On the 29th November, Lewisham held its full council meeting to agree its first tranche of cuts, involving over 400 job losses, cuts to services and the closure of a children's centre. Not yet agreed were proposals to close five libraries.
According to the Independent, Aaron Porter, NUS president is reported to have said "Despite repeated dismissals by Nick Clegg that these are uninformed protesters, students are intelligent, articulate people who are not being listened to by those in whom they placed their hope for a different politics."
But we say...
What the students... should learn is that if they really want a new politics, they need to look further than voting Lib Dem, a party which, unsurprisingly, has demonstrated that it is, when all is said and done, just more of the same old.
The need to look to a truly new politics: not the capitalist joke of a 'democratic' system we live under now.
Recent events, both here and abroad, have shown that there is no escape from this circus through the ballot box.
Residents of Camden protested outside the Town Hall against the Labour-run council proposed, and voted through, cuts of £100 million to local services. People are angry at the threat of 1000 lost jobs, closure of libraries, sports facilities and increased rents.
A wide cross-section of the local population were present, with students and workers of all ages assembling together. The resulting changes to be enacted include; cuts to free nursery and after school provision and special needs education, rents to be increased by 7%, an increased to marry, the Talacre sports centre to be farmed out to an outside contractor, Mornington Crescent sports centre will close, all non-essential building works cancelled, street cleaning scaled back and even hours of street lighting reduced.
£68 million in cuts this year, £25 million next year, £136 million over 4 years.
Plans to cut 50,000 jobs are being discussed. Not only will this mean 50,000 people with no jobs, it will also most certainly hit front line services: the council says that only 4% of it's budget goes on back office services.
"When the county council faced its last major round of cuts and changes to services in 2006, hundreds of people took to the streets of Northampton to oppose the changes and the chief executive said he would not rule out such scenes being repeated when this year’s budget is announced next month."
On Monday 29th November a meeting has been arranged by the Socialist Party and the Green Party to discuss the cuts. People of an anarchist persuasion might wish to attend...
News reporters have been indulging in some imaginative speculation over the last few days suggesting that the temporary occupation of the Conservative Party headquarters on November 10 was down to an internet conspiracy consisting of, among other groups, the Solidarity Federation. This is sensationalist nonsense.
The welfare state was introduced largely at the behest of capitalism to ensure a healthy and educated workforce. Its origins date back to the Boer War when the army recruits were in such poor health they were unfit to fight. Since then, things have changed. Large sections of the working class are now surplus to the needs of capitalism, so the capitalist state no longer cares so much about our health, education and welfare.
Consequently, the British state is now withdrawing from many areas of welfare provision and handing responsibility over to charities, religious groups and the voluntary sector. This brave new world is the US model, where those in well-paid jobs have private schooling and health provision, while the low-paid and unemployed are left to under-funded public sector provision and whatever handouts the voluntary sector provides. In some US cities, health provision has been handed over wholesale to right-wing fundamentalist Christian groups.
Throughout the world it is the workers who are paying the price for the capitalist crisis. In Britain it took a trillion pounds sterling to save the banks from collapse and the government now aims to pay for the bank bailout by making brutal spending cuts. The attacks by the Thatcher government decimated many working class communities but the planned spending cuts go much further than Thatcher ever dreamed. Over the next 4 years the government intends to cut public spending by 25%.
Even the government admits that this will lead to the loss of half a million public sectors jobs. And as the British economy is so dependent on the public sector, again, according to the government’s own figures, there will be at least another half million jobs lost in the private sector. These job losses will be felt hardest in the old industrial heartlands of Britain, places like Scotland, the North of England and Wales, that were decimated by the Thatcher government.
The media keep running stories about benefit fraudsters living it up no doubt in preparation for drastic changes to the benefits system. Brighton SolFed spoke to one of the supposed benefit scroungers to find out what it’s really like to live on benefits.
Since finishing a postgraduate course, Teresa has been looking for a job in Brighton. “I have been applying for at least 4 to 5 jobs a week for the past 4 months but did not get any job. Often I have been told I am overqualified for the positions and even though I tried to impress on them that I would like to work – I was told that they can get someone less qualified to do the work on minimum wages.”
“When renting any place I have to keep in mind that I will not get any help towards any heating or water rents etc. I only get £62 a week for unemployment benefit, which also has to cover heating and water bills together with food, travel expenses or any other bills that I may have to pay.”
October 20th saw the unveiling of the long-awaited Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), the coalition government’s detailed blueprint on precisely how they plan to screw the working class. Little within the CSR was a source of surprise, with cuts roughly at the level that had been predicted in the run up. While the scale was predictably significantly below the 40% that had been mooted, this was clearly an attempt to ‘soften us up’ and feel lucky the cuts were “only” 20%, as if it had been taken straight out of the pages of ‘Negotiation for Dummies’.
