Chorus:
We will rise, we will rise
We will not accept those politicians’ lies
So come on get out and fight, unite against the right
We will rise, we will rise!
“Cut it all”, cries Cameron; “cut them off”, cries Clegg
“If you lose your livelihood, well, just go out and beg!
One and all must share the pain, ’cause we have done the sums
We’re all in this together - oh, but not our banker chums!”
The government goes on about this Big…
We should be honest with ourselves. The anti-cuts movement is a broad movement, overwhelmingly liberal with a revolutionary fringe. Peace News, as the “for nonviolent revolution” tagline suggests, sits at the radical end of things. So when someone asks, as George Monbiot did in the Guardian on 7 March, for a statement of aims for the anti-cuts movement that is “short enough to be put on a flier but specific enough to be useful”, there could be two different kinds of answer, two different…
I met Karen and Alice at the Heatherington Recreation Club student occupation at Glasgow University. They and numerous others are occupying and looking after a beautiful building, a former club for research students that had been left to waste by the university authorities.
Heatherington is now being used as an educational and cultural venue as well as a space from which to organise on issues in higher education and the wider anti-cuts agenda. Scotland’s academics took two days…
On 8 March, Aberystwyth Students Against Cuts celebrated a fortnight of occupying university premises. Moving into two of the main university lecture halls, we have been living, sleeping and operating a campaign of resistance against devastating changes to funding in our higher education institutions.
The challenges associated with living in lecture halls have formed strong bonds and nurtured an ever-growing community of student and staff activists. From this platform we are…
We apologise to Barclays bank for wrongly reporting last month that in 2010 the bank paid a mere £113m in corporation tax to the government, on global profits of more than £5bn. In fact, it was in 2009 that Barclays paid a mere £113m in corporation tax to the government, on global profits not of £5bn, but of £11.6bn – a tax rate of 1%. On 7 March, Barclays announced that it handed nine senior bankers £88m in share awards in 2010 and chief executive Bob Diamond received a total package worth…
On 2 March, defence secretary Liam Fox announced that troops now in Afghanistan could be among 11,000 military personnel who will be sacked as part of the cuts. Fox admitted he may have to cut more than planned under last year's strategic defence and security review (SDSR). Ministry of Defence sources said the department had identified a gap of “several hundreds of millions of pounds” between the MoD’s financial commitments and its allocated budget for 2011-12. According to a report in the…
We discovered in mid-February that bail-out bank Royal Bank of Scotland is set to pay taxpayer-backed bonuses worth up to £1.1bn to its staff. Bail-out bank Lloyds Banking Group is paying its outgoing chief executive Eric Daniels a £1.45m bonus in shares. As PN went to press, major banks were expected to offer their staff bonuses of around £6bn. On 18 February, it emerged that Barclays bank paid a mere £113m in corporation tax to the government in 2010, on global profits of more than £5…
On 5 February, protests against the closure of 450 library services took place all round the country, ranging from a “shhh-in” in Sheffield to a flashmob in Cambridge. Pateley Bridge in Yorkshire saw the first protest march in the town’s history on Saturday, followed by an occupation of the library on Wednesday. North Yorkshire plans to cut 24 of its 42 libraries.
While many major military projects continue (including the interventionary Astute submarine, cost: £3.9bn for three subs), there is a pleasing roll call of military cutbacks, including the sale of HMS Invincible, the aircraft carrier involved in the Falklands war, which was sold to a Turkish scrap dealer in early February. Sale price: over £2m.
Military cuts mean that Britain is to finally halt its warship patrols of the Caribbean, operating since the Second World War, it was announced…
Internet protest service Sukey, which helps demonstrators to avoid being “kettled” or penned in for long periods by police, will be rolled out for the anti-cuts demo in London on 26 March. Sukey displays real-time police and protest behaviour via an app for smartphones and texting for other mobiles. www.sukey.org
There have been strong reactions to the student protests at Millbank on 10 November (see p8). Overwhelmingly, mainstream figures have condemned the “despicable” behaviour of the protesters – the word used by Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students.
From the left, in contrast, came a statement signed by Hilary Wainwright, Billy Bragg, Naomi Klein and a number of student activists saying: “We reject any attempt to characterise the Millbank protest as small, “…
A new anti-cuts direct action network has sprung up targeting Vodafone as the unacceptable face of corporate tax avoidance.
A Private Eye investigation uncovered a deal whereby the tax authorities agreed to allow Vodafone to use a loophole to avoid paying £6bn in taxes.
Protesters closed at least 21 Vodafone stores in cities across the country on 30 October. The national UKuncut day of action was organised extremely quickly through social networks on the internet.
…
As Britain’s coalition government starts to trim billions of pounds of welfare funding, local organisations throughout the country are springing up in opposition.
A new body, the Coalition of Resistance (CoR), seeks to unite these groups under a national banner, protesting against the proposed cuts to health services, unemployment, disability and other vital government programmes.
These protests culminated on 20 October with a mass demonstration at Downing Street in opposition…
The overwhelming majority of people in Britain support the idea of a one-off 20% wealth tax on the richest 10% of the population that could pay off the national debt. The coalition government claims that the only way to start dealing with £800bn of national debt is through cuts in government spending (£64bn over the next five years).
Hitting the poor
Conservative prime minister David Cameron claimed on 21 October that the tax and benefit changes were fair, being hardest on the…
Back in June, the prime minister said that in resolving the country’s financial crisis, the coalition government would act “in a way that protects the poorest and most vulnerable in our society; in a way that unites our country rather than divides it; in a way that demonstrates that we’re all in this together.”
David Cameron said: “We are all in this together, and we will get through this together.” A noble sentiment shared no doubt by the other millionaires in the cabinet. The…
