of ‘all in this together’. One at least has introduced a sort of computer game to this end – but, for the public, reduced to ‘zapping’ enemies. However, 7500 out of 800 responses said, “Remove the management.”
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Tom Morrison (Secretary, Clydebank TUC and Scottish Secretary of the CPB):
Clydebank TUC has taken a leading role in activities against the cuts. Central is building unity with the community – we have to win people’s trust. Many community activists today have never been in a trade union. We have to see that the campaign isn’t regarded just as a sectional fight, as workers just fighting to defend their jobs. So Clydebank TUC responded by exposing the attacks on the benefits system, on social housing and so on. Benefits are being driven down, forcing people to look for jobs that don’t exist.
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The situation we are in is more than just a financial crisis or a crisis of accumulation of capital. There has been a global shift in the main centres of capital accumulation, and this has had an impact on the relations of power.
Read more...80 years of striving for Peace and Socialism
The Morning Star's editor Bill Benfield, explains why the newspaper is different from the other dailies as the only one that stands up to capitalist injustice. Well, 80 years have passed and the people's paper is still here which in itself is no mean feat as you will see from the contents of this supplement.
Fire, war, bans, court actions, bailiffs and bankruptcies, we've seen the lot but, with more than a little help from our friends - you - we've kept going.
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